665: The Path to $1k/mo with Mini Digital Products

If you're selling online or in person, you're familiar with this challenge. You need people to find your products, which usually means paying for ads or hoping they stop by. What not flips that? This is the live shopping platform that's exploding right now on what not you go live and sell directly to real people in real time. I've seen what not climb to the top of the app store. I've seen the seller earnings, everything from the small part time projects to multi-million dollar businesses, what not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform they see, which you've got. They can ask you questions and then they buy. What's fascinating is they keep coming back for more. What not buyers are spending more than an hour a day in the app. All that is great news for sellers. In fact, sellers on what not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. That's because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers from collectibles to cookies, from resale treasures to vintage fashion. People just like you are building real audiences and real businesses on what not. And for a limited time, what not will match your first $150 sold in the first month? Visit whatnot.com/sell to start selling. That's WHATNOT.com/sell. The path to $1,000 a month with digital products. You know money doesn't grow on trees, but you do know that you can't plan your own money seeds. And by the end of the episode today, you're going to have a path forward on how to do just that on one of the biggest marketplaces in the world. This is the SideHussell Show. It's the business podcast you can actually apply. Today's guest is a long time listener. He's a serial side hustler, real estate investor, digital product seller, online course, entrepreneur, from Gold City Ventures and the FI Show, Cody Berman. Welcome to the SideHussell Show. I am very excited to be here, Nick, and talking with you today and hopefully drop some knowledge bombs on the listeners. Yeah, you bet. It has been a long time coming. We've got three rounds with Cody today, including Donate a Business Idea. But we're going to start with his latest side hustling brand new Etsy store that started last summer. And a few months in was earning $1,000 a month. And now Cody, you're known online as the printable seller's guy. And my understanding is you get an email or you get a comment that says something to the effect of, well, sure, it must be nice. You're having started in 2018. But what about us? What about today when the marketplace is so much more crowded, all the good niches are already taken. And you're like, okay, challenge accepted. Let's do this. Let's start a brand new store and see what we can do with this. Yeah. So as an online content creator, I'm sure you're no stranger to this, Nick. There are haters out there. And so you get hateful comments on all your videos, all your podcasts. There's always one. And someone on, I think it was on a YouTube video or maybe it was a short, they said something to the effect of, well, of course you were successful. You did this in 2018. The Etsy market is so different now. You could never repeat your success. And I'm like, okay, buddy, like I can do this. I'm going to repeat my success. So I started a brand new shop. Didn't tell anybody about it. Didn't post it on social. Didn't market it to my email list. Didn't mention it on the website. Like completely in a silo blank from scratch. And was able to get that shop up to a thousand dollars per month in revenue in 116 days. Love it. Love it. So we're going to break out on how that works, starting with the, maybe the high level of what am I going to sell? How do I figure out what the demand is? The keyword research behind that or the product creation strategies behind that. But where do you start? What do you say? Like, okay, I'm looking at this blank slate. What kind of product could I sell? The best thing with your audience. And I am catering these answers specifically to some people who are already entrepreneurs or sad hustlers. If you're already a sad hustler, look at what you already have and what you're already using. So some easy examples. If you're someone who's in the personal finance niche and you already have this amazing debt paydown tracker or you already have this amazing net worth tracker or maybe you have a tracker for your side hustles, you can very easily just kind of white label it, templatize it and flip that. And now instead of just a product that you're using for yourself, like a random Google sheet, now you can actually go and sell this thing on marketplaces like Etsy. And I've seen this work so many times over. We're both podcasters, Nick. I'm sure you have a media kit or something that you can send to potential sponsors like, hey, here's my downloads. Here's my stats. So a couple of years ago for the financial independent show, my podcast, we put together like this really extensive media kit. And I'm like, well, I just spent all this time on Canva making this like awesome media kit. It's white label it and resell it as an editable media kit and it sold a bunch of times. So so many examples that side hustlers like us, people who are already doing something entrepreneurial, you might have resources in your own life that you're using that you can just easily repurpose, turn into a template and then sell to other people. I mean, there's been six and seven figure businesses built up this stuff. I was actually on a real estate show a couple weeks ago talking about digital products and printables and you look at a company like bigger pockets and they're selling all these different calculators and spreadsheets and things like that. I mean, that's probably adding six or seven figures to their bottom line, just basically taking one template for a thing that they're already doing and then white labeling it and then reselling it to hundreds of thousands of people in their case. Yeah, it's an interesting selling your sawdust type of example where it's like, I already created this thing and the ideas I've kicked around and like I have it tracker or a podcast production checklist planner or sponsorship tracker. There's all sorts of these different tools that you may already be using. Maybe an incremental revenue stream to the business that you already have, the side hustle that you already have or it could be a completely new thing that is kind of a standalone entity. So it sounds like the new shop was more of that standalone type of variety. Yeah, the new shop was more of a standalone. I just wanted to mention the use what you already have because that's often the easiest place to start. If you're someone who's listening, you're like, well, I don't already have a sawdust. I don't have any awesome spreadsheets or any cool tools that I'm using myself for this new shop. Here was my basic strategy. So I would just brainstorm a giant list of potential ideas. This would be from my own head. I would also use chat GPT to come up with ideas, although it's hit or miss. And then once I would have like a massive list of product ideas and these could be anything from I should probably define what printables are digital downloads. Just so people are just thinking abstractly about this. So printables and digital downloads is basically a digital file that you create in a program like Canva. You then upload that digital file into your Etsy shop. When someone buys it, the digital file would automatically be delivered to the buyer. So I already mentioned some of them like a media kit template, for example, but other ones like checklists, planners, calendars, games, invitations. There's thousands of different types of printables. So just wanted to set the stage. What printables are. So I create this massive list, like literally 250 different printable ideas. Again, these are just things that I think maybe could make good printables or things that chat GPT things could make good printables. And then once I have that monster list, that's when I start to plug them into like a keyword research tool. So for Etsy specifically, ones I use at eRank and ever be, if you aren't as familiar with Etsy or even if you want to sell outside, like I'd say you want to open up Shopify store or WooCommerce, you can use other keyword research tools. Maybe you already have HREFs or maybe you already use Uber Suggest or maybe you're using some of these other tools. Like you can use any keyword research tools, what I'm trying to say. I will plug those 250 different ideas into the keyword research tools to see one, if they're searched demand, are people actually searching for this thing that I want to create. And two, is there a ton of competition? Because the last thing I want to do is compete with everyone and their mother on some generic digital products that I'm probably not going to stand out with because again, everybody is selling it. So that was kind of my general strategy, my 10,000-foot view of my strategy for this new Etsy shop. And that's helpful. And even, remember talking with a Debbie Gartner who was selling all these different games, like holiday-related trivia games. And there's like, once I've got this template, well, just allow their rinse and repeat toward the next holiday. That's coming out. I was like, oh, it's able to create dozens of these different things. So I thought it was really creative. And then we talked to Becky Beach as well who really leaned into this chat GPT for product creation. And I remember prompting it like, what we were live on the call. What are some side hustle-related digital printables, digital products that actually came back with some decent suggestions, business planning, template, side hustle, budget template? Like, this is not bad. One thing I wanted to get you a take on was the idea of static printables versus a customizable spreadsheet file. My gut is, and correct me if I'm wrong, is like the customizable spreadsheet that may be able to command a little bit of a higher price, like higher perceived value for the end user. So you can only charge more with editable printables, and especially just the bigger the printable in general, the more you can charge. If you have a bundle of a bunch of resources, you're going to be able to charge more than just for one of those standalone resources. So that's your question. Yes, but with that being said, if you do have just like a simple one page that you're selling for $4, $399, $499, you can probably make a ton of different variations very, very quickly. Whereas a Google Sheet, a very complicated, say, personal finance tracker with a bunch of tabs is going to take you a whole lot longer to create different variations of that. So for me, I actually tend to lean on the side of simpler printables just because I can pump out so many different variations. And for me, and we can get into this new shop, it was a numbers game. I was just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would sell. In E-rank, it looks like they have a free version, which is somewhat limited to five keyword lookups per day, but pretty affordable plans if you want up to 200 keyword lookups a day. And then get an idea there of filling demand versus creating demand. Obviously, I want to go where there is some search volume versus like trying to create demand from scratch. If nobody knows you exist and you create some random product that nobody's looking for, it's a recipe for disappointment. Nobody's ever going to find you on Etsy. So in these tools are they. certain metrics, I don't know if they do, they spit out like a like two buddy will give you a a metric. Oh, this keyword variation on YouTube give you like a 95. Like, okay, it's got a good mix of search volume and competitiveness. Is there a metric where you're like, yes, this is worth going for? It's not a numerical score, but they do make it very easy and color coded. So on E-rank, I don't know if you're, sounds like you're on the website, for example, if you type in a keyword, you'll see the search volume and competition. The search volume and competition both range with like a color coded scale. So for search volume, green means a lot of people are searching for it. Yellow is like a couple like a medium amount of people are searching for it and red means not that many people are searching for it. Conversely, for a competition, if it's red, it means a ton of people are competing on that product, if it's yellow, not as many. If it's, if it's green, that means there's like no competition for that product. Like, you might be one of the few players selling that thing. So I typically liked, I mean, in an ideal world, I love to be green green and we call those unicorns at Gold City Ventures where you have like a ton of search volume and no competition. Those are very difficult to find and view and far between. I usually, and especially for this new shop, would create something that has usually yellow search demand and then green competition. So not many people are competing on it and like a medium amount of people are searching for it. So that's kind of the two metrics that I pay closest attention to in these keyword research tools. Okay, all else being equal, go with this less competition. You're going to be easier to find some eyeballs and some buyers that way. Yes. And I love the phrase, the riches are in the niches for this side hustle specifically because one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they'll go on and they'll just try to sell a very generic printable or digital product. I always use a thank you card, for example. If you type in thank you card to eRank, you'll see the competition is through the roof. Like it's, it's so bright red. Every single person on Etsy tries to sell like a thank you card. But if you niche down a couple layers and instead of just a generic thank you card, you have maybe a teach, like first grade teacher thank you card. You have a soccer coach thank you card. You have a ballerina instructor thank you card. Like these now that you're niching down a couple layers, you're competing with far fewer people. And so, and even from the buyer's perspective, like getting closer aligned to what the person is searching for, they're going to have a higher likelihood to buy. Like just imagine somebody who's buying a thank you card for their ballerina teacher and they type in ballerina thank you card. Yeah. They're going to choose your ballerina thank you card over just, you know, Joe's from those generic thank you card. So it's much more aligned with the buyer. And, again, you're competing with less people because the riches are in the niches. As canva gets better and better, do you find that like people would just go and make it themselves? It's always, and I ask the same question to the spreadsheet sellers. I was like, who doesn't know how to make a spreadsheet? Who's buying the stuff? But what's your take on that? It's convenience at the end of the day. I mean, a lot of it is a skill gap as well. The average person does not know how to use canva. If we took a poll of a random 100 people in the street, I don't know what percentage are actually going to be able to know how to create like a nice looking imitation in canva, but probably not a huge percentage of them. But the ones that do are often willing to trade five, 10, 20 bucks just for convenience and not having to spend their time on it. Okay. Like I can easily go out and mow my lawn. I pay a guy to do it because it's convenient. I have the time. I have the skills. It's just like I'd rather pay him to do it than do it myself. Okay. And so first grade teacher thank you card ballet teacher, school bus drive. Okay. So now my thinking is, well, once you have this template, okay, I'm going to swap out the clip art or swap out the graphic and the rest of it is kind of the same. So it makes this product creation process. Once you have that base template really, really fast where the maybe where the next challenge comes in is in the shotgun approach or this listing approach to put all the stuff up on Etsy because they're going to charge you through 20 cent fee. Not a ton, but it does add up if you're really trying to upload 100 products, a thousand products. Like what was the volume of products that you had to put up there to start seeing sales? I was putting up about 20 to 30 products per week. I actually got my first sale on day three. And so for those who don't know, I actually documented this whole process like day one to 116. I took a video almost every single day, kind of just sharing live updates, I was sharing screenshots of my shop. And on day three, I had my first sale, which was great. I think I probably only had five or six products up at that point, but I was adding like 20 to 30 a week during this whole process. Yeah. And that's cool because because there's not a lot of social proof on the channel. Yeah, we're it's like none. It shows zero sales zero reviews. Like I'm taking a chance on this guy. Yeah. That's the beauty of the side hustle though is you don't need an audience. You don't need email lists. You don't need really anything. Like if you understand keyword research and SEO, that is the most important skill. You can be a five out of 10 graphic designer. A lot of people think they have to be like this graphic design wizard in order to sell this stuff. You can be a five out of 10 graphic designer as long as you understand keyword research and SEO. And you go after those the riches and the niches and you go after those kind of longer tail less targeting keywords. People are going to buy your stuff. Like I'm still not a great graphic designer. Maybe maybe a six or seven, seven on a great day. But I'm not the best graphic designer. I'm just really good at keyword research and SEO. So if there's someone looking for a dinosaur themed thank you card for like boys, like a boy themed dinosaur themed thank you card. Like and I see that I might not be the best designer. But if I'm one of the only few people selling that thing, the people who are typing that into the search bar are going to come find me. And the cool thing about these keyword research tools. What's you go back to e-rank for example. If I type in thank you card, e-rank is going to spit out all of the things that people are typing in all of the different variations. So it's not just me guessing using your example from earlier. It's not me guessing ballet teacher, school with driver, gym coach. Like e-rank will actually tell me there's 116 people every month searching for gym coach. Thank you, card. There's like 187 people searching for ballet. There's 450 people searching for nurse thank you card. Like it'll actually give me the data. And I'm a very data driven decision maker. I don't like to just make things willy nilly, which was a mistake. I made what I first started the sound hustle back in 2018 more with Cody in just a moment, including the minimum search volume that he might target a product for the power of templates for both products and it's listings in the conversion rate you need to hit before you ever spend a dollar on it's ads. All that and more 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 really isn't the best growth strategy when the pressure's on and you need the right hire. This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs indeed sponsored jobs get you the quality candidates when you need them most like yesterday. How it works is sponsored jobs boosts your job post in the search results so you can reach the people with the exact skills, experience and qualifications you need to help your business thrive. Plus with indeed sponsored jobs, you only pay for results. There's no monthly subscriptions or long term contracts spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes with less stress less time and more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Inside Household Show listeners will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now in support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed.com/podcast terms and conditions apply need to hire. This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. In sports, there's this saying that speed is a weapon and the same is true in business. If you're missing calls or being slow to follow up with customers, you're leaving money on the table. Sometimes without even realizing it because your potential customer they've already moved on. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Kuo spelled QUO. This is the business communication system built so you never miss a call. Kuo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews and is built for how modern teams work. More than 90,000 businesses from side hustlers and solo operators to growing teams already rely on, quote, "Stay connected, stay professional and consistently reachable." And here's what's really cool. Calls, texts, voice mail, transcripts and contact deals all show up in one clean view in an app on your phone or your computer so that way you and your team are always on the same page. Plus there's built-in AI that can even answer calls and qualify leads for you when you can't pick up the phone. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Kuo. Try Kuo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Kuo.com/side hustle. That's KuoQUO.com/side hustle. Is there a minimum search volume that's too low to bother with? I usually don't touch anything under 50 and some people think that's crazy. Some other Etsy quote unquote gurus don't touch things that are under 200. But for me, I'm like, "This 50 people is searching for this a month and there's zero competition." And I can scoop up, say, even 20% of them, 10 people buy my $5 thing. Yeah. I like to think of these each as like a little mini passive income machine. That's $50 extra per month and that 50 adds up. If you can get an army of these $50 per month product, even if they don't have a lot of search volume, you get 20 of those going. That's a $1,000 per month and mostly passive income. Yeah. It goes back to the beginning. You know, planting these little digital money seeds, it cost you a little bit of time and 20 cents to create this thing. And now it's out there in the world and can earn passive income for you. I think that's really exciting. The deliverable file itself is a PDF. This is like a link to a canva template. I know that don't get to in the weeds, but mechanically, what does that look like? Yeah. So it'll be a PDF. And for, I'll call it a done-for-you printable, one that's not editable, it would just be a PDF file. So if you were buying, say, a checklist or a planner from me, you just might get the checklist or planner delivered to your Etsy inbox and then you download it and then you use it. For an editable file, you'll have a PDF and then you'll have a hyperlink on that PDF. Like it could be to Dropbox or Google Drive or to Canva itself, if it's an editable thing. Like there's, you know, editable files via Canva. There's another program called Corjol and Template. There's a bunch of these like editable design softwares. And then on the Deliveral PDF, you just have like a URL. So they click, you know, edit my template and then they can go and edit it. - Got it, that helps. But then this is all automated when somebody hits the buy button and Etsy sends them this thing that you have set up on the back end. - Everything is automated. I like to say it's a 95% passive income side hustle because about one in 20 people will message me asking for clarification with a purchase. They're like, oh, I can't access my template or this or that. So about again, one in 20. So 5% of the time, I'll have someone message me and ask for some specific advice, which I've built like a bunch of what they're called quick replies and Etsy. So I can just basically like click. Here's how to download your editable file. And then I don't have to go type it out every single time. - Yeah, frequently asked questions, a text calendar or keyboard short. Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Same exact thing. - Yeah. - I was gonna ask if you're leveraging AI on the product creation side at all. Yes, there's some element here on the ideation, but then to make the thing itself, is there any sort of like, you know, prompting chat GPT or even a canva to be like, I'm looking for a printable file that does this, this and this. - I have done some experimenting, but honestly, for the printables that I'm creating, again, most of these are simple type printables that I can then pump out a million different variations based on different niches and holidays and trends and things like that. I do not use AI to create printables. - Okay. - Another reason I do this is because you do have to disclose in your Etsy listing, like this is AI generated. There's no hard data on this, but my God just tells me like, they're probably slightly lowering the like SEO juice, the algorithm for these types of printables. So if someone's just putting up like a thousand printables in a day and all of them you have checked off, like this was made by AI, just something tells me that Etsy's probably waiting that a little bit less than the algorithm. Again, I don't have hard data on this. It's just, that's just my, my God feeling. - Yeah, there's something about the Etsy community too, where it started as a handmade marketplace, people doing business with people. So I wouldn't be surprised if you were correct on that, where I was like, we're going to diminish those in the listings just a little bit. - Just a little bit. - Okay. So we talked about product creation, we talked about the power of templates. Once the listing is live or maybe any listing best practices, obviously we want to put the primary keyword in the title of the listing, the description of the listing, anything else that you found to speed up that process or product images that you found to work well, pricing points that help, you have to price low. You shop, doesn't have any reviews, like what have you found here? - So I'll start with templates, because we did talk about product templates, like you just take the base template, let's use a thank you card, for example. And then you can go create a million different variations of thank you card. We mentioned that before. What I didn't mention though, is that you can actually have the entire Etsy listing as a quote unquote template. So if I'm going to create, let's say, I already have a Father's Day card in my Etsy shop. And I want to create a Mother's Day card. I can literally duplicate the listing and then I just go back into Canva, I just like change the listing images, I change the actual product itself, I change some of the tags, I slightly altered the description, but I can actually use a lot of the same features from that initial listing. So for me now, if I were to actually do that using this real example, like if I were to have a Father's Day card that I want to make into a Mother's Day card, it would probably take me like 15 to 20 minutes total. I might on the actual design change the colors from blue to pink and I'm obviously going to change the word Father to Mother. And some other changes like the tags, what you can use 13 tags per Etsy listing, I would change some of those to be specific to the holiday. But using the entirety of your Etsy listing as a template is something not many people do. Like even the listing images you were just asking about Nick. Yeah. I have eight listing images that I'm using for all my products and it's just drag and drop. Like I'm using Canva templates using like the frames feature. And so when I create the new product, I'm just like dragging and dropping back into those same templates. And I'm going to recreate the wheel every single time with my listing images. In terms of what works, clarity is key. So something I see new sellers do so often is it's either their title or their description or their listing images, especially that main listing image. I like to think of that as the gatekeeper to sales because like if someone scrolling through Etsy, let's say they type in Mother's Day card and your listing image doesn't attract them at the start. Even if you have the best product in the world with the best title and the best description and you have an ugly main listing image, you're not going to make the sale. It's the gatekeeper. It's kind of like a thumbnail on YouTube. Like you need a good thumbnail to get people attracted and clicking into your video. Now once they get in, there's a whole bunch of other different things that you can do to make them convert. But if they don't get in in the first place, then you're screwed. So I like to say that clarity is key. Like you want your title to be exactly exactly what the person is going to get. You want that main listing image to be very clear on what that person is going to get. Concrete example from our community, someone posted a couple weeks ago, they're like, hey, this is my first listing. And they were making holiday gift tags. I think it was gift tags for Valentine's Day. And for their main listing image, it was like an 8 by 5. It was an 8.5 by 11, just like a letter size sheet of paper with all of the gift tags on it. Like it was very unclear what the actual product that the end user would be getting. So we in the community were like, oh, actually, it would probably make a lot more sense if you were to mock this up and like show this gift tag on an actual Valentine's gift. And someone is, it's a lot more clear what the end user is buying. So clarity is key. And far too many people make the mistake of just like having this like abstract. Maybe they're trying to like keyword stuff in the title or the description or their main listing image just looks weird. There's too much information on it. And it's kind of difficult to tell what the person is getting. The less confusion that your buyers are going to have when they see your product show up in search, the more likely they're going to buy. And because people are still buying convenience, you're not worried about it. Or just, you know, if it's a simple printable and I'm just, I just literally gave it away. Like there's an image of the thing. Not really worried about that because it's a different buyer mindset than to do it yourself or. So to be clear, it's not just a PNG or a JPEG of the finished product. Like that's not the main listing image. It's usually mocked up. Maybe there's like a nice like wood background or something like that with shadows. You're still showing exactly what the printable is or what the digital product is. You're not, but you're not just giving it away. You're not just like having the PDF as the, the front runner, the showcase of what the product is because to your point, you don't want people just going in, screenshotting it and then printing it out and using it. That's, that's not what I'm recommending at all. Okay. What do you recommend? I mean, how do you show it without showing it? Okay. Let me try to think of a good example. So let's use, I'm using thank you cards a lot in Mother's Day and Father's Day cards. Let's use a Mother's Day card. So Mother's Day card, I might have the five by seven card, like add an angle kind of with like a shadow effect on it to make it pop on like a wooden background or maybe on a table with flowers in the corner. And so it's not just, it's not just the piece of paper. Like it's a whole mock up. Sure. So like if someone were to go in and try to like screenshot at it like and you know, try to crop it, it's not going to look great. It's not going to look great. They're just going to pay the four or five bucks for the finished product. So that's what I mean. Like you are showing the entire printable or the entire digital product, but it's not in a way where someone can just like screenshot it or download it and use it immediately. Do you use Etsy ads at all? Are you relying 100% on just the SEO of these listings or the search volume that's there? For this Etsy challenge, I tried not to use ads for the beginning part when I made it to a thousand dollars per month. But after that, I was like, okay, no holds barred. Let's see how much I can pump up this revenue with ads. And it was actually like the week before Christmas. And I started pumping out my ad spend like a hundred dollars a day just to see what I could do. Because Christmas is huge holidays or huge on Etsy. And so with this new shop, I spent just over nine hundred dollars in 10 days on ads. And that ended up bringing in an extra twenty two hundred dollars in revenue. So like 1300 profit if I can do live math on a podcast. Yeah. So yeah, I do use ads. I use ads my main shop. I was trying to use ads very sparingly in this new shop until I hit that goal because I didn't want to, I don't want people to be like, well, the only reason you got there was because of ads. I was like, no, I'm getting here because of keyword research and SEO. But then I turned the ads dial up to 10. It adds work. Yeah. I'll trade 900 for 2200 all day. Yes. Ads do work if done correctly. But I also didn't want to teach people the wrong lessons. If people think that they can just solve problems with ads, what I like to say is ads buy you eyeballs. So if you already have a product that's converting, like people are already buying your product here and there, sure, you can throw some ad money at it. See if it works. But if you just have a shop full of stuff that's not selling and you're paying for ads, all you're doing is buying more eyeballs that are probably not going to buy the thing because it doesn't have any proof of conversion. So like, I don't want people to think or get the idea that just spending money on ads is going to solve their problems and all of a sudden this side hustle that's bringing in zero for them is going to be $1,000 per month overnight. Like, you have to do the hard work of the keyword research and the SEO and figuring out what buyers are searching for. Then once you figure that out, then you can start experimenting with ads. This ad see give you data on you had 1,000 views on this product and 50 people bought. So you have a 5% conversion. Like, what's do you get any of those metrics or what's good or what's a good benchmark? Yeah. So give you those metrics. I like to be anywhere between 3% and 5% conversion rate on visitors. So I was actually when I was publicly documenting this, I was like, okay, I'm getting 100 visits a day. Hopefully that means 3 to 5 sales. And it actually did end up being around that. So basically to hit my goal of a $1,000 per month, I needed to get somewhere with between 175 and 200 visits a day. And so I'm like publicly tracking the first days, like, you know, 12 visits. The, sure, end of the second week's like 25 visits. But yeah, that's a good benchmark to get back to your question. Like three to five percent conversion rate is awesome. - But even then, to be able to put something out onto the internet and get views, even if it's just 10, 12, 20, you know, the first couple of days. - Yeah. - Here, that's starting a brand new blog and shouting it to the void of the internet. Like, Google's not gonna break your brand new site and go right out of the gate. I think it's an important contrast to draw. And some of the other Etsy sellers that we've talked to have been trying to collect emails from their shop, oh, get a free bonus template when you enter your email here and they're trying to like, wean themselves off or maybe, you know, build up their own traffic source to their own self-hosted storefront or don't shop the five store for digital products. You're doing any of that, or is it just like, I just wanna take what this marketplace is gonna give me? - With this new shop, no. I really wanted to just focus on Etsy generated traffic. So I didn't do the email list stuff. I didn't really lean into ads. I didn't do social media for it. For my, like, main business school state adventures, absolutely. Like, we are collecting email addresses using printables as lead magnets, which is something I was gonna talk about later today. But yeah, in my main business, I'm all for it. But the reason I started this new shop was like, I don't want people to think they need all that stuff 'cause you don't, you really don't. Like, you just need the keyword research in SEO. But if you do wanna scale this and build a bigger business out of it, definitely go for it. Like, there are tons of ways, and I listened to those other episodes you had with Debbie and Becky. There are great ways to get people on your email list, whether that's with a freebie, or like a bonus, or a bundle, or other ways. And then you can obviously, once they're on your list, you can then sell them similar products to what they've already bought. But it's not a necessity. You don't have to do that to be successful on Etsy. - Yeah, we'll work your way up. The value chain, will you buy this? So the next thing you might need, yeah. - Exactly. Lots of different marketing things you can play around with once you get going. There was a question I wanted to ask, to the extent that it matters, do you need to have your shop niche to down? Like, you know, the thank you card in Portia, I mean, that's all we sell, or could it be a little bit broader, or do you find that that matters? - I find that it doesn't matter much. Now, if you're someone who, it doesn't make any sense, like let's say you started a shop for South hustle nation, and it was all about South hustles. But then all of a sudden you started throwing like wedding printables in there. That might just make your audience be like, what the heck, what are you doing? So if you already have an established brand, and you wanna be like, you know, the thank you card guy or girl, or you wanna be like the personal finance guy or girl, then it might not make sense to branch out. But for the average person, it's totally fine to have a whole, hodgepodge different types of printables in there. And Etsy actually has what's called sections in your shop, so you can silo different stuff. You can be like, oh, here's my thank you card section. Here is my planar section. Here is my editable template section. And so you can silo them off like that. But just in terms of buyer behavior, most people aren't like searching for a shop and then browsing the shop and seeing like what's good in there. Most people are typing a product into the search bar, seeing what shows up on search results, and then clicking bind that product and then they might not ever see you again. So it doesn't really matter if you have a whole bunch of different stuff in there. - That's fair. That's probably consistent with my own Etsy buying behavior. It's, you know, search and discovery. - Yes. - And I don't know if I've ever reordered from the same shop again. They solved my problem and now I'm gone. - What do you buy on Etsy Nick? (laughs) - We have a cool map downstairs that says, you know, adventure awaits. It's like a school like watercolor map about other gifts on there over the years. Like maybe Perstone, jewelry stuff. - A few purchases, not a prolific Etsy shopper, but I spent some time on there. But I'm kind of inspired to throw up some of these templates, you don't have to clean up some of the templates that I've been using. But you know, there is a side hustle nation shop with a handful of t-shirt designs up there, but I failed to prioritize it very well. So I'm excited to maybe take a crack at it this year. - Why not? Extra revenue stream. And for someone like you, we can talk about this later or now, but anyone who's an entrepreneur or a side hustler having an Etsy shop is, it's kind of a different way of advertising, right? Instead of spending money on, say, Facebook ads or Google ads or YouTube ads, like this is a way you can get people into your ecosystem. Like let's say you had the side hustle shop and someone downloads your side hustle tracker or your big list of side hustle ideas, they might not have ever known you before. And you're getting these people, not only are you getting paid to acquire them as customers, like you're not paying like a Facebook head or a Google ad or a YouTube ad, but you're building good well with them. Like if you deliver something of value, if you have like this rock star side hustle income tracker, that's like five bucks. You got them into your ecosystem. You figured a way to get them on your email list. Now you've already built a good rapport with them. So now when you launch some kind of a side hustle course or a membership or some other bigger digital products, like they're already gonna be like, oh, this guy already delivered so much value for me with this little $5 printable that he sold me. And so yeah, it's like a great entry point into your business with these printables and Etsy is a great search engine to get people into your ecosystem who might have not gotten there before. - Yeah, the side hustle business planning template. We came across some people who were doing, who were like doing this for like kids, some of our businesses, like here's the, you know, we wanna teach our kids on to be a new shop. Here's the lemonade stand, you know, business plan template that they would buy and like make their kids fill out. It's like, I love that. - There's probably a ton of these. We'll plug these into e-read and see what we can get. Now at the time that this episode is airing Gold City Ventures is in the middle of their semi-annual e-printables course launch. So we can link up your reference to that in the show notes for this episode at sidehustle-nation.com/coady and we'll be right back with more with Cody in just a minute, including his business idea donation for side hustle show listeners right after this. - Right now we're all trying to do more with less. And I wanna let you in on a tool that lean, main, high performing teams are using right now to be more efficient and buy back some of their time. Our sponsor, Gusto, is the online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one, it's remote friendly and it's incredibly easy to use. So that means you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple directed deposits, health benefits, workers comp, 401k, you name it. 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Our partner Shopify helps you turn those what-ifs into why-nots. Shopify is the commerce platform that powers millions of businesses around the world. What if you never built a website before? Well, they've got hundreds of ready-to-use templates that help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. What if people haven't heard about your brand? That's where everybody starts. Shopify helps you find your customers with email and scroll-stopping social media campaigns too. And what if you get stuck? Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24/7 customer support. It's time to turn those what-ifs into Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/side hustle. Go to shopify.com/side hustle. That's shopify.com/side hustle. All right, we're back with Cody Berman from at the five show and Gold City Ventures for around two in this episode. Round two is your business idea donation. This is something you think listeners could run with. This is something that you might start yourself. If you had more hours in the day, what have you got for us here? - I even have a name for this business for your listeners, Nick. I'm hoping, I'm trying to scratch my own edge here. I'm hoping that someone creates this. I don't have the time. I don't have the resources. I don't have the connection. It's called The Hub. And it is an all in one business service for entrepreneurs. So this is legal, accounting, a development team, marketing, HR, everything that you could possibly want as an entrepreneur all packaged into one. And I'm sure you have felt these pains, Nick, where you're looking for, say, a new accountant or you're looking for a legal team. It's like pulling teeth. I'm asking all my mastermind groups. I'm posting in Facebook groups. Everyone's giving you different recommendations. You don't know who's good. It's so much. And as we've scaled up, Gold City Ventures in our company, like there's just all these different pieces and all these different places. If someone were to develop The Hub, like we'd pay, literally, I'm not even joking. We pay like $5,000 a month for that to get rid of all of the other individual people that are like tangentially attached to our business just to have like this one awesome rock star team in place. And obviously there'd be different tiers. Maybe a new entrepreneur is paying $100 a month. The more developed businesses are paying $10,000 plus dollars a month. I don't know, but I would love for someone to do this because it has been so difficult and so much work for us like to find those key players that, again, we don't have the expertise. Like we're not developers, we're not legal, we're not accounting, we're not HR. But they're important people. They're important people that you need to make your business succeed and to be compliant. So I would love if someone took this idea and ran with it. - Okay, talk me through this. So are we thinking like a directory of sorts of like here are the top legal professionals that deal with online business e-commerce. Here's the top accounting professionals that know this type of business. It was like, you know, Sam Parr from Sandless, right? My first million. - Yeah, yeah, so he was doing something like this for accountants, right? - Yes, so not that, not that. What I want is, and this is why it's so difficult, you need some kind of attractive reason for these people to want to work directly with you. Like if I'm paying the $100 a month, $5,000 a month, whatever it is, whatever your scale of business is, I would want them to just assign me. Like here's your lawyer, here's your accountant, here's your dev person, and they're just kind of at your back and call. Like if you need a funnel completed, or you need like a website thing done, you just hit up the dev guy that's already part of your package and he does it for you. Or if you need a legal contract, you have like a new joint venture that you're doing, you hit up the legal team of the hub subscription that you're already a part of, and they take care of it. So not a directory, 'cause I think directories still kind of, you have to go through the hard work, you have to interview a bunch of people, you have to pick one, get recommendations, that's not what I want. I've been there, done that. I want them to just like have really high quality, vetted people that I can trust, that I can just give them these tasks that I don't want to do or don't know how to do. Okay, so I'm now understanding it better as a, I have like a on-demand fractional agency, fractional support for, basically fractional everything. (laughing) - That's everything. - Okay, it's like it's not worth having somebody on staff full-time or even part-time, but like there are needs that come up. - Exactly. - For legal, for technical stuff, and to say, just I want to resource it by back pocket to go to do that and not have to, somebody else does all the vetting, and I don't have to go out and ask for answer recommendations on here. I just like have a membership to this thing and people are standing by, ready to help me out. - That's it. If someone did this well, I would pay, and I'm sure a lot of other people would pay, I talked to a lot of other entrepreneurs who have the same pain points. People would pay a lot of money for this, if it was done well. - Yeah, when I had the virtual assistant site, there were, especially in the overseas companies in the Philippines, they would kind of promise this, like, oh, you need web development done, you need a funnel building done, you need copyrighted, I'd be like, hey, look, we've got it all in-house, we've got the experts to do this design, whatever you need. - The question mark is always the quality component. So that's kind of where the vetting comes in, and like, well, how, you know, and the level of trust you have to build to get somebody to sign up. - How does this legal contract again? - Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. - Okay. - All right, that's the hub, the all-in-one business hub for entrepreneurs. Now you've got that business idea, that's your next site also where you can run with that. Let's go to round three, the triple threat, the first component of this is a marketing tactic. It's working right now. It's not have to be Etsy-related. This could be related to any of your other businesses. - We kind of touched on it before, but while that's working, and it's worked for years, is printables or digital downloads as lead magnets or low-ticket offers? And we discussed a little bit using the side hustle Etsy shop as an example, but it's just such a great way to get people into your ecosystem. It's almost like a trip wire product. I don't really like that term too much, 'cause it sounds like you're tricking people into buying something, but it's just a great way to get people exposure to what you've got, like what you've got to offer. And if you can while people out the gate with something either free, like a lead magnet or cheap, like a low-ticket offer, maybe it's literally seven bucks or 17 bucks, they're gonna be so much more prone to purchase whatever other things you have to sell, whether it's a course or membership or services or whatever, one-on-one coaching, they're gonna be so much more prone to sign up if they already know that you're someone who delivers value. And you're able to sell these on Etsy, is that the primary strategy? Or is it just through your website, like where you find in eyeballs and buyers? For Gold City Vensers, it's a whole bunch of things. So not so much Etsy anymore, but especially, I shouldn't say that. We do have a lot of people who come from Etsy, but most people who join our email list are not from Etsy. But so we have like, you know, affiliate supermoder stuff, we use SEO, like we have a huge blog and YouTube channel and we're doing paid ads. So like, there's a whole bunch of different ways that we're getting people to download these lead magnets or buy these low-ticket products. But again, it's building that trust. - Now, we did a really fun episode with Pete Boyle, who has his $1 product challenge. In his argument, it's like, yeah, you can build your email list with a bunch of free lead magnets. But the question is, are you building a list of subscribers? You're building a list of buyers. And he's like, that $1 barrier was enough to really accelerate sales of everything else that he had to offer. It's like, obviously, I'm not gonna make a living off of this $1 product, but it led to, you know, in his case, led to hire ticket consulting business and how led to hire ticket digital product sales too. And by just that little hurdle, that little bit of commitment and we talked about people who pay attention. And if you can wow people, you deliver, you know, 10X or 100X the value for that $1 thing, then all of a sudden that level of trust really skyrockets. - Absolutely. - All right, that is our marketing tactic. Digital downloads as lead magnets, low ticket offers, figuring out what you might be able to create. And you probably know what Pete recommended was working backwards from your core offer, or you know, peeling out a piece of that that solves some initial pain point. And it's like, okay, what's the natural progression of somebody going through this? If they ultimately are going to need your full service, what's a logical first step there? The next question here of the triple threat is a new or new to you tool that you're living right now. We mentioned E-rank, we mentioned Everbee, we mentioned Canva, we've had a few different tools here. But what else have you got for us? - Something I started using way too late, so I've been using chat GPT for a while, but I hadn't really experimented with custom GPTs. I think I actually heard you talk about this on a podcast, Kirk, me if I'm wrong, Nick. But now I have custom GPTs for a couple of different use cases where I have a custom GPT that can write something in my voice if I need a blog post or an email that just kind of will take in information that I give it, kind of spit it out, and honestly, like reason with itself a little bit, and then spit out a final product. And it honestly doesn't need too much tweaking sometimes. I have another custom GPT for generating and researching Etsy product ideas. I have another custom GPT for basically researching a guest for my podcast, the Financial and Penetro, and kind of honor things, some interesting questions or things that they've mentioned before. And for those wondering, a custom GPT is, if you're on chat GPT, you know, you just type in, like, hey, I'm interviewing Nick Loper today. Tell me some interesting things about him. A custom GPT is basically just a string of queries that you have saved. So it's like, hey, search up Nick Loper. What are his top episodes? What are some interesting things that he doesn't talk about too often? And you can add as many queries as you want, as many kind of actions onto this string of instructions, that's basically a custom GPT. And I was way too late to this game, and they're awesome. - Okay, this is something you like would save in the sidebar of chat GPT rather than having to punch in those kind of priming prompts each time. - Yes, you do need the paid version, the $20 per month pro version of chat GPT, and then like in your profile at the top right, it'll unlock and you'll see like, there's, I mean, there's a bunch of options that unlock with that tier, but custom GPT, so with one of them, I don't think there's any, okay, maximum number. I think you can create an unlimited number of custom GPT's for all different use cases. - Interesting. I have a plate around with that. I've just gone through the, you know, one specific use case. Maybe I heard a guest mention at then. - Yeah. One that I would probably need to create is like, take this article and turn it into a compelling YouTube script. That's like kind of the bottleneck in creating more video content. I've got this huge body of library content on the site, but it's like, how do we translate some of that over to video and do it in a way that is native and natural to YouTube and not just reading, reading a blog post. I don't think that would necessarily play very well. So, you know, a series of prompts like, you are Nick Loper from Side Oscillation and this is your task. Do you understand? - Yes. - And like, okay, here's, here's the copy. Can you turn this in? And you know, don't include blah, blah, blah. You know, it's okay to use some of the same phrasing, but it doesn't have to be word for word. Do you understand? Yes, okay. And go over there, but like to have that saved, I can see how that would be a time saver. - Oh yeah, he's time saver. - All right. And last, but not least, your favorite book from the last 12 months. - One that I didn't think was gonna have such a profound impact on me, 'cause it was really dense when I started reading it, I was like, oh my gosh, this is so boring. It's called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Coniman. And it's all about human psychology and why people tend to make certain decisions. It's like really interesting if you're a marketer and just like kind of like the gambling, lottery mentality, like loss of version. There's a whole bunch of really, really good stuff in there and stuff that we as marketers can use through our advantage. - Interesting. I have heard of this book for a long time. It's been out for a while, but I've never cracked it open. So Thinking Fast and Slow. - It is dense. It is dense. It's not like a fun read, but there's just like a lot of info in there. There's a lot of really good stuff. - Yeah, you would layer this on with an influence by Robert Childini type of thing. - Yes. - How do we tap it to these psychological benefits or psychological triggers to improve our business? - Exactly. - Okay. - Very cool. We'll link that up in the show notes as well. SideHustleNation.com/Code. You've got a million different side hustles. Like what's next for you? What are you focused on? What kind of projects you got going on? More real estate builds. What's new? - Real estate been slowing down on. Honestly, our core focus has been Gold City Ventures. And building that out, we have some exciting stuff that I can't announce yet, but just know that we have some exciting projects in the works. Constantly improving, building our community, making the content better and easier to follow. So yeah, most of the new stuff for me, Nick, is Gold City Ventures. What's honestly, if you were to ask me this question years ago when we first became friends, I probably would have named 10 news hot hustles that I was going to try. I was doing way too much. And honestly, I think I spread myself too thin. So now I've kind of re-narrowed my focus into a couple core things that I'm really good at and just focusing all my time energy into those. So yeah, doing more on Gold City Ventures, continuing the podcast, the Financial and Appendix Show, and that's the end. main focus is for me right now. Very good. Well, we'll link up all of those resources, including the ePrintables course at sidehustlenation.com/cody. Thank you for sharing your insight. This is, again, very inspiring. Maybe hopefully you get off the sidelines and into the Etsy game up a little bit myself. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit upsidehustlenation.com/deals 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 in value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So, help spread the word. Fire off that text message to somebody excited about planting those little digital money seeds, building extra income streams. Until next time. Let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the sidehustle show. Hustle on.