To make the most of your side hustle hours, try this super-simple productivity hack: tracking your time. There are a bunch of fancy apps that will do this for you (Toggl is one I’ve used in the past), but for my latest trial I just logged tasks and hours in an Excel sheet. Each day … Read more
Cassandre went from $0 in side income on May 18th to a total of $2230 by July 30th.
While $2230 isn’t a remarkable amount of money, it’s helped her pay down a significant amount of student debt in a very short amount of time, starting with zero money invested and zero experience.
This is her story.
There’s a seldom-discussed truth about online business:
No one really knows what they’re doing.
It’s a practice, a process, a call-and-response experiment. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes blog posts get a great reaction and sometimes they’re met with crickets. Sure, there are systems and formulas and “best practices” to follow, but no one can guarantee success.
The conventional wisdom when starting a blog is to “get the word out” by guest posting on established higher traffic sites.
It makes sense, right? They’ve already got the readership and eyeballs you’re after, so why not go directly to the source and try and siphon off some of their audience to become your audience.
But there’s a problem: guest posting sucks.
In March I participated in my first online bundle sale.
It was hosted by Alexis Grant and the team over at The Write Life and featured 9 different products and resources for writers at a steep discount. ($1076 worth of stuff for just $99.)
I think coordinating bundle sales is a side hustle opportunity for bloggers — with or without an established audience.
Yesterday marked 500 days since my last warm shower.
When Nick Reese challenged me to start taking cold showers last March, my initial reaction (and you can hear this on the podcast), was “that sounds horrible.”
But since I’m all about different experiments, I figured I’d give it a shot for a month and see what happens. And the weird thing is, some good things started happening (over 25 comments on this original post).
Yikes, the year is already half over!
This is the second installment of my quarterly progress reports. If you want to check out the first one from April, you can do so here.
Why “progress”? Because that’s what it’s all about.
To me, progress means forward motion, or actively taking the steps to improve each day. It’s one thing we can control.
In January, I had a chance to sit down with Nick Stephenson, a top-selling Kindle author in both fiction and nonfiction. We recorded a podcast session on building an email list from Amazon.
The “hook” was Nick built a massive list of 15,000 email subscribers in just a few short months, using one pillar strategy: giving his books away for free.
The first was with his fiction work, a crime thriller series where he decided to make the first title in the series “permafree.” Later, he pulled the same trick in non-fiction with a giveaway (very meta) called Reader Magnets.
Which is why I was nervous about publishing this post. Would my readers be confused or turned off by this sort of content?
To my surprise and delight, my first-ever income report was well received. Even readers who have zero interest in the business of blogging liked the post.
They enjoyed the opportunity to look “behind the curtain” and appreciated my transparency.
Over the past few weeks I’ve made several clearance arbitrage scouting trips. After hearing about this side hustle for the past year and some of the success my friends and peers are having with it, I had to give it a shot!
The first thing I did was install the Amazon Seller app on my phone.
Upon opening it, I learned an Amazon Seller account was required to run it, so I created a free Amazon Seller account.
