726: The $300/day Marketing Funnel: From Content to Cash Flow

There's a side hustle that's exploding right now, and that's a live selling on what not. I've seen what not climb to the top of the app store. I've seen the seller earnings, everything from small part time projects to multi-million-dollar businesses. But what not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether you're selling beauty products, collectibles, electronics, thrift store finds, luxury fashion, even food products like cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. So how about this? People selling on what not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products and hoping somebody finds them, you're building real connections with buyers. And those buyers, they're spending more than an hour a day in the app. They're not just browsing, they're bidding, they're buying, and they're coming back. You go live, show off your products in real time, and then turn what you love into real income. And for a limited time, what not is matching your first $150 sold in the first month? Visit whatnot.com/sell to start selling. That's WHATNOT.com/sell. Whatnot.com/sell. This is the $300 a day marketing funnel that you can replicate in your own niche. Now here's the formula, the TLDR version of this. It's free content, leads to free email opt-in, which leads to paid offers. But there's quite a bit of new hunts, quite a bit of strategy. To each of those steps, which is why I'm excited to give you a real-life breakdown, some real-life examples in today's episode. My guest is a financial educator in online entrepreneur. He's the best-selling author of "Why does the stock market go up?" From longterm-mindset.co/brion-feraldy. Welcome to the SciTussell Show. Awesome to be here, Nick. Thank you for the invitation. Yeah, I'm pumped for this one because I saw your presentation at FinCon with the same title, my $300 a day marketing funnel. It's like, "Hey, this magical ATM from the internet gets a lot of people's attention." But this game starts with attention. And in your case, it starts with going where your target audience already is. Look, I want to teach people about being a smart long-term investor. And so I got to go out onto the social platforms where they're already consuming content. Twitter or X, LinkedIn, threads, YouTube. And how do I get people to notice me there? Something you've done a very effective job of, a couple hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn, over 650,000 on Twitter or X, and something you've been really prolific at for the last several years. So speak to me about the attention-gating game. What's working there now? The first question you need to ask are, who of the customers that I am trying to serve and what platforms are they naturally hanging out on? Now, the platform that I got started with was Twitter, aka X, at the time. And that was the place that investors were going to talk about stocks. So I kind of got lucky that the platform that I naturally gravitated to and started on was also the right platform to choose on. At least it was the right platform for me at the beginning. Now, if you're starting from zero, a big mistake is to try and use like five or six platforms or ten platforms all at the same time. That's absolutely the wrong thing to do. Everybody's advice is be everywhere. Yeah, which sounds so smart, but if you are really starting from scratch or you don't have a big presence, it is far better to be excellent at one platform than horrible at ten platforms. And if you really spend time on any given platform, you'll notice what kind of content is resonating on that platform at that particular period of time. And those things are constantly moving targets. So the first thing you need to do is ask what platform are your customers already hanging out on? It could be Twitter, it could be LinkedIn, it could be YouTube, it could be Instagram, it could be threads, it could be Reddit, it could be Medium, right? It could be Substack. There's actually many different places that you could look. Start with one in your case, Twitter. And then as that platform matures, as the audience grows, okay, now I figured this out. Let me add in a second and a third. Yeah, but you want all of your energy, all of your focus, focus on just one thing, one platform, until you are getting traction on that platform, until you can clearly define a repeatable system for yourself that you can reliably get traction and attention from. And only once you have that platform systematized, should you even think about going on to a second platform and you should take the lessons that you learn from growing on the first platform, apply them to the second platform and repeat that process again. Try and figure out what content works on that next platform, what is the format that consumers want to look at and keep iterating and experimenting using the content you already have from the first platform ported over. But sometimes you just have to reformat it. For example, platforms like X might love text, but platforms like Instagram obviously love images. So you can even start by just taking a screenshot of your Twitter posts and put them over on your Instagram account and maybe turn them into slideshows, for example, or convert them into being very simple reels. So it doesn't have to be a huge leap. You just have to make sure you're optimizing the content that you're making to be the platform that each platform is going for. Yeah, it's got to be native to that platform, which is where you see a lot of podcasters and I was guilty of myself of this in the early years. Their tweet would be a new episode drop today. Here's the link. This is the worst tweet ever. Nobody's scrolling Twitter looking for a 45 minute audio episode to listen to. It just didn't connect. What do you see working today on Twitter or LinkedIn or one of your primary platforms in terms of just starting out, it always feels like shouting into the void, like, I've got good stuff. Somebody may attention to me. Like, what do you see working today? I take a very diversified approach to social media today because I've spent multiple months, if not years on every single platform to kind of grow it up. But one reason that I do that is because algorithms are constantly changing, constantly changing across all of the platforms. And as a general statement, I usually have one platform that's doing very well and one platform that was previously doing well, that's not doing well. And those things do ebb and flow. I can tell you that the platform I am currently putting the most time into is YouTube. So that is the one that I am focusing the most of my energy and time on. And I have the other platforms, largely in maintenance mode. Okay. What's attracted you to YouTube? What's the opportunity you see there? YouTube is a platform that combines discoverability, SEO, as well as when a subscriber joins your channel. If they watch a couple of your videos, they have a deeper connection to you as a creator than they would if they were just reading text. You know, you're a podcaster. I'm very jealous of that because people that consume podcasts tend to listen to multiple episodes and you have been in their year for dozens, if not hundreds of hours. And they are likely to develop a very strong connection to you as the whole simply because you are spending so much time with them. That's not the case really for written platforms. And it's just a completely different human experience. When you hear somebody's voice, you get to know how they speak, you know, what words they kind of flub or any inside jokes that you have. You can do that with audio and video platforms and you can't necessarily do that as easy with written platforms like LinkedIn or or substax. So I'm focusing my energy on YouTube because it combines discoverability, the ability to go live and with the ability to establish a deeper connection with the audience. Are you targeting kind of evergreen how to evaluate a stock like type of keywords that people are searching for this month, they're going to search for next month. On social, it seems like the lifespan of a piece of content is 24 hours maybe a little bit longer if it really hits. But it's like it can be more evergreen on YouTube. Yep, that's another reason. I've made YouTube videos that you know, if you're a YouTube, you're understand this. When I publish them, they're 10 out of 10, which is horrible. That means it's like the least popular video in the last 10 that you've produced. So sure, sure. But eventually the algorithm has found that video served it to the right audience and those videos eventually become one in 10 in time. So you are absolutely correct. That is another benefit of YouTube, whereas the content you create can have a shelf life that lasts years where you can't say the same about tweets. Okay, I'm looking at some of your titles now investing for beginners 2026, which S&P 500 ETF is the best. So kind of these evergreen type of topics or the keyword targeted type of videos. I've heard it said by Ryan Holiday, you're trying to create content that is time Lee and time lists at the same time, which is a really hard thing to do. So I am trying to create content that is related to right now. So putting 2026 in the title tends to do this, but I'm also trying to create time list content. So I will remove 2026 from the title on those videos in let's just say six months time and they'll become videos that you can watch. So that'll become which S&P 500 tracker is best, no date on it. And that will become more long term regulated. Best performing video of all time, 1.7 million views for Warren Buffett, how to analyze a balance sheet. So obviously this is tapping into the popularity of you know Warren Buffett related search terms. And so anybody who's watching investing related content on YouTube this gets served up as like, hey, you might also like this. Absolutely. And I've made lots of videos that are similar to that and accounting related and you know as a content creator, you can never predict ahead of time what's going to do well, what's going to resonate for the long term. But in that case, I was borrowing the authority of Warren Buffett diving deep into how he thinks about a balance sheet, which is an idea that not only plus to investors, but it also applies to business owners, to managers, to entrepreneurs. So I think that one did well because the topic applied more broadly than just my niche, which is investing. Okay. So kind of this combination of social content, written content, sometimes it's just like a little short form take on what's going on in the market. And then some of this, you know, more longer form evergreen content, you know, eight, ten minutes, sometimes an hour long video on this stock investing course, for example. And then you can make money as a creator on these platforms like Facebook, it started paying people obviously. YouTube has their partner program or ad program, but you have a, you know, much more in depth funnel that doesn't rely on any of that. So talk to me about kind of the next step you would like someone to take after consuming your content if you have an example of that. Yeah. If you ask anybody that doesn't understand social media or the world that we are in, how, how YouTubers make money. Most of them assume it is with the ads that are natively served up on YouTube, right? And there's lots of reasons why people think that they're used to watching the ads. They know that there's some kind of creator split. And if you're a creator, it's very easy to just click a button, monetize and you get paid on that. But I don't think people understand just how little those payments are, even at a relatively big scale that you have to, to be at. So if you're a Mr. Beast of the world or some massive creator with the tens of millions of views that can amount to sizable amounts of money. But that is the one of the worst ways to monetize an audience. So if you are depending on programmatic advertising, which effectively that is, that is the bottom of the barrel way to monetize an audience, in my opinion. All right. So what are you doing instead? The best way to make money from an audience is to have that audience directly give you money by buying products that you have created. By far, the best way to monetize an audience, like I can make a YouTube video. And let's just say it gets 10,000 views, which may be a lot or a little depending on what scale of a creator you are at. From an advertising perspective, that will amount to maybe $100 in ad revenue. Maybe it's probably less than that. Very little when compared to what you would require to build a business on and be sustainable. But that same video with just like 10,000 views, if you are pitching a product that you personally own, create, and is digitally native, that same video can make you $1,000, $2,000 or even more in direct revenue from the audience. So when you're talking about the scale of monetization, selling your own audience products that you make is way better way to monetize them. Let's go through an example. If you have one handy of taking somebody from a YouTube or LinkedIn or Twitter and kind of walking them through the next step, okay? What's going to be the opt-in offer and what is behind, you know, what happens after that? So in this case, what I am sharing here is just a direct tweet that I had from my Twitter account. So it's just a short little text tweet and it says, "Investing isn't risky. Being without doing any research is. " This is a tweet that I have on basically autopilot. It's published through a platform that I use called HypeFury and this tweet surfaces every like 45 days or something along those lines. Now I have the platform that I use called HypeFury, which does the tweeting for me set up so that once a tweet gets, I think it's 50 likes, which isn't that many for an account of my size. So in this case, the lead magnet is about a free ebook that I made that creates some of my infographics that explain the content of investing. So every time a tweet gets a certain amount of likes, the software that I use will automatically publish this lead magnet below it and say, "Hey, if you like this, tweet, you know, grab a copy of my infographics here." Yeah, and this is pretty slick. Can I pause here because it's like, I'm not plugging this from the point of publishing. I'm waiting until it has some minimum bar of traction before I'm making an offer here. Yes. So the opt-in here was the access of PDF of 10 of the most popular investing infographics I've ever made. Yep. So if somebody decides, "Hey, I like that," and they click over to it, they get taken to this, which is my Landon Optin page for capturing their email address. Simple landing page built on kit. It looks like. Exactly. It's a simple landing page built on kit. I've done my best to optimize the heck out of it. Notice that on the page, you cannot do anything except for, "Give me your email address," or exit out. There's no other options on this page. In addition, it ties in directly to the link that they clicked before. So the link that they clicked had a visual showing off what the thing is. So it's a free e-book. It's in big letters. 10 of the most popular things I've ever made. If you go over to it, I actually have a visual of what the e-book looks like kind of on your phone to make it very easy to understand what you're getting. This has been downloaded by over 5,000 investors at this point, so trying to pack it with social proof. And this is optimized for conversion. The last I looked, I think this page was converting at about 72%. So 72 out of every 100 people that land up on this page do give me their email address. Okay. I fill in my email address and then you click, "Yes, I want the cheat sheet." So now I have their email address, which is the critical step. That is the thing that you as a creator truly want people to give you. And maybe we should, we should harp on this point for a second. I view the entire point of catering content on social media to get people to give me their email address. Social media is not reliable at all as a way to get in contact with your audience, but emails are. So I am very much focused on creating content on social media with the sole goal of getting people to give me their email address. Once they give me their email address, a big mistake that I say is they just have a pop-up that says, "Email sent!" Or welcome. Yeah, thanks. So you know, confirmed. Like that. Yeah, thanks for giving me your email. Huge mistake. Right now somebody has looked at a tweet that I had or some content that I had. They've clicked over to a lead magnet that I've created and they've chosen to opt in. So right now they are thinking, "I know who this person is or I know a little bit about this person. I just got a free thing from them." So you have their attention. And what I have chosen to do, and I think is a huge opportunity, especially if your creator with any size audience, is right now, as soon as they give you your email address, you should present them with what's called a tripwire offer. This is a very low-priced offer that allows them to become a customer, not just a subscriber, as quickly as possible. Hey, real quick. I took Brian's advice and turned it into a free visual funnel building worksheet. You can download and start filling in the blanks for your own business. Just hit the show notes for this episode. Grab that for free. We got more with Brian in just a moment, including the tripwire offer in this example, and how that's presented coming up right after this. When you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Hoping the right people see your job posting isn't the best growth strategy. When the pressure's on and you need the right hire, this is a job, response, or jobs. 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That's why more than 90,000 businesses already trust Quo for theirs. Quo works wherever you do right from an app on your phone or computer and it lets you keep your existing phone number. Plus AI is built right in not something you need to bolt on after the fact with automatic call logging, summaries, and next steps. So nothing gets lost. It can even answer the phone and qualified leads for you when nobody can take the call. Let's make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo dot com slash side hustle. That's Quo Q U O dot com slash side hustle. Quo. So in this case, they just downloaded a free ebook for me that has 10 of my most popular infographics that I've made related to investing. And what this offer is is I basically say, well, do you want a hundred of my most popular infographics? You're like that, there's more. Yeah, there is more, right? There is, instead of just 10, do you want 100? Do you really like these infographics and do you want all of them not necessarily just 10 as a sample? It's like at this point, they haven't even checked their email. Yeah, they haven't even had a chance to consume the original 10, but it's like, hey, while you're hot on this downloading infographics spree, I got more where that came from. Exactly. So this is a full-on sales page. And right at the top, it says, hey, your free gift is on its way to your inbox, and you just unlocked a one-time offer. So I normally sell my ebook for $49, but I am offering it to you today for just $7. So that's what I'm looking for. $7 from a purchaser. And there's a decent-sized page here that explains who we are, what we do, there's videos, it's packed with testimonials, there's frequently asked questions, and what I'm trying to get them to do is click over to this button here, which takes them to my checkout page. This is what my checkout page looks like. So it's the same consistency. So you get all 100 infographics on there, lots of testimonials. You are trying to do everything in your power at this point to build trust with the person and show them that they're making a legitimate purchase. It's like, look, it's just $7, but still, the hurdle from free to any amount of money is significant. It's like, well, who's this guy again? Yeah. Exactly. So you're trying to pack it with social proof, lots of people on here. So again, 3,000 people have purchased this from me. It's actually more at this point. And generally speaking, it gets great reviews. And it is just that $7 and you try and reduce all friction, just all friction from the offering. So you can use your credit card, you can use PayPal, you can use Google Pay, you can use Apple Pay. When I chose a checkout device, I wanted to make sure there was as many checkout options as possible for them. What's the shopping cart that you're using here? It's called spiffy. Spiffy is the shopping cart that I use. And I like them quite a bit. So right on this page, they can just check out and buy the 7 if they want to. But I offer them the ability to upsell. So I created a couple of mini courses. These are less than half an hour long. And they dive into some aspect of investing. So I built a mini course that's all about how to analyze a company's moat. I built another mini course that's how to do a reverse discounted cash flow calculator. And similarly, I priced these at a one-time discount. So these are normally $80 each. And I discount them to $27. What I'm trying to do is if somebody is going to go through with the checkout process, I want them to have many options to give me more than $7. If they are a purchaser. And it's very important that all of this makes sense in the eye of the buyer. Notice that all of this content is directly related to investing. It is from visual or tweet about investing to lead magnet about investing, to trip wire products about investing, to upsells about investing. And so it's very important that you think through all of those flows that they match with the buyer is naturally thinking about them. Do you think it helps that there is kind of an inherent ROI in your customer's mind, where if I'm in a hobby niche and you're going to teach me about how to grow better tomatoes, like I got to pull some different psychological levers than you would in a financial niche? I do think that helps the problem with the, the, quote unquote, problem with being in the investing niche is there's no way for me to like guarantee people money. I'm effectively selling them education related to investing. I can't make a guarantee about you're going to do well as an investor. You're going to buy anything. But a lot of people that are in the business to business can offer guarantees around around money, right? Like buy this thing and I'll help you land your first sponsorship or buy this thing and I'll help slash your your profits and you can make guarantees. So the best offers to me are you buy this thing and I can guarantee you that you will make money from it. That is a much easier sell. I can't necessarily do that, but to your point in theory, this does help them to become a better investor, which can lead to money. I just can't promise it. Yeah. What's the little guarantee badge at the top? That's just related to the product itself. So it has a 30 day money back guarantee. Okay. So if anybody buys this, they can email me and they can get all of their money back within 30 days. Yeah. Does some kind of risk-riverous soul, I think that's important, yeah? Absolutely. All you're trying to do is minimize risk in the buyer's eyes at this point. And I am absolutely dead serious about this. We have refunded people for for $7 purchases. It's zero questions asked. So we do everything we can to make it as frictionless and easy as possible to become a customer of mine right away. Okay. So you can add, you know, these upsells to it and the button does happen. But this is the simple funnel. It is content to lead magnet, lead magnet to email opt-in, email opt-in to low price ticket. And this is the funnel that makes me $300 per day. So you said 72% of the people who hit the original landing page give you their email. And then what do the percentages look like on this next page on the $7 page? For every 100 people that kind of go through this opt-in process, a bad funnel will convert about half a percent of them into paying customers. A top tier amazing funnel will convert about 7% of them into paying customers. My funnels, I've never been able to get that good, but I'm in the 3 to 4% range. So for every 100 people I get to give me their email address, roughly 3 to 4 of them become paying customers. And the average selling price on those customers is about $17. So for every 100 emails that I get, I roughly make $50 or $60. Okay, like getting paid to build your email list is one way to look at it. Exactly. Now I haven't gone and been so sophisticated as to connect this to ads so that you are, you know, you're paying for ads to get email addresses and then you're liquidating the cost. I am, that is something I do want to do. So the only thing that I'm driving traffic to on this particular funnel is organic traffic, but if you really get this dialed in and you really know your audience well, you can use this to dramatically offset the cost of running ads or in some cases even make a profit immediately from running ads. So it's a super, super simple in theory funnel to run, but I think it's one that every creator should should should implement as soon as possible. Yeah, that was the next question. It was like, well, now yeah, do you have the paid ads running from meta or for many of these platforms really where it's like, I'm sick and tired of creating all this organic content on a daily basis. Like maybe there's an easy button where I could pay a dollar a subscriber or a thing or whatever. If you're a subscriber is worth 50 cents on average, organically, maybe it's higher. It's quite a bit higher than that, but this is really interesting. So I'm a little bit surprised. Okay, lots of people opt in 70% plus for the free bee. And then there's a pretty steep drop off while I only get 3% to actually buy the thing, but it is kind of a psychological switch that has to flip of like, well, I look, I just said, I get your free thing and now you're trying to sell me something. Like, do you get that pushback of dude, just give me the thing that I asked for. Wait, why are you trying to sell me all this other stuff? Yep. So that is by far the biggest mental hurdle that creators have to get over when they think about implementing that. And that's I was resistant to that idea for quite some time. I was like, I don't want to bother my audience. They're going to be mad at me right away because I'm asking them for money as a general statement. All of those fears are completely fake and exist in the creators' head. They're not something that actually manifests. One one way of thinking about this, when you are at, let's just say the grocery store and you are checking out, are you mad at the grocery store that right there is gum for sale? No. It's just an offer, right? It is an offer to buy gum or candy or a tabloid magazine. That's the mindset that you have to get into when you're doing a funnel like this. You are just presenting them with an offer and you're trying to make that offer as compelling as possible. But in no way have had are you are you deceiving the audience? I promise them a free ebook, they receive in their email box a free ebook. The only thing I'm doing is I'm inserting a intermediate step in there where I'm asking them to become a paid customer. But if they don't want to, they just x out of that box, which is something that 97% of people choose to do. But yeah, doing this funnel, I'm identifying people that are willing to pay for digital products. Yeah, I like that language, that mindset shift around, look, I'm being super salesy to know I'm presenting an offer. Take it or leave it. Here it is. It's going to help you go for it if not. That's cool too. Exactly. And I do think that the things that I am selling are designed to help people. My category is investing. I know what it's like to be an individual investor and all the education that you need to do investing the right way. So the content that I create I am very proud of and I wish I had when I was a new investor. So that is the mindset that I have adopted for myself. I'm just making an offer. If they take the offer, I think that this content will help them. If they later decide that they want their money back, I will always give them 100% of of their money back, no harm, no foul. So I make it easy to become a customer and easy to get a refund. And if you have that mindset, I don't feel like I have any ethical reasons not to do what I'm doing. Let's talk through kind of creating the different tiers here. You have free content. You put out for everyone on all these different platforms. You have you, okay, well, what am I going to gait behind the email opt-in? In this case, the infographics, the paid product, the initial paid product was a bundle of a ton of different infographics. And then we had these paid courses on many courses behind that. It's kind of a lot of quote unquote extra content to create or maybe you already had something in the archive or you've been building for a year. Like speak to that piece of it. If I go, I'm trying to piece this together as a newer creator, like, what do I put, what do I plug into all these different steps? To me, the creator mindset is how do I create content? How do I get attention? That's great. You absolutely need that mindset. There's another mindset that you want to be if you want to be a professional creator. And that is the mindset of business owner, right? Creating content just to get likes and clicks and hearts and all that kind of stuff. That's a great way to start. But if you want to make this a sustainable career or you want to turn it into a meaningful side hustle, you also have to build the business brain behind becoming a full-time creator. So a lot of creators just focus on creating content, making videos, trying to get their eyeballs and stuff like that. But they give no thought for how do I turn that attention into something that I can build a business around? So that's something that every creator needs to think through. And if you're in this business for any period of time, you know that there are dozens, literally dozens of ways that you can take attention and monetize it. Yeah. What do you think about, you know, in terms of your many courses and these digital products, like there's a really high degree of continuity between each step and try to think maybe if we go back to the gardening example or helping somebody who learn how to play guitar or something like what would be the equivalent at the different stages there? What I recommend you do is you start with the end in mind. What is the thing that you are trying to sell to your audience at the very end of the process, right? So in my case, I have a digital course and tool that I call stock simplifier. And it is a course. It's some AI prompts and it is a checklist that I use to go through and analyze a business from start to finish. That to me is the thing that I want people to buy and I charge $200 for that thing. So then we have to think in reverse from that. I can't just ask for $200 right out of the gate to a new subscriber, someone that I haven't built necessarily a trust with. So I say, what is one part of that course or one part of that idea related to learning how to analyze a business that I can break up into a lower priced course. So as you saw before, a part of my course is how to analyze a company's moat. That's a competitive advantage for people that don't speak investor. So I broke that piece out into a mini course that's like a sampling of the course, the larger course that I created. And I break that out and I bundle that into a $27 offering. And I think, okay, I have my $27 offering. How can I turn that into a $7 offering? Well, I created infographics related to investing that I share online. And all I did was bundle a bunch of them up into a PDF. And that is the content that I share online. So it's content visuals related to investing becomes a book about investing, becomes a mini course about investing, becomes a full course about investing. So start with the end in mind, break that down into mini chunks and get all the way back to free. And there's your funnel. Yeah, that's helpful. Something that the side hustle show audience struggles with, the portion of the audience is, you know, coming up with side hustle ideas. And so maybe there is a certain sequence or funnel around finding your idea. You know, here's a strength finder type of maybe there's AI quiz prompt something related to this. And it goes on and on and on up the sequence there. Yep. There's a great tool called score app. I recommend you look into. Okay. It's a AI tool that you answer a series of questions and it gives you a custom score at the end that that is AI powered. And it can be, yeah, to your point, what side hustle is the right choice for you? Cool. You kind of alluded to it, but that was the next question was what happens after somebody opts in and the 97% of people say, no, thanks to this offer. So ultimately, I want to continue to serve them and build trust and build the relationship and build the authority so that they buy this $200 course and tool. And so what is that portion of the relationship look like? You know, great. If they pressed the follow button on whatever social platform they found you on, but now you also have the opportunity to be in their inbox. So my final post, let's say you're going through my funnel and you don't choose to become a customer or in fact, if you do choose to become a customer, I have the same follow up sequence. So you've come into my ecosystem because you're interested in investing and you've downloaded my infographic ebook. That's the free thing that you got. So as soon as I get your email, I send you through a free five day course, an email based course that teaches you the principles behind the infographics that you downloaded. Okay. So what's the difference between a stock and a bond? How do you read financial statements? What are the different types of notes and why are they important? So it's a five email sequence delivered once a day for five days and it's pure me giving educational value related to the lead magnet to the new customer. So I put them into this one week long welcome sequence. So that way they're getting use to opening my emails. They're getting used to me being the source of information. And as they're reading the information, I'm hoping to build credibility with them that I know what I talk about and look how useful this free thing was that this guy created. No, okay. Is there after the five days? What happens then? Brian's response plus the tools it takes to run this online business and the new thing he's building to help his audience this year coming up right after this. So last month, it was time to replace the air filter in the car, which is about the level of vehicle maintenance I'm qualified to do. So I Google up the part number. I find this random store that is selling it and then to my absolute delight, I see that they're running on Shopify. How could I tell that little purple shop pay button at checkout? It meant not having to create yet another new account. It meant not having to find my wallet. I am paid and checked out in just a couple clicks. You already know that our sponsor Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including that car parts website and dozens of side hustle show guests. And you probably already know about the built-in store templates and marketing tools that make it easy to get your store online and get found. But what you might not know is that Shopify can also help manage your inventory, ship products internationally and even handle customer returns. On top of that, you've got access to their award winning 24/7 customer support if you have any trouble. So let's see less carts go abandoned and more sales going with Shopify and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/side hustle. That's shopify.com/side hustle. One more time is shopify.com/side hustle. Running a business is hard. If you were easy, everybody would be doing it right. You've got a to-do list, am I along and you got a dozen different hats to wear. So here's a resource to help lighten your load. I'm excited to partner with gusto for this episode because they've been one of the most recommended services by side hustle show guests. Gustow is the easy, affordable online payroll, HR and benefits tool for modern small businesses. In fact, they help over 400,000 businesses like yours take the pain out of tasks like payroll tax filing, direct deposit, health insurance administration, 401k benefits, onboarding tools and lots more. Of course, I encourage you to do your own due diligence, check out their reviews online and I think you'll find the comment threads in the comments about how easy it is to use their great customer support and the great value. So here's the deal. To help you get started or to make the switch, side hustle show listeners can try gusto today at gusto.com/side hustle and you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/side hustle. One more time that's gusto. G-U-S-T-O.com/side hustle. Yeah, so then if they did not buy, I offer them the ability to buy it again now that they have some more education about it. The mini course then or the $7 thing? Yep, I will offer them the ability to buy. If they didn't buy the $7 ebook, I repitch it at the end. If they didn't buy the mini course with the ebook, I repitch that at the end. But if they go through that whole sequence and they don't buy anything, no problem. I then add them to my newsletter. So I have two newsletters that I write. One is a hand curated one that comes out every Wednesday and that is a newsletter called Long-term Mindset that is all about investing and we, me and my partners, handed that every single week. That's a new and update issue. Then I also have a evergreen newsletter that comes out on Saturday that is all about the fundamentals of stock investing. We've written one years worth of content for that. So 52 emails that come out every Saturday. So after they go to After that sequence, I'm in their inbox at least twice a week. week with pure value add education on top of that. And what I'm trying to do is stay top of mind with them and again, help them with educational content related to investing that is pure value add. - Okay, and are you making an offer for the $200 thing along the way? - Yep, so along the way, the strategy that I have there is I do monthly promotions to my audience. I discount the products that I have and I do temporary sales on them. But the bigger thing that I do is I invite my email audience to private webinars. And during these private webinars, we're typically researching a company's stock that's in the news from scratch over the course of an hour or we're doing some type of educational content with them related to just general concepts about investing. But the goal is to get them on live webinars with us because as we talked about before, then they see my face, hear me talk, watch me and my business partners, go through and analyze companies, show them how we think as investors, take their question and they get to know us. And once they know us and trust us, then they're far more willing to become customers of ours. - Yeah, another touch point, a really high engagement or high relationship building touch point. If somebody's gonna hang out with you live for an hour, that can be really powerful. - Or watch the replay if they're not their live. - Yeah, yeah, real quick. After the five day mini course, it's about the infographics, education, pure educational content. If you didn't buy the thing originally, I'm gonna pitch it again, the original upsell. Is it the same $7 price point? 'Cause it was like messaged as like, "Well, this is you just unlocked this limited time thing." And so now, as a thank you for going through the five day course, you unlocked it again. - Exactly, it's the same offer. I've experimented with different price points. I just feel that $7 is such a low figure that if you're willing to break out your credit card, it's like such a low friction number. Like I've experimented with 17, I've experimented with 27, I've experimented with 47. The thing that I'm trying to optimize for is the absolute number of customers. I'm not trying to optimize for the highest dollar amount right out of the gate. I'm trying to identify customers, not grab as much as I can from them right out of the gate. If your goal was to get more money from them right out of the gate, I would definitely focus on raising prices. You'll obviously trade off that with conversion rate, but that's not the thing I'm trying to optimize for. - Do you find that the three or four percent who bought initially and then whatever additional percent that buy after the five day thing, do they convert at a better rate, like long term for the primary course and tool? - Absolutely, yep, people that are willing to pay any amount of money are just a completely different class of customer than other people. They're way more likely to open your emails. They're way more likely to click your links, they're way more likely to join you on live streams, they're way more likely to take advantage of offers that you have down the road, which is why I'm trying to identify those people as early in the process as possible. You know if you have an email list or anybody on social media, you get to know somebody and it's like, you see their content once and maybe you never interact with them again. Or there's a really sharp falloff rate with the following somebody. So there's a cost to our attention to following anybody. So I wanna make it so that if somebody does find me online, that I am able to provide them with value in their inbox as quickly as possible. - Yeah, I find myself definitely more likely to even open the emails from people I'm a customer of than just somebody I randomly opted into. So I'm with you. And you mentioned hype fury as this kind of social media auto posting tool. It'll recycle tweets on a 45 day cycle. It'll automatically add the opt in if it reaches a certain level of engagement. That sounds like a really cool tool. We talked about kit for building the email sequences and the initial landing page. Spiffy was the checkout software. Anything else on the tools and text side that you swear by? - Yep, so I use a platform called Circle for delivering my courses. Circle allows you to do all kinds of things. You can load courses into them. You can do live webinars in them. We do kind of our higher end premium communities through them. So yeah, my tech stack is really kit for email collection and email delivery spiffy for check out and circle for delivery and retaining the audience that I built. - Got it. Once a day in the life look like at this stage of the business where you sounds like some of the social stuff is automated and now I've created five, six years of it. So it's just like, well, let's go back to what content did well and resurface that versus creating new longer form stuff for YouTube. Like where are the hours going today? - I'm always kind of creating new content, new infographics, new visuals, that kind of thing for those platforms and I outsource that work largely to virtual assistants. So I come up with the ideas. The virtual assistants actually create the content. And then I approve it. And then in some cases they post it in other cases. I post it. So that thankfully takes up not a lot of my time but most of my time is devoted to video where I'm creating shorts. I try and do four shorts per week. And I share those across Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all the places that you can share shorts. And I try and do one live stream per week. That's an hour long on YouTube plus one long form video and I put long form and air quotes 'cause it's about 10 to 15 minutes long with both they're kind of highly produced. - That's long form these days. - Yeah, the attention spans are short. - Yeah, those are more edited and highly produced and really optimized for either SEO or they're optimized for content consumption whereas my live streams are live streams, right? So it's not like the editing is perfect on them. - On the short form, the four shorts per week and even on the longer form YouTube content is it the same call to action where it's like, "Hey, if you like this, why don't you grab the 10 free infographics that I teach you about the basics of investing?" - Yep, so I even optimize that as well. My short forms, if you follow me, are me talking through infographics. - Okay. - Literally print out the infographics that I make and I just with a highlighter go through and explain them each of the infographics in less than 60 seconds. And again, some of those videos have done extremely well but again, think through the continuity of that. You watch a short of me explaining an infographic and then I say, "Do you wanna download these infographics? Do you wanna buy a whole bunch of these infographics? Do you wanna learn more from me?" So again, it's all about continuity from the free content that you make to the premium content that you wanna sell. That's very important. - Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, we had a woman Cheyenne Bullock on the show toward the end of last year and her product, the end, starting with the end in mind was a cleaning service subscription but it was like audio guy, like it was old school radio shows where she would interspers housekeeping tips or go clean, you go empty the dishwasher, go full-simulandry, you know, interspersed with like, dragnet episodes from the 50s. And so her social content was, you know, housekeeping tips and the email opt in, you know, on almost every post was, "Hey, get a free sample episode. You know, plug it into your ear, but see if you like it." And so it was really natural progression. They like you want more. You know, here, it's 25 bucks a month, or it's 50 bucks a quarter, that's something, you know, it was kind of a very straight progression from the social content to the final offer there. But Brian, this has been awesome. I am curious what surprised you the most over the last four or five, six years of making all this content and running this business? That this can be a business in the first place. I did not set out to become a professional content creator. I did not set out to start a business. All I was doing, I was working for the Motley Fool back in 2019, which is a financial newsletter publication on Ryan. I was just a writer for them. And I started to share posts online related to investing and that happened to do very well on Twitter. And it was only basically accidentally that I discovered that you can build a business. So I did not set out to build a business as a content creator. I was purely a content creator. I had so many mindset blocks. I was like, so allergic to the idea of charging money for things, so much so that the first time I made money online, the price that I set for the thing that I was quote unquote, "selling" was zero dollars. It was, you can download this for free, but I basically put a tip jar on there. So if you want to give me money, this is free, but if you want to give me a thank you tip, you can. And that very first part, I've ever remembered this day. It was like, you always remember the day you make your first dollar online. I made $2,000 in tips online. Yeah, from a tip jar, wow. But that was because I built up so much goodwill over the course of like 18 months that people were basically looking for a way to say thank you monetarily. But I had all of these hangups about charging for things online, which as you've seen, I've completely gone now. - People seem to fall into one of two camps. Your camp of like, look, I'm doing this for the love of the game. I'm just putting stuff out there. I don't even know, I don't feel bad charging for this stuff. Like it's all free in my head anyways. And other people are like, look, it's a thousand bucks, take it or leave it. I admire your confidence, but I'm more in your camp there. But what's next for you? What's got you excited these days? - So I've been all over AI, just I think a lot of people, our AI is dramatically set to transform the finance industry. So I've been building an AI powered product that dramatically speeds up the stock research process. So my category is helping individual investors to analyze businesses so they can make better investing decisions and we have a AI powered product coming out in the next month or two. that I think is going to really help with that process. So that's not pretty excited about. - Well, I'm excited too. Let me know when it's live. We'll definitely add it to the show notes along with longterm-mindset.co and all of your social profiles. Make sure to follow along with whatever Brian is up to on your social platform of choice. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. - Number one tip is going to be just get started. So many people, I've heard them call the Wanchiprinners, right, they consume content related to starting an entrepreneur's ship. They think about starting a side hustle, but they're always looking for an idea. They're always consuming more content related to it. Nothing will actually start the process better than trying to sell something to one person. Doesn't matter what it is. It is so important that you actually take the first step to start a business, to just get that first customer, to mean nothing else matters. So if you've been sitting on the sidelines, if you've been consuming content, if you've been thinking about a side hustle, just do it. Whatever your idea is right now, just do it. Take the next first step to try and get your first customer. If that fails, you now have data that you can try again with more information to make a better decision. - Yeah, this is your year. Go after it, get started today. What separates a lot of people stuck on the sidelines is this. You don't need to know steps two through 10. In fact, it probably changed by the time you get there, but you just gotta take that first thing. It honestly doesn't matter what the thing is because you're gonna figure out, do I like it? Do I not like it? What am I gonna learn from this? Like a friend that's a quote that stuck with me likened it to your first move in a game of chess. I just put my paw in out into the world. I'm gonna see what kind of reaction it gets. And then I'm gonna go from there. A couple takeaways from me before we wrap number one was this at the very top of the show. Go where your target audience already is. Start with one platform. Don't spread yourself too thin. Learn what works and go deep there first before diversifying and then obviously long term diversifying would be a good thing because the algorithms are constantly changing and you don't wanna see your thing evaporate overnight. The second thing that I wrote down was the content itself is not a business. This is something that took me as a podcaster long time to realize, you know, but 14, 15 months into hosting the show. It's like, you know, this switch flipped. It's like, oh, dummy, it's content marketing for a business. Okay, now we can figure this out. I loved the call to, especially if you're kind of having a hesitancy towards selling. It's like, look, I'm gonna make an offer. I'm not gonna sell you anything. I'm gonna put this offer out there. If you want it, great. I think it'll help you. Here's the price. Take it or leave it. And then the consistency across creating the content, consistently like showing up for your audience. But the continuity of what you're talking about where it's like starting with the end in mind, like Brian mentioned and the kind of reverse engineering will, okay, what is this offer gonna be? What is this offer gonna look like and so on? And actually to help you out with that, that's your free listener bonus for this week. It's a free visual funnel building worksheet that I put together based on Brian's advice. So you can plug in different pieces, what makes the most sense for your business? That is the next step. So you don't just listen and kind of not along as we're talking about this. So it's the next step to help you actually get started and do the thing. Do you can grab that for free at the show notes for this episode? Just follow the link in the description. It'll get you right over there. And if you're already a signed-hustle nation subscriber, just check your inbox. It'll be in the newsletter. Big thanks to Brian for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sign-hustle-nation.com/deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show really does. A difference. That is 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 the friends. Do me a favor, fire off that text message. I appreciate you. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.