It’s natural to position yourself as the expert when you’re making your pitch to a potential customer, but you want to get them excited about the outcome. That frees you up to potentially hire subcontractors to do the work. (Location 301)
It’s a lot of effort to build a resource or body of work that’s worth paying attention to. In an audience business, your readers and followers are often investing something more valuable than money; they’re investing their time. Sure, we’ll look at some ways to shortcut that timeline, but for me, it took a couple years of patiently putting out content and practicing my craft before my audience business turned into a full-time income. (Location 403)
If people are asking for your help, they think you’re “Expert Enough.” (Now, they might not be willing to pay for you advice, but that doesn’t mean others won’t.) (Location 533)
What do people already ask you for help with? What do you get excited about? What do other people struggle with that comes easily to you? (Location 602)
Selling results has the obvious advantage of freeing up your ability to get the job done any way you see fit. If that means doing it yourself, fine. But if that means hiring someone equally or better qualified to do it, also fine. (Location 943)
4. Create “Productized” Packages Before you bring on a subcontractor, one model you might consider is the “productized” service. That means providing a certain deliverable for a flat (usually) monthly price. (Location 952)
“The advantage of a niche-specific store,” he said, “is that I can position myself as a leader in the industry.” In other words, the perceived expertise earned by only selling bounce houses can be a competitive advantage. (Location 1386)
Product licensing is essentially selling an idea to an existing company and then collecting royalties when the resulting products sell. (Location 1475)
(The best-selling book on product licensing is One Simple Idea by Stephen Key, (Location 1481)
Jodi explained there’s a fine line between the content you can charge for and the free content you create to attract new readers to your site. She’s discovered that for her market she needs to create two to three blog posts that aren’t related to selling her books for every book she releases. These posts introduce people to her brand and give her more chances of being discovered on Pinterest or Google. (Location 1747)
To promote her paid products, Jodi typically produces a blog post to accompany each book or guide. That blog post will extract some of the ideas from the book, so if the reader can’t afford it or doesn’t want to buy it, they’ll still get some value from her site. (Location 1753)
The way I look at competition is as validation. If your idea for an audience business is so unique that truly no one has ever done it before, I’d see that as a red flag. (You can use a free tool like Keywords Everywhere to see if people are actually looking for information on your potential topic and not finding it.) (Location 1875)
Jonathan gave me this advice: “If you can’t be first, be different.” For an audience business, I think that’s important to remember. If you just set out to replicate what’s already been done, it’s a recipe for disappointment. (Location 1878)
Over time, your audience will begin to feed you questions you can create content around, but at the beginning, there is no audience to do that yet! Fortunately, there are lots of ways to come up with content ideas for your new project. (Location 1890)
The Table of Contents Method The Table of Contents Method for generating content ideas works like this. Find the bestselling books on your topic on Amazon and use the “Look Inside” preview feature. With that, you’ll often be able to see the table of contents or chapter headers the author uses. If each of those topics was worthy of an entire section of their book, it’s probably something worth writing about on your site as well. While you’re on these book pages on Amazon, you might check out the reviews, too. Specifically, I’d pay attention to the two-, three-, and four-star reviews and identify what the buyers thought was lacking in the book. What could have been covered in more detail? What was missing? (Location 1892)
That “holy-crap-this-is-amazing-where-have-you-been-all-my-life?” reaction is what you want when someone comes across your content for the first time. And that happens when you’re too good to ignore. (Location 1951)
I don’t typically pitch other hosts to appear on their shows, but I rarely turn down an invite when someone asks me to join them. (Location 2024)
Guesting is the equivalent of holding out your sign at a busy intersection. Your message won’t be relevant to 100% of the people who pass by, and you’re going to get some rejections, but it’s guaranteed to reach more people than sitting at home in your basement and keeping to yourself. (Location 2033)
“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.” —Mark Twain (Location 2188)
Here are 10 questions to use in your scoring matrix: How excited are you about the idea? Is there a clear path to your first customers or sales? How much time will it realistically take to get off the ground? How much capital will it realistically take to get off the ground? What’s the revenue potential? How easy is it to operate? How easy is it to automate or delegate? How easy is it to scale? How easy is it to stop operations if it’s not working? Is the business something I could sell down the road? (Location 2199)
The piece of advice I probably cite most often from The Side Hustle Show is Ryan Finlay’s from episode 72: “The best opportunities aren’t visible until you’re already in motion.” (Location 2223)
