684: $500 Per Client Per Month: Why Local SEO Should Be Your Next Side Hustle

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Today's guest runs a six-figure digital agency wall traveling the world with his family and says if he was starting over, he focused on selling a simple local SEO service. This might be the last bastion of SEO, local SEO. From EricDingler.com, EricDingler. Welcome to this side hustle show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to unpack this with you for your audience. You bet. And this one, I'm excited as well. We're going to figure out, well, how do we find customers? How are we going to deliver this service quickly and effectively? Maybe how to remove yourself from being the hands-on technician in the business. But kick us off with, what do you see as the opportunity here in local SEO? Well, for me, and especially as somebody that every three weeks to three months, I'm moving into a completely new city with my wife and our 14s. We're constantly going to Google Maps or Apple Maps, looking for restaurant, barber, grocery store, dentist, whatever it is we need. And I don't see people stopping that. People are still looking for that local service. I don't see it going away. And everybody in the entire world uses Google Maps, Google My Business and Apple Maps. Yeah, we're regular SEO, article SEO. Website SEO is being eroded away by AI and maybe read it in the search results. Local SEO is maybe a less competitive game and it still works by the old rules, more or less. Whereas if I want a restaurant near me, it's not being eaten by AI just yet. Yeah, the thing about Google, they have invested millions and millions upon millions of dollars mapping every city, every country, every road in the world, adding all of the businesses that they can find to it, working to ensure that we have access to businesses, hours, contact information, all these things. Yeah. And they don't charge for this. They don't charge you and me as the end user trying to find a place and they don't charge the businesses to be on it. But even with that, only about, according to Google's most recent numbers in the USA, only about 20, 25% of businesses have claimed to their Google business profile and have optimized it. So 75% of the local businesses around you haven't done this yet. And they all already know about Google. They already know about SEO. And if you can learn a new key phrases and use those when you're talking to businesses, it's a very easy services. In fact, today is our oldest son's 18th birthday. And he is an outdoor kid through and through. Computers are not his thing. He wants to be outside all the time. He wants to play soccer and stuff like that. But if he was to come to me today and say, okay, dad, I want to start my own thing. What should I do? And my agency, we do web design development, app work. We focus a lot on helping businesses meet accessibility standards. We do paydads, social media. We do all those things. Yes. And this is Intrianset Studios. If anybody wants to go check that out, that's all right. Go ahead. Thanks. Yeah. But if my 18 year old came to me today and said, I want to start my own thing, I would give him a checklist to start a local SEO business. And I would say, this is what you need to go do. All right. Coach, me through this. We'll worry about the technical skills. I don't know the first thing about it. We'll worry about that in a second. But like, let's say I'm your son. You're like, you talk me through this. What do I do first? The first thing you're going to do is you're going to go sell it. I do this a lot. I often sell services that I don't know how I'm going to deliver it. In fact, my very first local SEO client, I sold them local SEO. I collected the money. And then I used that money to go pay for somebody to teach me how to do what I need to do. Because you can tell your customer, this is going to take me four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. They don't know. Yeah, yeah. You set up expectations. Sure. Exactly. So you set those expectations. So what I like to do in this case, and this is going step by step, really breaking this down. The first thing I would do is I would write a, what we call beta test social media post. And later at the end of the episode, Nick, we can give people a link to, I have this written out in an actual checklist with links and everything that people can follow. Perfect. But for the conversation, the thing I like to do is I like to create a beta social media post. People that are listening, they probably have friends that are business owners or they use local businesses. They have a dentist. They probably have a barber or hair salon. They have a favorite restaurant that's not a chain. You have your local mom and pop favorite places, landscape or whatever it might be. You have friends that have these businesses. So what I like to do is create a social media post that says, hey, fellow business owners are hate business owners who are friends. I'm testing a new piece of software or I'm testing a new system that lets me know that me help local businesses be found more often when somebody searches for them. I'm looking for three businesses that I can use that would be willing to let me use their business as an experiment. You'll get an increased visibility on Google and I'll share all the results with you in exchange for helping me out. If you're interested, let me know. So that's kind of the gist, something like that. You put that out there and then you tell every business owner the next time you talk to them, if you've got a neighbor that has a local business, you go knock on the door and you're going to tell them you're going to do this and then you can say when they respond to the Facebook ad or when you go talk to them, you say it's $500. The first time I did it, I sold it for $1,300, I had never sold it before, sold it for $1,300. You can do that, but if you're a little more like, "I don't know, that makes me nervous." Start lower, that's okay. But there is a guy, Sam Sarsden, and he has a coaching program. It's $49 without the community aspect, $99 if you want into the community that's monthly. He teaches exactly how to do all this. I don't have a course, but I know Sam's course is great. You can go sell this and then go sign up for Sam's course and he'll show you exactly how to do this. What you're selling specifically is a one-time SEO boost. That's what you're going to sell. It's your foot in the door offer. That's what I sell it for $500. One-time SEO boost and you tell them, "I'm going to improve your position in Google Maps and Apple Maps within three months." "Okay, within three months, you're going to be ranking higher," which means, "And here's that one of those key phrases that I was telling you I like to use." We're going to increase your customer activity. I'm not promising more leads because I can't deliver on that. I'm not promising specifically more websites, visitors or more phone calls. I'm just promising more customer activity. Every local business owner understands that. A restaurant is never going to use the term leads. Restaurants aren't looking for leads. A barber shop's not looking for leads. They're looking for appointments or walk-ins. A rougher is looking for leads. To me, the most universal phrase that I have found is customer activity. This allows you to not worry because that was the next thing I was going to ask about. Do you worry about niche? Well, I'm only going to target rufers, but then it becomes maybe a potential conflict of interest if I sign up five rufers in the same town. Now, I'm competing. Who is my favorite? How do I figure out who I want to rank the highest? You're going to go kind of broad. It sounds like. The same skill set or the same toolbox can apply across any number of different businesses. Yeah. Absolutely. The fastest way to a sale is the face-to-face conversation. For a side hustle, especially to just get started, you're just talking about finding three or four local businesses that are going to do this SEO boost $500 because here's what happens. You're going to do the local SEO boost. Then within that, three months, you're going to get results. Here's what you're going to do. When they say, "Yeah, I'll do this." This sounds great. I love to do it. It's $500, so you know, you know, set up a Stripe account, take PayPal, take check. You're starting out of the side hustle, like cash is fine. Like, well, however you get into pay, yeah. Somebody can Venmo you, sure. Don't let that beat the bottleneck. Exactly, exactly. Like, there's lots of ways to get people's money from them. So, receive the money and then say, hey, listen, I need 24 pictures of your business. People in your business, behind the scenes, the front of the place. I need 24 pictures. And that's what you need to send to me. And if they're like, oh, I don't have them. You have a 17 year old, an 18 year old, a 25 year old on your team. Like, everybody on your team's got an iPhone. That's all I need. I need somebody take out their phone, take it 24 pictures. Then they're going to send you those pictures. You're going to take those pictures. You're going to create 12 posts with those pictures about their business. This is a great place to leverage AI. AI is really fast, fantastic at this. And then every week, you're going to go in and you're just going to post to their Google Business Profile. So, they're going to give you access. It's super easy to get access to their Google Business Profile. You're going to get access to the Google Business Profile. You're going to go in one to week. You're going to post a picture for 12 weeks. And maybe this is for these 75% of businesses that haven't even claimed theirs. Maybe that's step one. Like, hey, here's an easy quick win for you, Mr. Mrs. Business owner. Let's do that first and then we'll go do this one time boost. Right. Well, this is part of the one time boost. Yeah, this is it. This is part of the one time boost. So, for the one time boost, you're going to use AI to rewrite their description. You're going to use AI to help you create those 12 posts. And then you're going to go in and you're going to schedule those. Now, down the road, there are tools you can get to automate this. We now, when we do an SEO boost, we create all the content. We create all the content that we create. And then we do an SEO boost. You can pay with cash, credit card. You can book an appointment. We do kids. We do fatins. We do beards. Like, what are the common questions people ask you about your business? And that's what's has to go in the description. And so most business owners talk about themselves and not their customer. And their customer's needs. So real easy fix. Plus you want to make sure that you mention, you know, the business type you are. You know, AJ's barber proudly serving Columbus, Ohio, men, kids, short hair. You know, then you list the things, walk ends, welcome, all that kind of stuff. So that's in the description. I got it. Okay. Then this is in that the checklist I have a lot of businesses, local businesses. They go to set up their Google business profile. Nick and they're like, I want to serve everybody. So they put their service areas, the United States of America. Okay. Huge mistake. Huge mistake. Because when Google decides who to show to somebody in Google maps and when Apple decides in Apple maps, the first thing they look at is the geographic location of that phone. So I'm in Budapest hungry right now. If I get my phone and I search barber near me, it's going to show me a couple of the closest barbers right here to me in Budapest. But if I turn my VPN on and I say I'm in Miami and then I open Google maps and I ask for a barber, it's going to start showing me barbers in Miami. If you say you're in the United States, that puts your business geographic location out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Because it goes clear up past Alaska down around Hawaii. And the only people that's going to see your pizza shop, barber shop mechanic is somebody trolling for fish out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Not what you're going for. More with Eric in just a moment, including the exact type of posts you should be creating for local businesses. Plus how to scale this thing into a six figure recurring revenue business with a remote team right after this. Scrappy side hustlers have an advantage over bigger competitors and that speed. The faster you can pick up the phone, the faster you can respond to customer messages, the better. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo spelled Q-U-O. This is the business communication system built so you never miss a call. 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This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Another quick win sounds like narrow down that service area location and you kind of drop perimeter. The service area. All kinds of ways to do that. Just the city or a couple towns. But I just start with that one central space. And so you do that. That's optimizing. Optimizing the description. Optimizing the service location. You get those things optimized. And a lot of people, business social, they haven't bothered filling in all the little boxes about parking, accessibility. Is it veteran owned, woman owned, something like there's all these things. And it's because Google keeps adding these questions and information every few months they add a new one. And most businesses aren't updating that. So you're just going to go through the Google business profile. And here's the thing. If you're like, I don't know the answer. Make a list and send an email to the cassette. Hey, just wanted to follow up with a couple more questions. Do you do this, this and this and this? They're going to answer it. You're going to put it on their Google business profile. Super simple. Yeah. So that's optimizing. You're going to do it one time. Then you're going to create the 12 pieces of content. And you're going to go in once a week and add those. So one day added on Monday, one day added on Tuesday. You want it to seem kind of natural. And then once a week, you're going to add a picture. Those things right there, you're going to start to see their rankings improve. You're going to see increased customer activity. We like to use a tool called local Falcon. I think I pay around $29 a month for local Falcon. It's a super inexpensive tool. You go into local Falcon. You go to reports and you use you find the business. If they've got a Google business profile, local Falcon is going to find them. And then you you said a geographic region. We normally start with like two miles and then you put in a search term or a couple search terms. Barber, men's haircut, pizza, pizza delivery, pizza pick up depending on the business. Okay. And what local Falcon does is it goes and it scans the entire area because I can be a quarter mile to the east of a business. And it's in 20th place on Google. I can go a quarter mile to the right or to the west. And it's going to be in first place. Your position on Google changes street by street. What this does is it creates a heat map and it shows you all of these dots. And it puts the right position of where you are. So you're going to have some areas that are green, some areas that are red, some that are in between in the yellow and orange. Now some businesses may be on the line. all green, this whole list. We'll expand out. Look for a different search term, expand the radius. - Okay. - Some businesses, it's all red, except for right where their business is. It's green. And those are the business owners that go, well, we thought we were in first place on Google. - Yeah, you are. Are you searching from your front door? Yeah. - Yeah, indoor business. But you can either get in a car and drive around town and refresh your search every street, or we just create this geo-grid for you. Now, down the road, you can offer this geo-grid as a freebie. This is a good way. Once you start getting some clients, you're getting established, and you start to promote some things, this is a great lead magnet, because a lot of business owners see this map, and they're like, "Oh, I want to see that for my business." You don't need to do that starting out. That's kind of a 2.0 kind of strategy. - Okay. - Right now, you're gonna just talk to a couple of businesses, get a couple of people to hire you, you're gonna go in and do these things, you're gonna create one of those maps. Every month, you're gonna run the scan again. A local Falcon has this whole list of suggestions after it runs the report, AI generated suggestions, that'll tell you a wealth of information of things to do to improve your rank. - Give an example or two of the type of post that you're posting on behalf of these different businesses to their Google profile. - Sure. - Give me an industry. The interesting industry you want. - We can go with the Barbershop example again. - Barbershop, great. So they give you a picture of a kid getting a haircut. You're just gonna take that and you're gonna say, depending on the type of year, maybe it's another one of our customers in, getting ready for the summer, getting a haircut before vacation, back to school seasons coming up, getting ready to head back to school here in Pittsburgh, talk about vacation coming up, just whatever you can. Or maybe it's the barber that's cutting their hair, maybe they're in their five years. Hey, here's Tony, been with us for five years, cutting one of our favorite little customers hair again, helping them get ready for vacation. - Okay, but you don't always have that insight, so you got to like kind of probe the business owner for what's the occasion? You don't wanna just make stuff up. Oh Tony's really just started last month. That's always gonna be a little weird. - I wouldn't make up anything like that. I wouldn't make anything like that. But here's the thing that can be a little annoying with this. Very few people read these. That's what's annoying. - Sure, I know I get it. It's like you need to feed the machine even though nobody's realistically reading it. It's like, but you gotta give it some data, you gotta give it some stuff to chew on. - Yes. People read reviews and people look at the pictures. But very few people read the post, but Google does. And Google wants to make sure that if it's gonna recommend you, somebody's there turning the lights on. Because if Google sends somebody to a closed business, they're going to lose their trust in Google. They may switch to another tool. If Google starts losing eyeballs, Google starts losing advertising. Google will not lose advertising. I mean, that's how they make their money. It's advertising. So they wanna keep the eyeballs. They wanna make sure that they're giving you and me when we look for a business, a business that's open, a business that other people use, a business that keeps their hours up the date. Google will reward you by what these are called signals. - Yeah, yeah, giving positive signals. - They can look active, right? It's active and engaged. They're using our tools and helping people in that way. - Yes. And right now, again, for those that are listening, that just trying to get started, you're just doing a one-time local SEO boost. So you're doing a minimal viable product here to get results. When you run that first local Falcon scan, you're gonna take a screenshot. Each time you run it, you're gonna take another screenshot. And suddenly, you're gonna get before an actor's. You know, had very little green, two months later, all of this green. They're showing up all over the top of Google, okay? Because then what you can do, you've got these first few seed clients, they've given you the money that's given you the money to invest in higher, you know, into a training and getting some tools. But now you can go back to them and say, here's the results we got. This is great. Here's what it's gonna take to keep you at the top of this. You're gonna need to keep posting once a week and you can do this. And we gotta get into eventually what there's these things called directories. There's some great tools that help with this. Mods local is one, yes, is another. These are tools, a business owner can go and pay them for themselves to do it. And the business starts getting added to directories. Directories are websites that link to businesses. So this is how you get those back links. They're still gold, even in local SEO. - This is still a big thing. This was NAP listings, name address phone number listings, like all across the internet, all pointing back to your home base or website. - Exactly. And some of these directories now power voice search. So it's important to have these directories up to date because Google looks for consistency of NAP, name address phone number. If you're listed on 20 websites, but sometimes the name is spelled out one thing. Sometimes it's this, sometimes the address is a little bit, sometimes the phone number is different because you got a new phone number, something like that. That's a signal to Google like, "Uh, did they have their act together?" They really be trusted. But this is an advanced. And we don't touch directories for a local SEO boost. I don't act too. But for our monthly recurring, where we go and we say, "Hey, listen, we can manage this for you." And we can write content. We need to have a strategy session once a quarter where I come in and I interview you about your, how long have they been here? How long have they been? This is where you get into the nitty gritty. And we do a quarterly strategy session. And we have, you got any specials coming up next three months? Anything you want to put, you have a seasonality to your business in the next three months. Is there work something like, "Oh, back to school is big for us." Valentine's Day is big for, "Okay, great." So then you create that content calendar. And at this point, you'll get a tool where like, now you're going to create the content and post it. So it's automated and done for three months, things like that. Or better yet, how I do it is I now have a team that does this. I've got an amazing person on my team from El Salvador. She's a rock star. And this is all she does for us. She only does local SEO content. She creates it for, she meets with the clients once a quarter, does a strategy session, maps out their content. She can do two of these a day. And we typically charge around $750 a month for the ongoing monthly recurring revenue. But again, I grew into that. So this is local SEO. It's not going away. - Well, that's, no, that's like really, really cool to see what is potentially possible down the road with a trained up team member who is taking half a day to service this customer that you're charging $750 a month for. You imagine the margins on that are quite healthy. - Yes. Even if you hired somebody in the States, I have one person on my team in the States, but the rest of my team are remote. We're an entire remote, I'm remote. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So my team is remote. Yeah, and we just, that's how we operate. Because we are able to keep them very high margins. We're able to keep our costs very competitive that way. And it's fun to be able to travel around the world and meet your staff. - Do you worry, you know, this is the, Bezos line of, you know, your margin is my opportunity. Do you see clients getting poached from under you, from other competing services? Or is it just like the number of small businesses is so vast, so massive that's like, well, even if we lose a client, that's fine. We'll go find somebody else. It's like, it's, we, you try to play this game of churn versus retention and margins versus like, well, wait a minute, how much does this really cost that to fulfill? - Yeah, if you show up every month with a report that's showing results, hey, we got you these results. That's you, most business owners, that's the number one complaint I get when we get a new customer. We were spending all this money. I never knew if it was working. - Got it. - You know, I didn't know where the results were. Because in the agency world, we're known for just sending a report and expecting our clients to read it. They don't have time for that. We show up proactively, hey, we just looked, you're at it. And we just tell people, we might call a client and say, hey, we just ran your report and on average, we've dropped three positions. And we use that, we use we, not you, not, you know, it's, we're in this together. Hey, we dropped three points. And so we looked and here's what we'd like to do. We'd like to do this and this and this over the next six weeks. And they're just like, hey man, you've got our back, whatever you need to do, like, 'cause it just, you build trust, you build trust. And for us then, now this led to Dindy, I had no intentions to own an agency. I was pastoring a church and my wife, and I decided to adopt a sibling group from Bulgaria. We had two biological children and we just felt like the next thing we were being called to do was adopt. And I had to come up with an extra $50,000 'cause we wanted to adopt debt free. - Okay. - I didn't know I was gonna come up with $50,000. So I had to come up with a side hustle and I knew how to do it. build websites. And so I started building websites and that kind of got a little bit of traction and I got a couple dozen clients and then I learned about this local SEO. And I just went back and I upsold my very first client to do it. I was like, "Hey, I'm testing this thing and you know, do da da." And they're like, "Yeah, okay, sure." And I was like, "It's $1300." And they're like, "Yeah, sure, let's do it." I'm like, "Great." And then I went to some businesses I didn't even know. I did the same thing and I did that. And then I started, and then I worked through my network, my local business network, onboarded all the low hanging fruit. And then we started to learn how to do another service. And so I just went back through and I said, "Hey, we're now doing reviews as a certain, we can help you get more five-star reviews from your satisfied customers." Oh yeah, Eric, let's do that. Yeah, I was going to, I was going to ask if the reviews were a part of this like ongoing monthly package review, reputation management, collecting reviews. Refutage management. Yes, it is now. It is now absolutely. But it is really its own separate kind of monster, if you will, and that's okay. So we package it as a separate service. Yeah. Because I can either sell somebody reputation management or I can sell them local SEO boost. We always start with the boost. And then I can come back and say, "Hey, we can add this. We're constantly trying to figure out how can we increase wallet share?" How do I increase that monthly recurring revenue per customer? When I first started out, my average monthly recurring revenue per customer was $49 a month. Okay, yeah, come a long way. Yes, we're now more like $490 average per customer per month with a whole lot more customers. Now, some of our customers are $2,000 a month. Some of our customers are still $99 a month. But you know, with average is out across the board, $495 a month. More with Eric in just a moment, including why accessibility compliance could be the next big service opportunity. Plus, his fastest path to $25,000 a month in recurring revenue coming up right after this. One customer says, "This tool literally spoiled me." It's so easy. Another added that it's taken a point of anxiety, and turned it into a seamless and easy process. Of course, they're talking about our sponsor, Gusto. Gusto is the online and payroll benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one, remote friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Think of it like cleaning out your virtual junk drawer. 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But if you want to sell products online, let me take some of that decision fatigue off your plate. There's a reason millions of businesses, including dozens of side hustle show guests, choose our partner Shopify. Think of it as this one decision that makes all future decisions easier. For example, you no longer have to start from scratch and designing your storefront. You can just pick from one of the proven templates and then customize it to match your style. You can quickly generate product descriptions. You can use Shopify's built-in AI to enhance your product photography. You can even fire up email and social media campaigns to help drive traffic and sales. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner Shopify and start hearing sign up your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/side hustle. Go to shopify.com/side hustle. What's your take on this? I've seen some people advocating this as a potential foot in the door strategy. It's to say thanks to these AI website building tools, you know, type it in a quick little prompt. You know, spins up this really nice looking website for local business XYZ. You could send that straight to the put Hey, look, I noticed your website was maybe look at a little dusty, little outdated. I made you this new one. You could have it for $200. It took you all of three minutes to create with AI. People using that as a potential foot in the door one for, okay, I could sell that website, a quick little revenue hit. But maybe this guy clearly knows what he's doing on the tech site. Maybe I could hire him for this local SEO and potentially this recurring revenue holy grail down the road. I think that's totally doable. You can do that first. There's a whole lot more people doing that. And you're running up against ads for Wix and Squarespace that run during the Super Bowl. That's what you're competing against. And so I have found it's become a little bit harder to sell websites because there's a lot more, well, I think I can just do this tomorrow. You know, business owners move towards the squeaky wheel. They're always going to want more customers. And they all use Google a lot of times. I even had some clients start to tell me like, I can't, Eric, I can't remember the last time I looked at a website if I'm not doing research. And so I'm not saying websites aren't going to always be important. But for a local bit like when's the last time you went and looked at the barber shop, I'm kind of bald. I don't look at a lot of barber shop. That's a funny example for two bald guys to be using here. Maybe barber shops are not the right one. But you know, for a barber shop, even a landscape or something like that, like I'm not going to go look, I might go look at a dentist website, but I don't know. Sure, absolutely. I would rather help somebody because it's hard to qualify the win of a website. Like, hey, I got your new website up. Now, they're vain. They're going to, oh, look at me. I got my next new website. I don't like that. But if you can show up and say, this is why I like reputation management is actually another foot in the door offer because I can show up four weeks after we launch and I can read you three, five star review. Hey, Nick, let me, let me show you what this customer said about you. They said, you're the best and you're great. You know, and then this customer said this and you're able to give them that feedback. Then you can say, now I was looking at your website. Now that we're getting more reviews, your website needs a little bit of work. They're going to trust you and say, oh, yeah, let's redo it. Yeah. It's easier in my opinion to know that way than to start with the website. That's been my experience. That's fair. No, I was just curious. See, get your take on that as somebody who's in the space. All right. What else do we need to know? So we've kind of covered, we're going to start with this local SEO boost. We can hopefully transition into an ongoing monthly maintenance package. We get a layer on reputation management, collecting reviews and there's software tools to help you do really all of this stuff and hopefully make it a little more automated and potentially so websites down the road like, you know, getting your foot in the door and hopefully business owners know other business owners, right? So the word of mouth starts to spread. Do anything else proactive on the marketing side to try and build up that client base? Yes. Accessibility. Accessibility is both a social justice issue as well as a good for business. In every business, unless it is a religious organization or private club, every business has to legally meet the standards and requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And just this last week, the European unions new accessibility laws rolled out. So this is beginning very, very universal. 20 to 25% of people that use the internet have some type of barrier. Could be a disability, could be slow internet. It could be they use a SIM card with limited data so they have any just turned off. If you can design a website or social media content that is super easy to read or you make sure you use what's called the alt text, you're opening up a business to about 20 to 25% more customers. So accessibility is huge. It's never going to go away. And that's the other problem with all these places that are spending upwebs. None of them yet are spending up websites that meet accessibility. So you can spend up a website for a foot in the door offer, but you've just put a legal target on them. And, not only that, you're not being a good neighbor to people with disabilities. So that's how we talk about it with our agency. We want to help you be a good neighbor. Accessibility is a whole another new fascinating world, but I don't think I would try to get into it as a side hustle. Okay, so this is another add-on service. Like, hey, by the way, did you know all websites, I think it's all businesses over a certain size. Like their website has to be ADA compliant, according to like your yours is not, but we can help get it there. And here's what it's going to take. Yeah. So the confusion that comes in on the size of business is there are a couple different articles of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The part of the article that deals with the physical and employment accessibility, making accommodations for that, but specifically to the physical property depends upon the size of your business. There are zero exceptions for your web content. It does not matter how many employees, it doesn't matter your revenue. If you're selling $3,000 a month in your business, your web content technically has to be accessible. Now, there's no enforcement unless somebody chooses to bring a lawsuit. But last year, this changed, the Department of Justice came out with some new regulations last April that said, if you receive any money from the government through a grant, maybe you're a doctor's office, and you accept Medicaid or Medicare, maybe you're the local garbage company, and you have a contract with the city to provide garbage pickup within the city. If you get any federal or state money or local money, and exchange, you're providing a service to continue to be eligible after April next year, you must have your website combined. And we're starting to get clients that are coming to us saying, Eric, we're filling out our application for our date funding for next year, and they're asking for a website compliance certificate. So that is happening in a very specific industry. And so that's a little bit different. But here's the beautiful thing about it. I tell people this all the time. It's real estate agents don't build the houses they sell. Nick, I have no clue how to go in and set up what's called Arya tags on a website. I don't know how to do it. I don't even know what that is. But my developers do, and they do it every day. And so I've never ran a Google ad. I've never logged into the Google business platform area when I forget it. And he was struggling with what he was called right now. But the Google ads platform, I've never done it. I don't have no idea. But we run Google ads every day for a customer. Eventually, from a side hustle, clean building becomes key to it. And again, if my son was wanting to start a business, this would be something I would try to get him to do from the very beginning, is to find somebody that can do fulfillment and then go out and sell it and then pay that person to do the fulfillment. - Got it. Is there a sweet spot in terms of Metro Area size? Or is there markets that are just like, this is too competitive? I wouldn't trust myself to sell it one time SEO boost 'cause I don't think we can move the needle here. - No, because even in a very competitive market, there are plenty of businesses that those other brands are not even going to give the time a day to. They're gonna judge them based upon their location or the condition of the business or something like that. And they're looking for masks. They're marketing broad strokes, running ads, cold calling, I can't stand cold calling, cold emailing. So they're getting bombarded with cold emails, cold calls. In my experience, Nick, and I don't know what your thoughts are on this or what you've seen. In my experience, the fastest way to $25,000 a month in recurring revenue is local networking. And sometimes we go into new markets and by geographic markets. I just recently hired somebody in Kent, Ohio. And we're following our process in Kent. It's a US-based employee. We needed a new person. The last person was leaving. I found somebody in Kent. It's always good for me to have somebody in the US. And we just started the same thing. Signed up, this person started going to all the local networking events. We found a local business association and went to them and said, "Hey, we'd like to host a podcast for you. You're the producer of it. It's under your branding. We'll interview your members and it becomes a member benefit for you to give to your members for free and will help you recruit more members. This is the fourth or fifth local area of business podcasts we've done." And they're like, they love it. And so we just Katie started going around and interviewing all of Main Street Kent. That's the business association. She just started interviewing all of their businesses. And at the end of it, she's just like, she's built a relationship and she says, "Hey, can I add you, I actually am with Entrance at Studios. Can I add you to our weekly email newsletter?" And then I was like, "Oh yeah, that would be great. We'd love to get that." And we've signed on all kinds of clients that way. So over and over and over again, it's hard to be, I'm not saying the Chamber of Commerce or B&I, those are great and they have their places. But I'm talking about going to the local community, business association and getting in there. And then finding some of the strategic partnerships. When I was in Ocean View, Virginia, one of my best strategic partnerships was a commercial real estate agent. Because Duncan knew every single time the new business was coming in to town. And he was able to make referrals for me over and over and over again for, hey, so and so starting this business. Hey, do you hear someone so he was going to try to open up ice cream shop? Oh no, I hadn't heard that. I'd reach out and build, hey, I heard you're going to start an ice cream shop. How can I help? And stuff like that. So it's hard to be that there's no money hiding behind your computer, especially starting out in the side hustle with the local business. It's just hard to be getting out there, hitting the pavement, and meeting people, having a face-to-face conversation, and getting those first few clients in. Like you said, they start talking to others. You get a couple of case studies. Now you can start to branch out. Now you can start to grow. And it's just, to me, the fastest way to $25,000 a month in recurring revenue is local networking. All right, that's fantastic. You heard it here first. The digital nomad life comes second. What comes first is this boots on the ground, local effort. There's no money hiding behind your computer all of that line. Eric, you got the agency. What's next for you? You got the family, you got the travels. What's got you excited these days? We are trying to figure out where in the world we're going to live. We need to settle down as our children are turning 18. We have another one that will be 18 next year. It's time for them to start transitioning to young adult life. And literally the world is open. And three and a half years, we've lived in over 20 countries. And we've just learned that we love all the places. And so what's exciting for us is trying to figure out that. Give me your top three. Where are your favorite spots? Oh my goodness. Our favorite spots. So London would be a great to live in. We really love Buenos Aires, Argentina. Argentina's fanastic. We really like that. And let's see a third one, Istanbul Turkey. We wouldn't settle there. But if you're looking for someplace to visit, check out Istanbul Turkey. It's a great city. Very good. I've been fortunate enough to have visited all three of those. So I'll vouch for those all very cool places. So. Okay, there you go. This has been awesome. So I know people will hopefully take a lot of action based on this episode and go sell some of this service on their own. If you would like to grab Eric's local SEO side hustle checklist, I would encourage you to do that. It's at EricDingler.com/side hustle with all the details that we talked about in this episode. That's Eric with the sea Eric Dingler.com/side hustle for that local SEO side hustle checklist. Let's wrap this up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. Real estate agents don't build the houses they sell. So don't fall into the trap that you have to be the one doing it. There are some side hustles where it makes sense and things like that. But if you're long term kind of desire is to start a side hustle to escape the nine the five with it, then figure out how to be a leader. If I was starting over, the two things I would study starting over, and I'm talking like I'm 50. If I was going back to my 20s, the two things I would study to start over, the two things I would study to start over is leadership and list building. Okay. Well, you heard it here first. Leadership and list building. This is my interpretation is like don't find yourself getting stuck in fulfillment. You don't want to be the technician doing the work all day every day. You want to be building client relationships. You want to be leading the team rather than kind of getting stuck in the freelancers trap of selling your skills. You don't even need to know necessarily how to do this. You just need to be able to play matchmaker with the people who need the service and the people who know how to get it done. That's absolutely right. And I do, I have a 90 day accelerator. I do every quarter. Why take a group of people through the process of gearing up to hire on board and lead a remote team. And so if that's something somebody interested in, you know, go ericdingler.com/sidehustle. They'll download that. They'll be able to reach me from there and be more than happy to help somebody navigate hiring a remote team. Very cool. Go check it out ericdingler.com/sidehustle. My other note that I have here is, you know, you want a recurring revenue. You got to solve a recurring problem. Businesses needing to increase their customer activity, like Eric said. Hey, that's a recurring problem. It's never going to go away, right? So sell that result. And if you want a recurring revenue, you got to keep selling it. Give those follow-up reports. Say, before and after, here's what we did. Here's what we were able to get done. Here's where we want to go next. So really cool stuff, again, ericdingler.com. The side hustle show, as you may or may not know, just had its 12th birthday and whether it's your first time listening or you've been here since the beginning. I appreciate you spending some time with us in your earbuds today. If you're newer to the show and you want to go a little bit deeper, what else you got here? It's been around for this long. You can actually get a personalized playlist at hustle.show. All you have to do is answer a few short, multiple-choice questions. It's going to recommend 8-10 of our greatest hits to start with based on your answers. Totally for you. for you, hustle.show for that personalized playlist. Big thanks to Eric for sharing his insight. And can I shout out our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone? SideHaselNation.com/deals is where to go for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you find a value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. Fire off that text message. I know you got at least one friend who can take Eric's model and run with it. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen, and I'll catch you in the next edition of The SideHusle Show. Hussle on.