[00:00:00] Hala Taha: Today's podcast is sponsored by Audible. Get your free audiobook download by heading over to audible trial.com/app. I've got some exciting news. We've just launched our YAP Slack channel, a place where listeners from all over the world can connect with one another to grow their professional networks, engage in live discussions, and provide valuable feedback on our show. To join our YAP Society on Slack, go to bitly/yapsociety. That's bitly/yapsociety. I'll stick the link in the show notes to make it super easy. 

[00:00:35] You're listening to YAP, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and grow. I'm your host Hala Taha, and today's episode is all about the art of side hustles.

[00:00:46] We've invited Nick Loper on the show who is the chief side hustler at Side Hustle Nation, a popular blog and podcast. Nick currently makes his living off of 15 different income streams. And so he's the [00:01:00] perfect guy to give us practical advice on how to make some extra cash on top of our nine to fives. Stay tuned to find out what it takes to start a side hustle and how to turn a side hustle into your main hustle.

[00:01:12] Hey Nick, thanks for yapping with us. 

[00:01:14] Nick Loper: You bet. Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:16] Hala Taha: So I thought that we could get started with getting acquainted, so an icebreaker, if you will. I was on your website and I saw this list of 25 facts about yourself, one of which I found really interesting. You took a cold shower for 500 days in a row. Can you tell me about that? Why on earth did you do that, ? 

[00:01:36] Nick Loper: I know it sounds awful now. So this was in the 2014 to 2015 timeframe. Started actually with a guest of mine on the Side Hustle show who was talking about, taking cold showers, starting out as a fat burning hack like to boost your metabolism for the rest of the day, cause you're gonna expend calories like heating your body up long after the shower is over. But then what he found was it was effective for [00:02:00] that, but what he also found it was effective for just like motivation. And he's if this is the hardest thing that I have to do today, and some days it's really hard cause it sucks.

[00:02:08] You just, you feel like you're ready to tackle anything. And found the same thing and I said on air, I was like, You know what? That sounds awful, but let me give it a shot. And some good things started happening. It might have been totally placebo, at that time started to get more coaching clients, like traffic started to pick up.

[00:02:25] I don't know, like for whatever reason I was into it. And so I did it for over a year. I guess it was effective. Maybe it was what I needed at that time. 

[00:02:32] Hala Taha: Would you recommend it to others?

[00:02:34] Nick Loper: Absolutely. Get outta your comfort zone a little bit. Do it for 30 days, or even maybe the baby steps away. To do it would be to end your showers cold, which is what I tend to do today. Cause that's less, for some reason, less jarring than just like jumping straight into the cold water. 

[00:02:49] Hala Taha: That's funny. That sounds horrible. . So how did you become the chief side hustler at Side Hustle Nation. Tell us about yourself, your journey, how you got started with it all. 

[00:02:59] Nick Loper: [00:03:00] My original side hustle was when I was working corporate was a footwear comparison shopping site. It was called shoe sniper.com and it would aggregate the product catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers and tell you where you could find the best price on your next pair of shoes. And it'd earn money as as an affiliate. If somebody went and bought that pair of shoes through Amazon, the site would get a commission.

[00:03:24] And while I was running that and the site had almost a 10 year run. We was always looking for stuff on the side, and it was like during one of these lower points of that business, doing some soul searching, being like what do you wanna be known for when people Google you? What do you get excited about talking about?

[00:03:42] And it was that prospect of lower risk entrepreneurship. How do I build a business on the side? How do I make extra money that, really never gets old and still doesn't get old because there's million and one creative ways that people are doing it. That's where the Side Hustle Show and the Side Hustle Nation [00:04:00] blog were born from.

[00:04:00] Hala Taha: So right now, are you a side hustler? Like how many side hustles do you have? 

[00:04:05] Nick Loper: A lot of ' em overlap and so my days of experimenting with a lot of the stuff are limited. So I used to do some freelancing, used to do some e-commerce experiments with Amazon and eBay and I still do a little bit of that, but that's taken the back burner, the Side Hustle blog has become in the podcast, they become the main focus, but there still are a dozen income streams related to that and not related to that, through self-publishing, through affiliate marketing on the site and on a couple other sites that I still run. Sadly, the shoe site no longer exists, but some other sites that were started during that time are still around, starting some experiments in the investing world.

[00:04:45] And it all, it all adds up versus trying to rely on one source of income, having a single point of failure. 

[00:04:52] Hala Taha: Yeah. So to that point, why do you prefer or recommend having side hustles over a nine to five job? 

[00:04:59] Nick Loper: Not [00:05:00] necessarily a preference one over the other, but the ultimate freedom is control over your calendar. How do you spend your time? How do you spend your days? And if you can piece together an income on your own terms rather than on somebody else's terms, you're more likely to have that freedom. So that's where it came from for me. And I would definitely advocate, focus first, simplify first, and then diversify second.

[00:05:21] Try and get one thing, one business, one income stream off the ground before going crazy and trying six things, with an unfocused effort. I think that's harder to see results from. 

[00:05:30] Hala Taha: Why don't you give some context to our listeners about Side Hustle Nation? So what is Side Hustle Nation?

[00:05:36] Nick Loper: Basically just a blog and podcast for people trying to make extra money outside of traditional employment. At the very low end of that, they could be like babysitting, walking dogs, delivering pizzas. Like I think all of those count as side hustles. There's a connotation that a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe there's this [00:06:00] vision, this hope, this dream that it could become something bigger.

[00:06:03] As it definitely did for me with the shoe business. 

[00:06:05] Hala Taha: I have a little trouble distinguishing a side hustle from a part-time job or a second job. How do you personally define what a side hustle is? 

[00:06:14] Nick Loper: Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential like that, it's something that you have ownership over.

[00:06:19] Maybe it's an asset that you own versus, Okay, I drive for Uber, or I'm delivering pizzas, or I'm, doing Instacart deliveries or something like that, right? That's, that absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind. But at the same time, like you're limited on how much you can do by, your hours in the day versus with you starting the podcast, it's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people, and that is really powerful. It becomes a little bit more leveraged, and I think there's a lot more upside, even just starting a freelancing business I'm gonna do freelance writing, I'm gonna do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is.

[00:06:59] Hala Taha: So I [00:07:00] was doing a bit of research on the show and I found out. More Americans are working a side hustle than ever before. And to be exact, there are 44 million Americans with a side hustle today. Why do you think the motivations to start a side hustle are so much stronger than they were in the past?

[00:07:17] Nick Loper: That's a weird, It's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great unemployment is at record lows, why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive, right? Housing, education, insurance, or healthcare, like all of those costs have grown way faster than real wages.

[00:07:41] So that's a driving factor, like just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt. That's maybe the negative way to look at it and the more positive way to look at it is, look, I have the ability and the desire [00:08:00] to, start something that scratches a creative itch.

[00:08:03] That is something that I have control over that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about, that's probably driving some of that as well. And those are the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people like I need to make rent next month. That's you're approaching it from a completely different standpoint.

[00:08:19] Hala Taha: Yeah, and from my perspective, I really think it's all about the digital innovation that's going on. There's so many different digital platforms where people can do freelance work, whether it's fiber or Upwork and mobility. Like you can just make money off your phone now while you're on the train.

[00:08:35] I used to do that years ago, but I just feel like it's easier. There's so much more space to play because we've got the internet now and there's just so much more that you can do with your free time to monetize it. So I think it's also like digital. impacr too. 

[00:08:51] Nick Loper: Yeah, that word play that you just used is really key in approaching it that way, saying, Look, this is gonna be a fun experiment. I'm gonna see what [00:09:00] happens. I'm gonna put some content out there and approaching it that way. Lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, Okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm gonna test something out. If it works, great. If it doesn't, Okay. Onto the next thing.

[00:09:13] Hala Taha: I also read that half of millennials report having a side hustle. So this is really big for the younger millennial generation. Why do you think it's so attractive to younger millennials specifically? Most of my listeners are younger millennials. 

[00:09:27] Nick Loper: Yeah, I think it's. Cash strapped nature. Look, we're dealing with a debt load.

[00:09:31] We're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively when I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends like outside of the office really.

[00:09:50] And so I had a lot of free times, nights, and weekends. I was like I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch tv, but how can I be more intentional, be more [00:10:00] effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it. 

[00:10:04] Hala Taha: Yeah. You mentioned that you have a blog. It's a very cool blog. That's actually how I found you. I was looking for ways to monetize my podcast and came across one of your blogs.

[00:10:13] Nick Loper: Oh, nice. 

[00:10:14] Hala Taha: And one blog that I saw that I thought might be interesting to recap for our listeners is this, Three Laws of Side Hustle. Do you mind explaining what those three laws are?

[00:10:25] Nick Loper: Sure. These will parallel Newton. , somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is gonna stay at rest. And an object in motion is gonna stay in motion until acted upon by an external force.

[00:10:43] And we see this over and over again with people who you know, are on the sidelines looking to get into the game. There has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action to register that domain name, to put up your profile on [00:11:00] Upwork, to try and get that first client to put yourself out there.

[00:11:03] And maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned. Like one of my favorite moments on the show was a photographer, a journalist I had on the show. He, a just, international sports photographer of the year or something like he's, like highest award in his industry goes into his boss for his annual review.

[00:11:21] And his boss is Man, I fought for 4%, but I could only get you a 3% raise. And he's You gotta be kidding me. And he is making 30 grand a year doing this. And he's This is not gonna work. And so that was the, motivating factor to get him off the sidelines and start thinking seriously about starting his side hustle. So that's the first law, and it goes both ways. Once you're in motion, we see this over and over again. Ideas start to pop up that you never would've had just based on conversations that you have or things that you come across during your research and that it's really powerful like this, inertia and momentum law.

[00:11:58] Law number two [00:12:00] is this law of force and impact. And so this is Newton's law of like acceleration. Acceleration of an object based on the force that was applied to it, so the smack of that 3% raise after winning the highest award in your industry, that was a pretty hard smack and , it motivated Vincent to take off in a hurry.

[00:12:18] He told me he would've been happy with 10% and so that wouldn't have been a big enough impact to really change his life. 

[00:12:23] Hala Taha: I just wanna pause here for a second cuz I love that. For me rejection is such great motivation, and it's every time I've ever been rejected, it's been when I've pivoted to something that is like a life achievement for myself. So I think that if you get rejected. If you feel like you've been let down, it's the best time to put that negative energy into something positive and do something different and impactful for yourself. 

[00:12:51] Nick Loper: Yeah, this was hit home. We were at this like beach vacation this summer and you know you're at the pool all the time and you're like, Man, I really should hit the gym more.

[00:12:58] Cause I see all these people who are super fit. [00:13:00] And so like maybe that's a motivating factor. You could see it in health, you could see it in business, you could see it in relationships. .. It happens all over the place. And then the third law is this action and reaction. So for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.

[00:13:14] And so we're recording this on election day and somebody just posted like, whether you vote or not, that's a vote. And so that got me thinking about this. There's an equal and opposite reaction. And even if nobody, Theoretically reacts to your stuff. Cause I wrote a personal blog for years and years that nobody really read outside of my friends and family.

[00:13:33] That was a reaction. It was, a reaction that told me that, Hey, you better write about stuff that people care about. And it wasn't all for waste because it was practicing skills of writing online and learning WordPress and learning all this other stuff. But it can be depressing when on the surface it's, yeah, there was no reaction. 

[00:13:51] Hala Taha: What kind of side hustles do you write about on your blog? 

[00:13:55] Nick Loper: The big three for the site right now are freelancing, like we talked about [00:14:00] e-commerce and kinda like a blogging and podcasting content marketing types of businesses where you're, Okay, I'm gonna set up a, an online presence to talk about this subject matter that maybe I'm an expert in, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm learning this subject matter and, monetizing through ads, through affiliate relationships, through digital products. 

[00:14:18] Hala Taha: And do you think that there are certain personality types that thrive in this side Hustle role? 

[00:14:25] Nick Loper: I've seen it work across, introverts, extroverts, young, old. It's really a matter of figuring out, okay, what's my offer gonna be and how can I get that in front of my target customers. 

[00:14:36] Hala Taha: Let's say I'm a millennial and I have this idea for a side hustle. How can I test the idea and make sure it's a good one before I either quit my day job or spend a vast amount of time on it?

[00:14:49] Nick Loper: This is good. Let's dive into this a little bit more. So What's the hypothetical business that you're thinking about testing?

[00:14:54] Hala Taha: Let's say selling something on Etsy. 

[00:14:56] Nick Loper: Okay, perfect. So if you're looking at Etsy, where I would start is [00:15:00] the existing listings on Etsy and the existing listings on, eBay, Amazon, Red Bubble, some of these other similar marketplaces where people buy me buying this stuff. If there are other people making sales that's a fantastic sign, right? There's money in that market. 

[00:15:16] The second thing that I would probably do is Etsy costs like, I think 20 cents to put up a listing. It's almost free, so you create your listing very affordably, and so if it's a handmade product, I would just create one of those so you can take nice pictures and put up that listing for 20 cents.

[00:15:31] Etsy has on platform advertising that you can use to drive traffic on top of their listing optimization tools and keyword tags and stuff like that. But one thing that you probably wanna do before paying for traffic is to land some social proof on your Etsy page, which is the number of likes on this page, the number of sales that you've made.

[00:15:52] So you can see that with some initial reviews from friends and family. You might even just give these away and say, I really prefer if you [00:16:00] ordered this through Etsy to help my appearance on that platform. And you find that kinda a similar strategy, not just on Etsy, but on iTunes. Hey, can you review this podcast on Udemy?

[00:16:08] Hey, could you review my course on Amazon? Hey, could you review my book? Like just to seed the platform with a little bit of social proof so the algorithms start to work in your favor. And When they do land on that page, they say, Okay, this isn't a ghost town. There's actually, some, there's something to this.

[00:16:24] Hala Taha: Isn't that so funny how you could have thousands of listeners and the best personal feedback, but if you have no reviews, like you ain't shit . 

[00:16:33] Nick Loper: Yeah. And maybe that's feedback too. If nobody wants your thing, if you can't get your friends and family to. That's probably a sign that it's not the best business to go into.

[00:16:40] Hala Taha: And I know a lot of people are thinking about these days, starting a podcast, starting a blog. Do you have any advice for those folks?

[00:16:47] Nick Loper: Yeah, I'm still really high on podcasting specifically because I forget the latest stats. It's probably something like 40% of the population even knows what a podcast is, and so that leaves a huge chunk of the pie, [00:17:00] left to go out and grow over the next.

[00:17:03] 5, 10, 15 years, as people discover on demand audio and they're probably gonna react like I did. This is amazing. How did I waste so many years listening to nonsense on the radio when I could listen to stuff that is going to help me grow personally and professionally? Like really excited about that.

[00:17:18] The key then is okay, how can I reach those people and the 40% that already do know about podcasts, how can I reach those people in a way that is either helpful or entertaining? A friend of mine gave me, this was five or six years ago at a conference, gave me the rule of the internet, which I quote all the time.

[00:17:35] It's, people are only ever online for one of two reasons. Number one, to be entertained, and number two, to solve a problem. And you can think that's Facebook and that's Google. To be entertained or solve a problem and the podcast may bridge the gap there. Some friends have called it infotainment, where you know you're providing educational content, hopefully in an entertaining way.

[00:17:54] Putting the listener first and it's a practice, it's a craft. Like the first 50 [00:18:00] episodes of The Side Hustle Show awful. I'm embarrassed to go back and listen to those, but it just took a while to hit my stride as a host. And I know you're like a radio professional, so you're doing great right outta the gate, but it's a practice.

[00:18:14] Hala Taha: Yeah, I read that the average side hustle only makes $200 a month and $600 a month if you're really knocking it out of the park. But to me that doesn't really sound like young and profiting type of stuff. That sounds like we could do better. 

[00:18:28] Nick Loper: Yeah, I definitely wouldn't leave your job if you're at that two to $600 a month level.

[00:18:33] What I would like to see is a track record of earnings history, 6 to 12 months. And other people will be more aggressive than this of replacing not necessarily your day job salary, but at least your monthly expenses. So you know you're not gonna be dipping into your emergency fund, your savings to try and get to that ramp up period.

[00:18:54] The exception to that, has been from folks where the day job really is the bottleneck, [00:19:00] and you say, Hey, if I had an extra 40, 50, 60 hours a week, in some cases, I know I could get this thing to the next level where it could support me, where it could support my family. That's when it might make sense to make the leap where it looks on paper prematurely.

[00:19:16] It has to align with your goals too, right? Some people have no intention of leaving their day jobs. Hey, I love my work, but I just, I do this stuff on the side because it's fun, because it's interesting, because it provides play money. What, for whatever reason, it's building my skills, it's exercising a, a different side of my brain. So not everybody is out to quit their day job. 

[00:19:36] Hala Taha: I personally feel like side hustles have a negative appeal to some people, especially like the older generation, that you should be more traditional, you should have a regular job. Have you faced any of that negative judgment? 

[00:19:50] Nick Loper: That's an interesting one. So the negativity comes from a couple places. The first is that you kind of economic macro [00:20:00] positioning that we talked about where it's what a sad state of affairs that 44 million people feel the need to side hustle. Like why can't it be like the old days? That's maybe one angle. The other angle is just like maybe the word hustle, like as the connotation of I'm gonna scam people, or something like that, not recognizing that just means your effort, like control what you can control, work as hard as you can when you can and be smart about it. So actually Side Hustle Nation comes from a quote from an old baseball coach of mine. He's Look, you're gonna have bad days at the plate. You're gonna have bad days in the field, but hustle never slumps.

[00:20:31] And I was like, Okay. I really like that. That stuck with me. 

[00:20:33] Hala Taha: Yeah, it is catchy. And what side hustles today, like this very moment in time, would you recommend to our listeners? 

[00:20:40] Nick Loper: Oh my gosh. As we talked about the freelancing, consulting stuff, if you have a skill that's in demand. Absolutely understand that your boss, your company is probably taking a large percentage of your value.

[00:20:51] A friend of mine was a tutor for Kaplan or one of these big tutoring companies. He was making 18 bucks an hour, which was awesome for him. Like in his early twenties, the company was turning [00:21:00] around and charging the parents like a hundred bucks an hour, and he was like, Wait a minute. I have this skill.

[00:21:03] I could go out and sell that directly to my customers. So I like that freelancing marketplace. Perfect first side hustle as a way to get your feet wet, understand that you have value outside of your business card, outside your paycheck. My wife and her business partner on the side from her job started a photography business completely unrelated to her engineering job.

[00:21:22] So it doesn't have to be, I'm an accountant by day, So I'll do accounting at night .When we talked about the podcasting stuff, we talked about kinda like the online authority business blogging, content marketing businesses. I continue to see, and I continued to be impressed by some of the numbers that these guys are posting.

[00:21:40] I just talked to a guy this afternoon who was selling $45,000 a month worth of a online course that teaches you how to start a microgreens farming business and grow this stuff in your garage and sell it to the farmer's market and to local restaurants. And it just blew my mind that there was that much demand in a niche I had [00:22:00] never even heard of.

[00:22:01] And I'm really excited by stuff like that, people having this new ability to monetize these little skills, hobbies, interests that you know they might be able to put out there.

[00:22:11] Hala Taha: Yeah, I feel like courses are getting more and more popular and so in demand, cuz I, people just wanna learn and if it's unique content that they can't find anywhere else, you can package that up and monetize it so. 

[00:22:23] Nick Loper: Yeah, make it easy for me, make it step by step. Absolutely. 

[00:22:26] Hala Taha: And how about blogs? Is there a way to really monetize blogs these days? Cuz it seems so over saturated. 

[00:22:32] Nick Loper: Yeah, that was my initial reaction too. But I keep getting proven wrong, people starting, relatively new sites. Again, another guy I talked to today started a mattress review blog in the uk. So like just a, even a tiny little island where apparently 15,000 people are finding his site every month and clicking on his affiliate links to go buy these mattresses. But because the price point is high enough and the commission is high enough, he's able to make a full-time living doing that.

[00:22:59] On the [00:23:00] blogging front, the trap I want people to avoid is Okay, I'm gonna start a personal blog and expect that makes money. The ones that I see doing well are the blogs that have content that solve specific problems. As you're creating every piece of content, think, okay, how is somebody going to discover this?

[00:23:17] Usually it's gonna be Google. Usually it's gonna be Pinterest, but like thinking of these user to content platforms. That's a term from Rosemary Groner who runs the busy budgeter.com. It's like a, personal finance budgeting site that's gone crazy. How are people gonna discover this? And if. If it has some nonsensical, clever title that only makes sense to you, probably nobody's gonna click on that.

[00:23:38] Probably nobody's gonna come and read that. And it's like you're gonna pour your heart out. You're gonna pour hours into creating this stuff. Make sure that you're setting yourself up for success. It's something that somebody is looking for and you're giving them the best chance to find it.

[00:23:49] Hala Taha: Okay, We're gonna close out with one last question. Tell us about the day that you quit your nine to five job. What made [00:24:00] you officially decide to start your side hustle career? 

[00:24:04] Nick Loper: The day that I quit, I was out to dinner with my boss and this has been on my mind for months really. Cause you know, I was building the shoe business on the side from this corporate gig. I was out to dinner with my boss. And I'm like, Okay, this is the day. I'm like, I'm gonna break, I'm gonna break in the news. Like I'm outta here. I'm gonna give my notice. It still took me like a couple beers deep into this dinner to build up the nerve to do it because it's is it, is that allowed?

[00:24:27] Can I cut my own paycheck? I went to school I have these obligations is this actually gonna work? And I had, several months of earnings history at that point. So it wasn't, completely, you might have heard the definition, Oh, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and it's gonna, figure out how to build their parachute on the way down.

[00:24:42] That was not me, and it was still super scary. But after I told him it was like this huge weight off my shoulders and it just okay, this is real. Let's go do this. 

[00:24:52] Hala Taha: And for millennials who are working a side hustle, when should they, decide to make that move? 

[00:24:57] Nick Loper: I would say once you have at [00:25:00] least six months of earnings history to cover your expenses from the side business. So you know, you're not jumping without a parachute. You've got something that you know is working and you think you can get to the next level if you're gonna free up some time. 

[00:25:13] Hala Taha: Awesome! I really enjoyed this. Before we go, can you let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and Side Hustle nation? 

[00:25:20] Nick Loper: Absolutely. Hit up sidehustlenation.com/ideas for a constantly updated laundry list of part-time business ideas that you can start today and no opt-in required, and of course would love to have you tune into the Side Hustle Show available in iTunes and pretty much every other podcast player app as well.

[00:25:40] Hala Taha: Perfect. Thanks Nick. 

[00:25:42] Nick Loper: You bet. Thanks for having me. 

[00:25:44] Hala Taha: Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting podcast. Follow YAP on Instagram at Young and profiting, and check us out at youngandprofiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on our new Slack channel. Check out our show notes or youngandprofiting.com for the registration link.[00:26:00] 

[00:26:00] You can find me on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn where I spend most of my social media time. Just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks for the folks who help put on the show, Timothy Tan, Daniel McFatter, Stephanie Steves, Christian, John Sparks, Kayla, and Ryan. I couldn't have asked for a better team.

[00:26:17] Until next time, this is Hala signing off.