17 Marketing Tips from Side Hustle Show Listeners: What’s Working Now?

Marketing can feel like shouting into the void, especially when you’re just getting started with your side hustle.

To find out what’s actually working today across a wide range of industries, I’ve crowdsourced some wisdom from Side Hustle Show listeners.

One common theme from the past couple years is the strategy of using social media content to try and hit the algorithm on your platform of choice, and then get those viewers or readers to follow you or to join your email list.

I asked listeners to share a marketing tactic that’s working well for them right now, and I got back a ton of great responses.

Here are 17 of the best marketing tips that were submitted, many of which you can apply to your business today.

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1. Threads → Email List

Deacon Hayes from Well Kept Wallet discovered an overlooked opportunity on Threads about a year ago.

After studying what makes content go viral on the platform, Deacon started seeing his posts get significantly more views than his follower count. With only 1,500 followers, his posts were reaching over 100,000 views, sometimes millions.

To capitalize on this traffic, Deacon created a call-to-action strategy but quickly got overwhelmed with replies. When he couldn’t find an app like ManyChat for Threads, he decided to build one himself called RadReply.

Now Deacon sets up automated responses that ask people to comment a specific word, then sends them to a landing page where they sign up for his email list and get their requested lead magnet.

“This has been a game changer for me because with my organic traffic being significantly down, I now have a new way to grow my audience,” Deacon explained.

The other takeaway? If you have a pain or problem in your business, you might be able to build the solution with AI.

I don’t think Deacon’s a software developer, so my guess is he built this as a vibe coding project. For more on that, definitely check out our episodes from earlier this year with Pete McPherson.

2. Subsidized Newsletter Growth

Next up is a super interesting email growth hack from Nate McAllister, where he’s found a creative way to reduce his marketing spend, or essentially subsidize his subscriber acquisition costs.

Nate uses a number of different tactics to grow his audience at Entreresource.com. SEO has been his biggest one for the past 12 years, but the world of SEO is changing dramatically.

AI answers, AI-generated content, and algorithmic changes with Google have made it less predictable than it used to be.

So Nate has really doubled down on paid ads to grow his email list… because that’s the one thing he actually owns.

One way Nate is growing his email list that not many people are talking about is SparkLoop. He’s using it in two ways:

To get people to promote his newsletter and pay them if they send email subscribers.
He actually gets paid to promote other people’s newsletters.

When somebody opts into one of his forms, they’re shown a pop-up that suggests about five other newsletters.

When someone opts into those, Nate gets paid if they go through and actually open emails and click on things. SparkLoop does a vetting process to make sure the subscribers are legitimate.

“If you can get below 50 cents, you’re now growing your list for free and you can scale it as much as you want,” Nate explained.

Make sure to subscribe to his newsletter!

You can create a free SparkLoop plan to enable this co-registration strategy.

3. Newsletter Discovery Networks

Lewis Waldron from Anywhere Income shared another newsletter growth hack that not many people are talking about: newsletter discovery networks like Refind and Meco.

These platforms can be very cost-effective, with engaged subscribers costing around $1-$1.50 each.

“You do have to set up some list cleaning automations,” Lewis noted, “but I think regardless of what sort of business you have, a newsletter obviously is a super powerful way to own your audience and engage them.”

Newsletter discovery networks seem to be untapped while everyone is throwing money at Meta ads or grinding on social media—which works but takes a lot longer.

4. Quiz Funnels to Affiliate Offers

Robert Brandl from EmailToolTester uses quizzes as a way for people to find the best product on their website.

“We review email marketing services. We’re an affiliate website and we just let people answer a couple of questions and in the end, they will get their ideal result for an email marketing service,” Robert explained.

This can work really well for affiliate websites or e-commerce stores where there’s a range of options and you want to make it easier for people to choose the best one.

Two quiz providers Robert uses are InvolveMe and Interact, both of which integrate well with email platforms for automated follow-up.

Done right, you can even use the quiz as a lead magnet.

When we talked to Tori Dunlap on the show, her free money personality quiz was the conversion mechanism she had in place when she went viral on TikTok — and she added 100,000 people to her list in a week.

Bonus benefit: A quiz allows you to collect valuable first-party data about your audience’s wants and needs that can fuel future content, email copy, or product development.

5. Collecting More Reviews

Crystal Slater Hawkins from Legacy Notary Services shared a simple but effective strategy: asking for reviews right after the appointment.

“If they could just take 10 seconds and give me a review on how things went with the notary appointment before I leave them, that actually drives more traffic to my website and it boosts my analytics when people Google ‘notary near me,'” Crystal explained.

The key insight here: if you don’t ask, the answer’s always no. Your customers love you, and the time to strike is right after you’ve delivered a great service.

My wife delivers digital pictures for weddings and families, and almost every time there’s a response of “OMG these are amazing, thank you so much.”

That’s the perfect time to hit reply with the Google profile link directly to the review page and make the ask: “Hey, would you mind copying and pasting that into a Google review for me? That would be a huge help for my business.”

6. Google My Business: Post Regularly

Another way to improve your visibility in Google is to feed the beast, give them more data and metadata and content to chew on, so they can put you in front of more customers.

Coach Dom Costa shared how regularly posting to his Google My Business profile has helped him rank second in his area — right below an international corporation — for his scrap metal recycling business.

“Every time I pick up stuff, I take a picture. Every time I dump it, I send in a video. I post pretty regularly,” Dom said.

No one thinks to use their Google Business profile as a social media channel.

You’re not going to get tons of engagement by posting pictures and updates there, but you’re feeding content directly into the engine that can feed you better lead flow.

If you have a Google profile for your business, when was the last time you posted content to it?

Challenge yourself to start doing it regularly — look for excuses to take pictures, tag them with locations, and feed those into the machine.

7. Get Press Mentions

Rosie Bell from Press Trip Pros uses HARO (Help a Reporter Out), a DIY PR platform that recently relaunched after being bought by Featured.com.

Rosie has gotten features in HuffPost, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, and NBC News, and even had entire segments dedicated to her on national television.

“There are so many benefits to being featured in the media. You can build brand awareness, trust, credibility, visibility, and you can be considered an authority on a topic and get sales spikes, get backlinks from high authority sites, and press begets press,” Rosie explained.

The great thing about HARO is that it’s completely free to use and anyone can reply with a pitch to a journalist’s specific callout.

Another alternatives are Source of Sources (SOS) and Qwoted.

My advice when pitching journalists: Quickly establish your credentials to match what they’re looking for. In my case, I often open with: “Hey, I’m Nick. I’ve been covering side hustles for 12 years, I’ve written several books on this topic, and I’ve interviewed over 600 side hustlers on the award-winning Side Hustle Show podcast.”

The other way to use press is to not just wait for inbound journalist inquiries, but also to proactively pitch your story.

1-800-GOT-JUNK pitched their local newspaper on a feel-good story, and Chef Jessica angled her pitch around families adapting to food allergies.

8. Precision-Targeted Direct Mail

Michelle Hensley from Nifty Package Company shared how she uses precision-targeted direct mail campaigns to reach affluent clients.

In the early stages of Nifty, Michelle realized that the average value of an order was $230 per basket — a clear pivot towards luxury positioning.

“We refined our outreach to affluent demographics such as corporate leaders and zip codes,” Michelle explained.

Her recommendation: Regularly review your client roster and sales metrics to refine your customer avatar. Understand who engages most frequently and who invests the highest, then use these insights to guide your marketing.

Michelle targets specific zip codes and corporate leaders rather than casting a wide net, making her direct mail campaigns much more cost-effective.

Michelle is also working on a new app for creative and event industry professionals.

9. Turning Competitors Into Referrers

Gary Youngblood from 13th Colony Shuttles in Savannah, Georgia, shared a brilliant strategy: collaborating with competitors.

“There are two other local agencies here in Savannah that provide shuttle services around town and there’s so much work that not one company can handle it all,” Gary explained.

When Gary gets a ride request he can’t fill, he refers it to another company in town. He’s found that this works really well because he’s gotten so much business from their referrals back to him.

“I’m busting at the seams,” Gary said.

This reminds me of Episode 273 with John Doherty, who turned this concept into a whole business called Credo.

When he got too busy to take on more SEO clients, he started referring them to trusted colleagues for a referral fee — what we called “high-touch affiliate marketing.”

10. E-Commerce – Bulk Semi-Personalized Email Outreach

Espen Campbell from Vortex Rugby shared how he’s using traditional B2B sales tactics for his rugby apparel business.

Espen scrapes rugby union websites for contact information, enriches that data using Clay, and then uses HubSpot to automate drip email sequences.

“We’re trying to do something new in that space and the impact is that we’re growing exponentially. We’ve gone from 2,000 to 5,000 followers on Instagram in a year. We’ve gotten more than 15 team orders,” Espen said.

What I love about this approach:

Tackling a growing niche – Rugby is an up-and-coming market in the US
Standing out – Vortex uses loud, bright, fun designs that are really recognizable
Selling one-to-many – Going after leagues, tournaments, and teams rather than individual players
Being proactive – Creating compelling social content for discoverability while also proactively finding customers

11. Reddit for Lead Generation

Mathias Deppe from Extraterrestrial Tools started his blog just two weeks before recording his tip and had already gotten three leads from Reddit in three days.

“I go onto Reddit, look for subreddits specific to my target audience. In my case, freelancers, entrepreneurs and side hustlers,” Mathias explained.

He looks for people talking about tools, asking questions, or having problems. Then he answers their questions and includes a link to his blog post or review.

“I make like two to three posts a day, not too much. I provide value first and then drop my link,” Mathias said.

As with all things Reddit, you’ve got to tread carefully, but if you can legitimately answer people’s questions, it’s a great place for those all-important first few visitors and subscribers.

12. Start with Short Form and Re-Purpose

Cheyenne Lynnae from Domestic Daydreams has created an impressive content flywheel for her cleaning routines membership.

Here’s her process:

Post organic short-form video content three times a day on Instagram and Facebook
Use voice-to-text to plug in the transcript of videos
Elaborate with additional thoughts and tips
Have AI format that into a blog post
Edit the blog post and embed the short-form video
Record the blog as a podcast episode and embed that too
Pin it to Pinterest and email it to her list
Use Facebook retargeting ads on anyone who visited her website or engaged with her content

The results? In the last 20 days:

60,000 new followers on Facebook
46,000 new followers on Instagram
8,000+ new email subscribers
60% increase in revenue

Those numbers are absolutely wild and Cheyenne is clearly doing something right.

13. AI-Powered Content Flywheel

Mike Lynch from Our Campfire Unplugged and Flywheel Factory built a system to escape the content creation grind.

“When I started my RV blog, blog posts took six to ten hours to write. I tried to outsource but could never get the courage up to spend the money,” Mike explained.

He built a system where he captures his ideas in his own words, runs them through a custom GPT that knows his brand voice, and then automates the workflow into blogs, emails, and social posts.

Mike cut writing time from 6 hours to under 60 minutes and finally started publishing at the pace needed to grow traffic and affiliate revenue.

His advice: “You don’t need more hustle, you need a system. That’s the Flywheel.”

14. Book Marketing with Interactive Content

Eric Keller, author of The Bear Soldier, shared a three-part strategy that blends interactive content, shareable assets, and measurable attribution.

Part 1: Interactive Campaign Map – Eric launched a living World War II campaign map with photos and one-sentence diary notes. Each click reveals a short, satisfying story nugget, transforming a bounce-prone book page into something people want to explore and share.

Part 2: Dynamic Social Previews – When visitors open a battle or waypoint, the site generates a custom open graph image (a unique social preview with photo, title, and year). This creates dozens of unique, authentic entry points back to the site instead of one generic cover image.

Part 3: Amazon Attribution – Every “Buy on Amazon” button carries an Amazon attribution tag, so Eric can see which channel or even which moment on the map actually leads to purchases.

His micro-funnel: Map for curiosity → Free chapter email opt-in → Amazon buy with attribution → Welcome sequence with printable discussion guide

15. Facebook Monetization Program

I’m currently experimenting with the Facebook monetization program — basically pumping out attention-getting content onto the Side Hustle Nation Facebook page in hopes that Facebook pushes it to a broader audience.

Facebook will actually pay you for it because the more time people spend engaging with your content, the more time they spend on FB, and the more money FB makes on ads.

I’m a couple weeks in and have made about $6 so far, but we’ve got a full episode coming up with someone who’s doing $30,000 a month with this strategy — so it can definitely scale to a serious income stream.

16. Paid Listener Acquisition for Podcasts

On the podcast side, I’ve been testing different listener acquisition channels.

PlayerFM, AudienceLift, and Podroll are probably my favorites or most cost-effective so far.

One cool thing you can do is promote specific episodes.

If we had a guest on a year ago, it’s a way to breathe new life into that older episode.

I’ve even had success splitting the cost of that promotion with the guest.

17. Creating Evergreen Video Assets

One of my favorite sessions at FinCon was with Coach Carson about how he pivoted from being an audio-first podcast to being a YouTube-first show and grew his channel to over 100,000 subscribers.

His suggestions I’m implementing:

Record a separate video-specific intro for podcast episodes posted to YouTube, really leaning into the hook and story in the first 10-20 seconds.
Look at what topics or videos have outperformed for similar channels and recreate those in your own style and voice.

He gave the example of finding a video on evaluating rental properties that did well on another channel.

Since he already had his own method, he easily recorded that and shared it — and that video did really well for him too.

Honorable Mentions

We received more great marketing tips than we could fit into the main episode, but these strategies are too good not to share. Here are a few bonus tips from Side Hustle Show listeners:

Aaron Johnson – Pixieset for Photographers

Aaron Johnson is a fine art portrait and event photographer who’s currently marketing his business through Instagram and LinkedIn.

For his website, bookings, and portfolio display, Aaron uses Pixieset.com.

“You can create your website for free and use Pixieset’s all-in-one tools for 30 days, such as email templates, contract templates, Studio Manager, online store, and the option to create a mobile gallery app,” Aaron explained.

For payments, he uses Stripe, which doesn’t contain any monthly fees—a budget-friendly option when you’re just getting started.

Aaron typically sends updates through Instagram about price information, mini sessions, prints, and merch.

As of his recording, he had landed one of his first four clients for fine art portraits and events like concerts, raves, and EDM house music shows.

Nira – Herbal Therapy with Educational Events

Nira from Indonesia is a partner in a herbal therapy company and shared an interesting offline marketing approach.

Her strategy centers on inviting people to herbal therapy meetings where they can see short demonstrations comparing results before and after product use, along with testimonials from people who have participated in herbal therapy.

The critical part of Nira’s process: “Don’t forget to write names, telephone numbers, and the health condition of the invitation participant to then be checked from day to day.”

This follow-up is essential — after the initial meeting, Nira’s team does consultations with their doctor or therapist community to provide step-by-step guidance for participants to recover and improve their health.

Their herbal products cover a wide range including hair health, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, gout, leukemia, stroke, constipation, inflammation, kidney issues, high blood pressure, and more.

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