The $10k/ Month Side Hustle No One Talks About

want to know the absolutely safest business you can start with zero dollars that can make you thousands and multi-multi-millions if you do it right I made this video about why newsletters are the smartest side hustle and I said if enough people commented I'd show you step by step how to grow your newsletter to make your own Millions let's just say enough people commented we also asked what do I do to get started well here you go this is the exact system we use to build a 300 000 person email list and three million social followers in two years with no upfront cash now we're here I feel like you're putting out some of the best entrepreneurial content on the internet right now the world we've learned is the one that stuck out so you call the contrarian thinking newsletter driving as a business leader Cody Sanchez but this isn't where we started let's take it back to day one this is day one February 15 2020. nobody's on the newsletter nobody cares but in the next 24 hours kicks off what will become a eight figure and I think one day nine figure business how did you do it so I spent the evening looking through Evernote on things that get me fired up to talk about maybe I want to talk about making money maybe I want to talk about philosophy building businesses I start talking to my husband and my friend Joe about it first two subscribers check check then I come up with the name contrarian thinking and I do this by looking through my journals but I also do this from perusing this site basically making sure I can get the domain the way that I pick a topic like this for newsletters is something called the three C's which basically mean curiosity crowd cash you need these three things in order to have a newsletter that's not only going to grow a lot but going to make you a lot of money one is curiosity makes you so curious more important than anything else is do you want to keep speaking on this for at least a year every day all day every day and then eventually once a week two is crowd is there a big enough group of people that's really interested in the subject matter that you could get a raving audience and have this actually grow I like checking these Facebook groups I basically go and search is there a group of people that's interested in vintage furniture oh turns out there is there's one for hundreds of thousands what about a newsletter on anti-work here's Reddit you could basically start a newsletter just from curating these Psychopaths you can play video games all day and you don't have to do anything the third one sure one of two things happened one people either already spending in this area or two I can make them money I'm talking make somebody money that I can justify a cost for them we know that people are spending money on vintage furniture because you can basically see here Industries up into the right growing thriving people like this movement cool we've got the cash checked now you could also make a newsletter that's about how to sell or how to find or how to make money on vintage furniture that's check check you pick your curiosity your crowd add the cash components and you are well on your way now my first draft email is right here this is where you're going to draft a welcome email write a really bad first round basically like your little front doorstep to your newsletter thank you come on in stay for a while this one was called thinking critically and why it matters not my favorite newsletter that I've ever written you can see sort of the progress from then to today but that took 24 hours everything I just mentioned and I was already up and running with a welcome sequence my first two subscribers and my idea for the newsletter next day is done done February 16th they're basically four steps first is I need to actually have a platform to send my newsletter right at the time I used MailChimp zero dollars to start if I was doing it today I'd use beehive uh they're I think the best platform out there basically cost you nothing you have your newsletter rocking and rolling there's a bunch of templates and ways to start this really easily I think it takes four steps second I use Squarespace to do a logo I didn't want to spend a bunch of money on an expensive logo I didn't even know if this was going to work you use this site at Squarespace and it's free it's a little janky but it's 3.99 I'm into that if it's free it's for me new motto then I pulled all the emails from my contact list I put them into a VCC email as an opt-in and I basically said hey you guys are all friends of mine I've interacted with you over the years I've got a new business and that business is this newsletter I'd love to have you come along and subscribe you can see the exact terminology I use right there that got me my first 102 subscribers and that leaves us to February 17th oh hi this is day four on day four I thought I'd say hi to some buds of mine these buds in particular is called your COI strategy centers of influence strategy I reached out to let's call it 10 or 15 of my most connected friends who I thought could send my newsletter to a bunch of people thus get them to subscribe it worked pretty well I basically went from 104 or something like that to 167 people who care I put this message out to them hey friends if you'd like to share this with other people it'd mean the world to make something to this effect second was I added a pop-up site on my Squarespace website which like I'm not an internet nerd so I didn't know this is like 101 no brainer but I added a really simple pop-up and you'll notice what matters with the pop-up is it's how you make people feel you don't say sign up for my newsletter please or subscribe here you say something like you want the inside secret click here you want to try to make it a little bit sexy this is your hook three I did a sign up sequence really easy also within your email service provide basically the more creative you can get with your sign up sequence the more likely they are to forward it that's very interesting then I got rid of all the stock images I hate stock images they don't make you feel anything I want my people to feel something so I supplemented them with unsplash free images it's my favorite site you can use it too I'm just helping you invest in your future then I went to LinkedIn to announce the news and I did a post like this on LinkedIn and like what what not a lot of people heard I think five people signed up wow and then finally I did Reddit do you guys like my drawing now Reddit is brutal so I went on there to post about this new newsletter that I had basically didn't work at all it was like a grandma dancing on Tick Tock badly but it's okay still got to day number five on day five I basically did three things one we hit 200 newsletter subscribers then we hit 253 newsletter subscribers all as a compounding effect of those first couple of days so at this point I realized I don't love MailChimp this new technology came out called sub Stacks or switch to sub stack and they have two pieces that I read that really change how I grow in general what are they this first one is how to get your first hundred Subs the second one tells you how to get to 5 000 subscribers and what I quickly realized is I wasn't posting enough and I wasn't posting the right way on the right platform so I go from posting once a week to posting every single day on LinkedIn on Facebook and on Twitter I love to disturb people and on Twitter is really important because that's the only place where other people repost your stuff to a high degree and you can hit velocity which takes me from day five to day six day six baby now we're moving to Instagram we do these little swipe UPS nothing crazy once a week I also put the link in my bio and Twitter and Instagram I know rocket science but I didn't realize that was important back then and I created this dock that has all of the ideas for how I could grow this guy doesn't help very much I come up with a Content calendar and I post every week Wednesday at 9 15 a.m so people will come to expect it I'm waiting to be impressed first couple issues go out 82 open rate 46 click through I'm like so at the end of day six we're sending out 422 subscribers oh I don't want to forget to tell you guys there's something special about this channel I do deals all day I bring deals to you all day so now you got a deal we got to seal the deal between the two of us what does that mean that because I teach you how to hit that six figure deal you hit that subscribe button and on day seven a couple of my LinkedIn posts get zero engagement I feel a little bit embarrassed I don't know if you guys have ever posted into the win and nobody cares but it happens [Music] lots of everything that I did on the seventh day basically just didn't do well maybe it's like God says like on the seventh day you rest or something because it wasn't working out for me and all that takes me to week two and week two is where it starts to get really interesting this week I actually hit 1790 subscribers in my second week first I decided I'm working way too hard I need to work smarter not harder where can I get the most subscribers for the least amount of work what I realized is I needed to hit up some podcasts so I went and looked through my list of friends on both Instagram and Linkedin and reached out to about 20 of them asking if I could be on their podcasts 10 of them said yes these were little tiny baby podcasts at the time I got a couple of hundred subscribers from let's call those all 10 of those podcasts together then the second thing that worked really well is newsletter swaps so I went out to the sub stack and I looked for other newsletters that were right about my same size and I said hit bud how about I plug your newsletter you plug my newsletter and we both grow and then finally I was like huh this all is just this big word called collabs so why don't I do a social post collab and I did my very first one on Instagram and we did a social post like this which takes us to week number three I'm at all about it so we get to week three this is big week 3 800 subscribers that's two times the growth of the previous week what's basically happening is everything compounds the podcasts start getting more and more subscribers that I've done the show notes where I tagged my newsletter in those podcasts start getting backlinks so more people follow me and I have what's called domain Authority then I start doing a few more of those collaborations and I've created what's called a flywheel I do these specific things and they all start motoring easier and easier together one of the unlocks that happened at this period is I started reaching out to big companies that needed more ugc this one for instance is called Flippa and I talk about buying boring businesses so I reached out to them and said hey would you like me to do like a guest blog post I just want to put my newsletter in there for people to sign up if they want to totally free I'm not asking for anything but I'll create great content for you probably five of these guys said no three of them said yes that led to hundreds of subscribers then what I realized is lots of people were coming to my site but it wasn't that well optimized so I added what's called a lead magnet I basically used this site designer with two r's because we're fancy they basically I think cost me like 50 bucks and I created an e-book based on one of my best articles I put that as the lead magnet and that basically 3x to the conversions aka the people that are clicking to actually subscribe and then week four starts to hit now week four okay the Studio's not that big so we're actually just going to be back here for week four week four was a big week how big let me tell you 11 000 and three subscribers totally nailed it now what took me over the edge this month is what I'll call optimizing on the edges oh it is that so when I went on a podcast I would do one thing I would make sure that I had a place where I could mention my lead magnet I would have a specific URL that I went to easy to understand like contrarianthinking dot Co slash recession and then I'd tell people when I was on the podcast oh if you want to get my guide to how to invest in a recession go to contouringthinking.com recession by the way spoiler you could go there for that lead magnet it's a pretty good one if you want to sign up for the newsletter you like it I also changed my focus once something started to go viral I let the boulder roll downhill and what does that mean I started talking about boring businesses people started really liking it so I said I'm gonna lean into this and I reached out to Forbes an entrepreneur I got blog posts in those specific places all about buying boring businesses this will happen to you when you start a newsletter you're gonna have something hit big and that's your moment to really lean in and become the expert in the hairless hypoallergenic cat Community look what you did to Mr Bigglesworth the last thing that really made the difference to get us over that 11 000 hump was I accelerated the things that worked and I killed the things that didn't more collaborations more newsletter swaps less Reddit because those guys more LinkedIn and Facebook stuff more Twitter less Instagram because I hadn't figured out how to use Instagram to grow at that point this sounds like Common Sense except it's not it's not it's not lean into what works kill what doesn't ruthlessly but let's take this back to you for a second 30 days 10 000 subscribers well eleven thousand and three subscribers which means at that point you can start turning on monetization AKA making a little bit of money if you guys want I'll do a whole video breakdown on how to make a million dollars with a newsletter but now you know how to grow and let me promise you one thing we are in a war for eyeballs once you can get someone's attention and become The Shepherd of those eyeballs there are so many ways to make money that it will blow your socks off and if you actually want to see a full break down on how to grow an entire newsletter to that million dollar Mark we actually have a course if you guys want it or just stick around for this next YouTube video hit that subscribe button

Channel: Codie Sanchez

Views: 323,705

Keywords: codie sanchez, cody sanchez, codie sanches, cody sanches

Id: WvKIC5d6iLI

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023