Online Business

To make money online, you generally need 3 things:

A website (don’t worry, they’re not that hard to make)
An audience
Something to sell

There will always be exceptions to this rule, like the YouTube celebrities who don’t have their own site, but most of the successful entrepreneurs online (myself included) have figured out those 3 things.

An online business is a great asset; you can work from anywhere and serve people worldwide. Depending on how you have it set up, you can even earn money while you sleep. Ahh that elusive “passive income!”

The location-independent business models you’ll find here include blogging, podcasting, self-publishing, teaching online courses, and more.

If you’re not sure where to start, let me recommend this “Greatest Hits” collection:

How to Build and Monetize a Facebook Audience: Zero to 50,000 Followers in 12 Months

September 16, 2021September 16, 2021

We’ve been on a bit of an audience building kick lately in our conversations with Dickie Bush about Twitter, with Tori Dunlap about TikTok.

Today you’ll meet a long-time listener of the show who built her audience on Facebook.

Chantal Lavergne is the founder of FunSensoryPlay.com, which started as a Facebook page in early 2020 — and that’s important because that’s years after the supposed death of organic Facebook page reach.

How to Grow and Monetize a TikTok Audience: 1.6M Followers in 13 Months

September 9, 2021

Tired of toiling away on social media for lackluster results? Tori Dunlap earned her first 200,000 TikTok followers in just a couple weeks, and has added another 1.4 million since then.

All that attention has helped her turn a healthy 6-figure business into a multi-7-figure operation.

Tori is the founder of HerFirst100k.com and host of the Financial Feminist podcast, where she helps women become more financially confident.

She argues that TikTok is the best social media platform on which to grow a targeted audience right now.

Building a 6-Figure Side Hustle on Twitter: Audience Growth and Monetization w/ Dickie Bush

August 12, 2021

Today’s guest has gone from zero to almost 50k followers in the last 12 months and has had several 6-figure course launches.

This is impressive in itself, but what’s even more impressive about this story is that Dickie Bush has built his audience on Twitter.

Twitter is a platform that I’d kind of written off. In fact, in 8 years and 450 episodes, we’ve never done a dedicated conversation on Twitter as an audience-building platform, but that might change today.

19 Marketing Tips for Books (and Other Products) From Bestselling Authors

September 14, 2021August 5, 2021

What’s the best way to write a bestselling book? Ask a hundred people and you’ll get 100 different answers.

This post serves a couple purposes. The first is to collect and share some awesome book marketing tips from the authors you’ll find below. After all, the “round-up” post format is a proven winner.

The second purpose is admittedly a little more self-serving. I’ve got a new book launch coming up and wanted to hear from some of the best in the business what I should to give it the best chances for success.

$1K 100 Ways: The Book Project 6 Years in the Making

July 28, 2021July 27, 2021

In early 2015, I registered the domain name 1k100ways.com.

I thought it would be awesome to showcase 100 different ways to earn an extra $1000, and highlight some of the great work of the Side Hustle Nation community.

And then I sat on it.

Easy Website Wins: Marketing and Monetization Lessons From 175 Website Flips

July 22, 2021July 22, 2021

Today we’re diving into the easy wins — the quick updates you can make to your websites to drive more traffic and sales.

To help me out on that topic is Mushfiq, a side hustler who has been building, buying, growing, and selling websites since 2008, all on the side from his full-time career.

During that time he’s done over 175 transactions and has a wealth of knowledge on what it takes to make money and build equity online.

45 Side Hustle Tools, Apps, and Resources I Use to Run My Online Business

July 15, 2021July 15, 2021

I’m always looking for ways to work smarter and more efficiently, and to that end I took a recent inventory of my online business “toolkit.”

Of course many of these will be obvious to you but hopefully you discover some helpful new resources as well.

The good news? Most are free or at least have a free version!

And if you’re looking for the definitive guide to online resources named by top entrepreneurs, check out the full collection in my book, Work Smarter.

12 Expert SEO Tips for 2021: How to Drive More Free Traffic

July 27, 2021July 15, 2021

Want to drive more organic traffic to your website?

I’m sure you do.

At the heart of organic traffic is SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

The better optimized your site is for search engines, the higher you’ll rank for your target keywords – and long-tail keywords – and the more visitors you’ll get.

Blogging vs. YouTube: Which Platform is Best to Grow an Online Business?

July 8, 2021

If you’re starting an online business and creating content, you’re almost certainly going to create either written or video content – or both.

The problem is that it can be hard to know which type of content is going to work best for your business, and getting off on the right foot is going to save you a lot of time.

So, to help you figure out which type of content is best for you, I’ve bought back, by popular demand, the Side Hustle Showdown series.