How I Turned Public Domain Radio into a 6-Figure Business

Want to build a six-figure cleaning business where your customers do all the cleaning?

That’s exactly what Cheyenne Bulloch built with Domestic Daydreams, combining free public domain radio shows with a near-universal problem: keeping your house clean.

Cheyenne is a longtime Side Hustle Show listener who turned a creative idea into a recurring revenue business.

For $25 a month or $45 a quarter, she sends members six private podcast episodes a week featuring old public domain radio shows (think Dragnet and classic crime dramas) interspersed with cleaning routines and instructions.

Instead of commercial breaks, you get prompts like “now go fold some laundry.” And with over 500 members, the concept is clearly resonating.

Tune in to Episode 708 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:

how to combine public domain content with your unique value
the Instagram strategy that grew her following to 25,000 in a month
why posting three times a day changed everything for her business

(If you’d love to put your cleaning on autopilot with cozy old-time radio and simple, done-for-you routines, you can join the Domestic Daydreams membership)

Table of Contents show

From Public Domain Books to Cleaning Podcasts

Cheyenne’s journey started with a Side Hustle Show episode about publishing public domain books on KDP.

Working at a grocery store in a town of 900 people, she heard about someone publishing public domain children’s books and thought she could annotate them for homeschool families.

That first business grew to around 60,000 followers on Instagram, but it was Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Work Week that really sparked the next idea. Ferriss recommends finding ways to build businesses on top of public domain works.

Cheyenne had always been fascinated by the 1950s and vintage housewife culture. As someone who struggled with keeping her own house clean while working full-time and commuting, she developed her own cleaning system.

When she discovered old vintage radio shows in the public domain, everything clicked.

She could combine those radio programs with her cleaning routine to help people clean on autopilot and stay on task.

Validating the Idea Fast

Before building anything elaborate, Cheyenne tested the concept with her existing audience.

She created a few sample episodes and posted on Instagram, offering to send free episodes to anyone interested. Since her audience was mostly moms and homemakers, the response was immediate.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. People said it was an absolute game changer and the only cleaning routine that actually worked for them after trying everything else.

That validation was all she needed.

Building the Business in a Weekend

Within a single weekend, Cheyenne set up an entire membership business on Kajabi, created sales pages, figured out pricing, designed a logo, and started a dedicated Instagram account for Domestic Daydreams.

Up until recently, everything grew completely from organic Instagram content. She posted at least once a day, sometimes inviting her old account as a collaborator when content aligned with both audiences.

The growth was explosive. Within a month, the new account reached 25,000 followers.

From Followers to Revenue

That following translated into revenue remarkably fast.

Within three weeks to a month, the membership had replaced a good chunk of Cheyenne’s income and was covering all her expenses, including her mortgage.

This happened during a transition period when she needed to shift away from her first business, so the timing was critical. By the first month, she had quite a few paying members.

The Instagram Content Strategy That Actually Works

At the time Cheyenne launched, Instagram was heavily pushing Reels. Static posts and carousels weren’t getting much traction.

She posted a Reel every single day, focusing on calling out her ideal audience. Point-of-view (POV) style videos worked really well.

These simple, relatable videos connected with people immediately.

But don’t send people directly to your products. She lost too many potential customers who got distracted in that middle ground.

Every Single Post Goes to the Lead Magnet

Instead, every Instagram post directs people to a lead magnet that captures their email address.

This strategy has grown her email list to around 30,000 subscribers in two years. In just the last month, she added 8,000 new subscribers before cleaning out inactive contacts.

Every Instagram post includes a call to action like “comment homemaker and I’ll send you some free episodes of the cleaning routine to try so you can get started tackling that mess.”

She writes pain-point-oriented captions that call out the problem, explain how the episodes solve it, and invite people to try free samples. When they comment, ManyChat automatically sends them the opt-in link.

The Sales Funnel That Converts

After someone opts in for the free sample episodes, they land on a page with the episodes at the top and a sales pitch for the membership below.

Then Cheyenne follows up heavily via email because she wants to train people to connect with her brand through email, not just social media. Building your business on rented land (social platforms) is risky, as she learned with her first business.

Her automatic email flow sends messages every four days or so. She originally followed a book’s recommendations for her welcome sequence, but over time she tested which weekly newsletter emails converted best for sales and turned those into her automated sequence.

The flow includes more free episodes via a one-week challenge, and by then people are usually warmed up and ready to join.

Retargeting Ads: The Huge Game Changer

While organic growth was working, retargeting ads became Cheyenne’s biggest breakthrough.

Most ad coaches recommend “top of funnel” ads to reach strangers, then retargeting ads for those who engaged with the top ads. But Cheyenne’s business is different.

She gets so much attention through organic Instagram, Facebook, and her blog (millions of views every month) that she skips top-of-funnel ads entirely.

She only runs retargeting ads to anyone who has interacted with her website, blog, Facebook, or Instagram.

Those retargeting ads go straight to the membership offer.

The Special Offer Page

The offer page includes a sample episode for anyone who hasn’t tried one yet, plus comparison videos.

After reading They Ask You Answer, Cheyenne embedded honest comparison videos between her product and competitors, even suggesting when competitors might be a better fit.

This transparency builds trust and helps ensure the right people join who will stay long-term and build community.

Why Quantity Beats Perfectionism

When someone asked what advice Cheyenne would give to creators posting consistently but not seeing results, her answer was brutally honest: quantity leads to quality.

“I know that’s so frustrating when you’re first starting out,” she says, but the data backs it up.

Instagram is a people-based platform, not an algorithm problem. People train the algorithm, and what they like changes over time. You can’t predict quality.

Cheyenne has thrown up posts thinking they’d do terribly but just needed to post that day, and they went viral. She’s also spent a week on posts that got almost no engagement.

The Content Ideation Machine

With such high volume, where does Cheyenne get all her ideas?

She uses a two-pronged approach:

Keyword Research: She goes to Answer the Public, Pinterest, and YouTube search, types in keywords related to her niche, and keeps a master list of what people are searching for.

Format Inspiration: When scrolling Instagram, she looks in niches outside her own because she doesn’t want to look the same as competitors. She saves links in her phone’s notes app and writes ideas for how she could apply interesting formats to her business.

For long-form content, she creates listicles based on keyword research, which give her multiple bullet points that each become short-form videos.

Three Simple Content Formats

Cheyenne uses just three video formats:

Talking head: Speaking directly to the camera while doing something
B-roll with text: Recording footage and adding text overlays
Voiceover: Footage of cleaning or cooking with voiceover commentary

For YouTube, she almost entirely uses voiceovers with an intro and outro to camera.

Pinterest: The Steady Traffic Source

Pinterest has been the “little poor side thing” of Cheyenne’s business, but it still consistently drives sales.

She posts about five pins a day and gets over 100,000 views a month on Pinterest. While that’s not a massive amount, the sales are remarkably consistent.

For Pinterest, the video Reels she creates for Instagram become her first pins for each blog post, then she creates static pins to complement them.

Pinterest tends to be steadier than Instagram and Facebook, which go through peaks and valleys.

It’s more of a search platform combined with social, so people typing in queries find her content rather than relying on algorithm-driven viral spikes.

She uses PinClicks for keyword research now, which makes things much easier than manually searching Pinterest.

Creating the Membership Episodes

In addition to all the public-facing content, Cheyenne needs to create six new membership episodes per week.

The bulk of the content is free public domain radio shows, but she still needs to add her voiceover with cleaning routine instructions.

When she first started, she batch-created as many as possible and set them to drip on Kajabi. When someone joins, the first month is already loaded. A week later, another week releases, and so on.

For members who’ve been with her from the beginning, she creates new episodes weekly. It takes about an hour and a half to two hours to edit the week’s episodes and load them into the membership.

She sits down comfortably, turns on a TV show, and edits on her iPad. With old radio shows, she has to scrub through them because some content is really offensive by today’s standards.

Finding Public Domain Radio Shows

If you want to do something similar with different public domain content, Cheyenne recommends the National Archive.

Some content there is still not in the public domain, but radio shows typically are because they had different domain laws. A quick Google search will confirm if specific content is public domain.

Just search for “old time radio shows” on the National Archive website. There are tons available, and they’re fun to listen to.

Beyond radio, there’s a whole world of public domain content out there—books, print material, military publications—that you can use as source material and layer your unique value on top of.

Tools and Tech Stack

Cheyenne keeps her tech stack relatively simple:

ManyChat: Automates Instagram comment responses to send the lead magnet
Kajabi: Hosts the membership, website, and email list (she upgraded her plan to handle 30,000+ contacts)
ChatGPT: Polishes blog post transcripts and helps with strategic planning
Descript: Records and edits podcast episodes with automatic transcription. She uses these transcripts to create blog posts and generate YouTube titles and thumbnails
Instagram Edits App: Instagram’s official editing app. They initially gave people a boost in the algorithm for using it. She can easily download videos and re-edit them, which is helpful for creating different versions for ads versus organic posts
PinClicks: Keyword research for Pinterest

Beyond the Membership: Digital Products

In addition to the $25/month or $45/quarter membership, Cheyenne sells digital printables on her website.

This serves people who only want the written cleaning routine without the radio shows. Her routine is so helpful that it stands on its own.

The printable bundle is also a great upsell. When someone purchases the membership, they see an order bump option.

If they don’t take it, they’re redirected to a page with a video showing how Cheyenne uses all the printables as a working mom to stay organized, plus a sales pitch.

The printable bundle is deeply discounted (around $47 instead of $80), which helps improve her return on ad spend.

The Biggest Surprise

After two years of running Domestic Daydreams, what still humbles Cheyenne every day is the feedback.

She gets emails and comments from people saying the cleaning routines changed their lives, helped their relationships, and gave them back control of their homes.

One member turns on the episodes with her husband. They do the cleaning together, he loves the radio shows, and she feels supported and cared for. It’s become a bonding time for them.

Moms with kids with disabilities, lots of children, or health issues tell her how much it helps to have a system they don’t even have to think about.

“It’s not a very technical detailed thing, but it always humbles me to see how needed it is and what a big difference it’s making.”

What’s Next for Cheyenne?

Cheyenne has two big goals:

Write a Book: Publishers have been reaching out, and she’d love to give people simple, easy tips while expanding her reach.

Grow on YouTube: Her channel has 5,000 subscribers, which is a solid start. There’s definitely an ecosystem on YouTube for cleaning routines and decluttering, so she sees big opportunity there.

If you want to learn more from Cheyenne, check out DomesticDaydreams.com and radio.domesticdaydreams.com/links for her resources.

Cheyenne’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation

“Make marketing your number #1 focus.”

Episode Links

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