Your tax return will show you your total income, your adjusted gross income, and your taxable income, but those numbers don’t show the most important figure of all.
Your “taxable income” is meaningless.
So what’s the most important number the IRS doesn’t care about but you should?
Your net profit.
One of the best ways to figure out how to better serve your customers or your audience is to, well, ask them.
So I set out to create my (annual?) member survey and see if I could get some insights into where readers and listeners are at in their side hustle journey, what types of businesses you’re working on, and what your biggest challenges are.
I also wanted to find out about how you were interacting with the Side Hustle Nation content; the blog, podcast, and email newsletter.
Last month I received an email from a reader I didn’t really know how to respond to. It was about growing up in poverty and what he could do to lift himself out of a bad situation.
I think an important thing to remember is that every expert was once a beginner, every champion was once a rookie, and that with a few exceptions, most successful/wealthy individuals weren’t born that way.
They all took incremental actions over time to build their knowledge, skills, network — and eventually their net worth.
But I was curious what advice the Side Hustle Nation community had for this reader, and wow, did they come through big time.
On December 7th, 2015, I started posting answers on Quora.com every day.
By the beginning of March — less than 3 months later — my answers had been viewed more than 500,000 times. This has more than doubled traffic to my blog, 10x’d my email sign-ups, and resulted in an increase in book sales.
This post explores my tactics for using Quora to re-purpose old content, accelerate your authority, and rapidly build an audience.
In January I published a post called The 134 Best Udemy Courses for Entrepreneurs, Freelancers, and Side Hustlers.
The post was a pretty blatant affiliate play, and I made a point to admit that at the very top. Still, it performed very well, earning $7620 in January.
After the first couple days, I realized I was on to something and it only made sense to try and drive more traffic to the page, even if it meant paying for it. So that gave birth to my first real experiment with Facebook ads.
From September 20th to November 20th, Side Hustle Nation generated 479 visits from Pinterest.
The next 2 months, from November 21st to January 21st, Side Hustle Nation generated 11,733 visits from Pinterest.
Why the sudden 25x increase?
It was anything but an accident.
As I reached my front door, too tired and uninspired to honour my previous arrangement to meet my friend for dinner, I decided that something had to change.
Sound familiar?
Fast forward six months and I had a service business running profitably, I was getting to the office at 7:30am to have client calls (for the side hustle) and then working at home until 11pm on marketing campaigns.
When most of us think of a side hustle, we think of e-commerce, copywriting or other single-serving offerings.
These projects can be great, but the reality is they can also be highly unpredictable. Sales can dry up and writing gigs can disappear.
For those who want a sustainable side hustle with dependable recurring revenue, there’s a new model making noise: subscription commerce built around monthly boxes.
Last year I published my first annual review, and have been doing quarterly progress reports since then.
Overall, I felt happier in 2015 than I have in a long time. I think that’s the result of a lot of factors coming together, including lower stress, fun projects, and a growing comfort as to what’s “enough.”
This is my recap of what went down in Q4 and in 2015 overall, plus my wins and losses for the year and my top 10 articles and podcast episodes.
The universe of free plugins is one of the most important benefits of WordPress. If there’s some functionality you’re looking for, odds are someone else has already built it!
Now I’ve been called — and this is true — a bit of a plugin junkie in the past. And there is a dark side to all this delicious free software; installing too many plugins can slow down your site, break some functionality, or even put you at risk for security breaches.
Here are a few I think you should consider, organized by functional area.
