Nagina Abdullah turned her weight loss blog, MasalaBody.com, into a 6-figure side business. By day, she works for a large consulting company, and with a busy work schedule, a young family, and limited time to work on her side hustle, Nagina has been very smart about her marketing and pricing.
After struggling with her weight for all of her adult life, she finally hit on something that worked and dropped 40 pounds! With friends, colleagues, and neighbors asking how she did it, she started her blog to share recipes and tips.
But she soon discovered that people didn’t want recipes; they wanted to lose weight! Quickly, Nagina adapted and used her own success story as a catalyst to begin helping other women make some serious lifestyle changes.
Her sales funnel process is applicable across a broad range of industries and business models, and I think you’ll find a way to put some of her tactics and strategies into practice for your own hustle.
In this interview you’ll hear her exact process for converting strangers into readers, readers into subscribers, and subscribers into clients.
She reveals how one of her guest post pitches was knocked back several times by a large website, yet she persevered and when her post was accepted it went viral and generated a load of traffic and new subscribers – and continues to do so.
There’s a lot of information in this episode. Not only will you hear everything behind how she built up a 6-figure coaching side hustle, Nagina gives away some of her most popular recipes to help you shed a few lbs.
Related: If you want to start a website of your own, check out my free video course on how to get your first site online.
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Learn:
- How Nagina turned her own weight loss success into a lucrative side hustle.
- How she started a blog to share recipes but realized her audience wanted more.
- How she tried 5 times to land a guest post on a popular site which ultimately ended up giving her business a huge boost.
- Why she changed her business model from one-on-one to group coaching.
- How she knew she could charge $5k for coaching with no prior coaching experience.
- Her successful sales funnel and email responder series methods.
- How she converted free “breakthrough calls” into $10k a month client revenue.
- The tools she uses to run her business.
- How to get three of her favorite sugar craving busting recipes for yourself.
- Nagina’s #1 tip for Side Hustle Nation.
Links:
- MasalaBody.com
- MasalaBody.com/sidehustle
- The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
- MindBodyGreen
- These 5 Spices Helped Me Lose 40 Pounds (MindBodyGreen Guest Post)
- MailChimp
- PayPal
- OptimizePress
- Chatwing
- Google Hangouts (YouTube Live)
Download the Free PDF "Highlight Reel" from this Episode
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This is an inspiring story, and I really love her approach and positioning. Her spice course is also genius! But I’m pretty surprised the fact that this is Ramit Sethi’s sister didn’t come up at all.
Ramit featured Nagina on his blog and she appears in his marketing materials frequently for his courses (Zero to Launch I believe?) – I would think this would greatly increase her traffic, subscribers and $10k months.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that! They’ve got a very entrepreneurial family!
Ha! Right? It must be in their genes. I didn’t necessarily think you knew and just didn’t mention it. But I’m surprised she didn’t mention it as part of how she may (or maybe not) got a first boost. :-)
Hi Susan!
Thanks you for your comments about my SpiceYourselfSkinny.com course!
It is amazing to have Ramit as my brother (especially because of all the secrets I have about him as a child ;)!)
I am feautured in the Zero to Launch marketing materials because I took the course, did the work, followed the process and Got outstanding results.
It may be interesting that my mom also has a blog called RaiseTopKids.com!!
So, I’m curious if 1:1 coaching is the way to go in the beginning to establish a trusted audience? Or, can you go straight to group coaching and achieve trust and scale?
Hey Mike,
Thanks for stopping by. I see 1-on-1 as the most common starting ground with the lowest cost and barrier to entry. Plus, you’re getting paid to learn the most common challenges and struggles — all material you can use to fuel your content or eventual group programs.
The path I often see is 1-to-1, followed by 1-to-many, followed by a product (like software). Each step you’re theoretically removing more of your direct time input from the equation.
Hi Mike,
I chose to start with 1-on-1 coaching because I could earn significant revenue while growing my list, since people will pay premium prices for personalized service. It also enabled me to learn deeply about my target audience and test and improve my weight-loss method before scaling.
Once I grew my email list to a size where I could earn significant revenue by charging less but serving more people, I switched over and applied the expertise I learned while coaching.
Brilliant strategy Nagina, so smart :)
Hi Nagina and Nick,
Thanks for the podcast, it was great and really helpful to build that fire under me to get this started for myself!
I’m a trained exercise physiologist and have ideas for books, ebooks, coaching etc and wanted to start with a blog, mainly to build an audience. The blog would be about how to live your best lifestyle and achieving behaviour change, but I currently have 6 categories to cover all bases.. Mind, body, work, etc. So after listening I feel I need a more specific pain point (ie need to lose weight) rather than the resource heavy blog I have been thinking..
Do you have some thoughts around this? Do you think this market is played out? How much content needs to be original, or can you link to other sites and incl some editorial around the value of the link?
I’d would love to connect over Skype if either of you are open to it.
Thanks so much,
Michael
Thank you for sharing your process in such clear and in-depth steps, Nagina! And for asking all the right questions, Nick.
I love that you tailored the free gift to the podcast episode, that’s really clever. My biggest takeaway is that getting traffic from publicity is a numbers game, and that it may take quite some pitches to get featured as a guest blogger, and some luck for your posts to go viral.
I really enjoyed this show. There was a lot to take in and I have to listen to it again and again to incorporate what will work for me. Thanks for reminding me about the long game. Awesome episode.