The Most Overlooked AI Side Hustle Of 2026 - Ep. #328

We've made millions of dollars. I don't see anybody else doing this. 300 customers is a million-dollar business, and every bit of it can be outsourced. It's a great side hustle. This year, for the first time in my life, everything that I have been doing that took my skill set can be done by AI, and it's scalable. It's never been scalable before. We created a simple website with one call to action, and we went from zero To $80 grand this summer.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

From that new website?

Well, that's a one-page website.

So, I just ran across the godfather of the internet marketing world. He's a baby boomer. He flew here to my house in Texas from his house in Nashville to talk to me all about making money selling a very specific thing to local business owners. Or if you're already a local business owner, how you can explode your business through a little clever tactic that I've never heard of anyone It's simple, it's based on human psychology, and it just works. A few years ago, you needed to pay thousands of dollars and have a bunch of studio equipment like this to make it work. But now you can use AI tools to make it happen. Please enjoy. So tell me what your business is.

The business that— well, I have multiple businesses, but the main business that I have been doing for about 15 years is helping small local service businesses. And what I mean by service business is a tire store, a pest control, HVAC, roofing. Businesses that they have— people have a problem. My roof is leaking, my toilet is leaking, I got bugs in the house. That's a problem. And they need to find somebody they know, like, and trust, or at least trust, that's gonna solve their problem. And then they're willing to do business with it. So it boils down to the basics of most local small service businesses don't think in the lines of traffic and conversion. Traffic and conversion is not that geeky of a term, but at the end of the day, I, Actually, make, make it as simple as possible. Traffic is people who find you on whatever device they're looking, which is 90% cell phones for local businesses. And when they find you, are they within 3 seconds of finding you convinced that you're the person to do business with? So that's conversion. The conversion that a local business needs is that this guy has a leaky toilet, I'm the plumber to fix it, let me call and book an appointment to solve my problem. Then that turns into a conversion of business.

So give me an example of a customer Like a, a specific—

That I solve or the problems they solve?

Either one.

Well, the problem that I see that is so massive is that, and of course web designers will probably not like hearing this, but most people build award-winning websites and what they don't build is high-converting websites. You can, when, when the bounce rate for most local business websites is 90%, they never go deep past the first page. Some people don't even go past the Google Business Profile.

And just so our viewers are aware, a bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website There's a percentage of people that hit a website, never click through to that website, and just end up leaving, right?

Well, according to the new Google stats, anybody who doesn't stay 10 seconds is a bounce.

Even if they click to another page?

If they click to another page, that's considered not a bounce.

Okay.

So it's kind of like, let's leave this place, let's bounce out of here. That's what it means. So the point being is, if you got somebody to your marketing information, if you don't convince them to stay longer than 10 seconds or take another action, like look at another page or tap to call or any of those other conversion strategies, then you're considered a bounce rate. And how you got them there— there's only 3 ways to get people to your website: paid traffic, organic free traffic, or borrowed traffic— an affiliate or somebody else sends you to your website. And so small businesses in the masses don't understand traffic and conversion. So it's like you could get a lot of people to your local business website But if somebody's confused and they don't understand who you are and why you're the best at what you do and something that convinces them that the data's out there, they're going to bounce and you're not gonna— it's not gonna result in a transaction. But when, and what a lot of web designers will do is they'll build what's called hero image websites that have beautiful photography.

Wasted real estate.

Wasted real estate, hard to read text. And the, the mark— what marketing information or reviews or social proof that this is the guy to solve your problem is usually under the fold and people never scroll down. So therefore, beautiful websites that win awards for the web designer, I've heard it over and over, I spent $5,000 on my plumbing website and I can't track one piece of business.

It's usually a negative indicator of how good their website is at converting.

Yes, yes, absolutely. So I help small business owners. I'll say, you, do you want to see your business grow?

Yeah.

And if they say, I have all the business I need, then they're not a customer.

Yeah.

But any business owner that I've ever met, I've never met a millionaire that says, I want to make less money.

Yeah.

You know, so, so my, my business is to show them and analyze the things they could do to improve their conversion or the results that they get from their online presence. And, and increa— and, and also the reason I call my business Local Internet Presence is because if you're a small business— I was just driving down the road here and there's the painting place.

Yeah, right down the road.

Right down the road. They're a prospect. Yeah, they don't know what's— they don't know what they don't know. So the business opportunity is that when you can show definitively that this is a problem and if we solve this problem you'll make more money, that's the business I've created. Increasing your local internet presence by increasing Your traffic or the people who find you and increasing your conversion, the people who spend money with you. And everything else is fluff in my opinion.

So the last customer of yours that you spoke with, for whatever reason, tell me like what type of business that is and what you do for them.

All right, well, I've got in my business, which anybody could do, I have 5 areas that are unique that I don't see other people doing. There's some things that have a little bit digital agencies. The competitors to what I do are called digital marketing agencies. And number one, most people ignore their Google Business Profile. That's where you see the reviews. That's Google Maps, used to be called Google Maps. It's now the GMB, Google Business Profile. And never paying attention to that, never responding, never adding photographs and videos, not replying to the reviews is— Google sees that you're ignoring it and the world sees you're ignoring it. You know, I've seen customers that have 30 reviews and 7 of them are 1-star. They can't calculate the amount of business they're losing by not paying attention to it. I've had customers say, well, what do I gotta do to get rid of the bad reviews? There's nothing you can do.

Just drown 'em out with good reviews.

Drown 'em out. Well, that's obvious to you, but the owners of these small local businesses, they don't think like that.

Yeah.

You know, and I'm the baby boomer who's been doing it for 25 years and seeing it. You know, I remember when the only social media site was Friendster.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, I, I saw MySpace go up and down, you know, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, you know, didn't exist when I started.

Yeah.

But social media is where too many people, I believe, focus too much attention and they ignore the 5 things. So number one, optimize the Google My Business profile by telling a business owner what he needs to do. You need to get more reviews. I don't know how to get reviews. Here's a way. Here's a card where you can get a review. You ask for reviews. You can't pay for them. You have to do everything and anything. You ask everybody to leave you a 5-star review. You know, it's— are you networking? And I'm gonna get into why. In fact, I listened to a great podcast of yours with a young man who's built his whole AI business by networking. Networking is so important in the local business world. So anyway, number 2 is I've heard local businesses, can you help us with our social media? And I go, well, think about what the word means. YouTube is social media. Your blog, your podcast is social content that can be shared. is social media. All Facebook and Instagram and TikTok did is they got huge because they made it easy from your phone to create content, post it, and share it. But media is video, audio, text. Social means that it's real easy to share with your friends. But if the only social media you do as a business owner is your Facebook business page, your Facebook posts, TikTok, and Instagram, which I'm not saying you shouldn't do, You're leaving out the most important, which is blogging and podcasting. And here's the reason why. When you blog, it gets picked up by all the search engines. Blog posts on your website that you own with a website address that you pay for, not something that belongs to Facebook, Instagram, they all own to Meta. You don't own them. They control it. They can change the rules tomorrow. But when you own your own web address, then it's not going to change because you own it. And when you post content to your own web address, that gets indexed in Google. So what are the disconnects with people blogging? And you're talking about what my business is. If the second tier is creating a blog and a podcast on a regular basis, it's, you know, most podcasts fail because people will do 3 episodes, not see any results, and quit.

Yeah.

It's the consistency. And I have a case study Where we've made millions of dollars in the pest control industry with a partner of mine. Uh, it was called Pest Control Marketing Podcast, and it was geared towards people who were starting or owning small pest control companies. And our whole thing is, you wanna grow your business, you need to listen to us. And then the podcast gave us a steady flow of customers on autopilot for years and years and years.

Digital marketing customers? Agency customers?

People, yes, but they're, they're the reason I've listened to your content. You guys know what you're talking about. I want you to help me grow my business.

Yeah.

And they don't know what that looks like.

Yeah.

So unbeknownst to them, I came up with these, and that's what's been tested for the last 5 years. But when you're working with guys that own pest control agencies, you're gonna say, you need to write a blog post. I don't know what to say. Well, name 50 problems that your pest control company solves. Well, we kill bugs. No, no. Break those bugs down into bedbugs. Rats, mice. I said, there are problems that people are searching for and you need to create content about that. Well, I don't know what to write. I don't like to write. Well, then we— a good mentor of mine years ago, he says, it's easier to record and transcribe than it is to write. It's a shorter distance from your brain to your tongue than it is from your brain to your hands. So you write it, you speak it and be truthful and then transcribe it. Now you have an audio file or a podcast and you also have a blog post.

Yeah.

And you'll be amazed how good it is when you transcribe some, you know, so I'd say, what are subterranean termites and why are they bad?

Yeah.

Well, when they got a question like that, you can't shut them up. They know the information. The world of small business, service business owners are not proficient at creating content.

Yeah.

So I had to coach them in what to do. I assume you've heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. Well, I met Gary many years ago. How did he build VaynerMedia? He did a WordPress blog every day for 3 years on wine at Wine Library TV. His books talk about how to grow your business with your passion by creating content and building— he built his audience. His mom and dad's wine store went from $2 million to $50 million because they could have bought wine anywhere in the world, but they wanted to order it from him because he was the wine Authority. And then what he learned from content marketing, this is all based on— he has a thing which is, if you search the Gary Vaynerchuk content model, it's called—

Jab, jab, hook?

Well, it's pillar content to micro content. And that's what this business is based on for people who would never know how to do a podcast, never know how to write a blog post. All they know is they want a website that the phone rings. So that's number 2, like I said, content marketing. But number 3 is paid advertising and making sure that you go to a conversion landing page. A word like landing page to a pest control guy means nothing. Well, it's Mr. Bug Guy, it's when somebody clicks on a blue link in an ad, they land on a page. And if that page addresses specifically the problem that they're encountering, Then the conversion will go up.

Yeah.

So we developed landing pages. The homepage is a general landing page, and we created a model, a very simple model for in the fold that has worked 15 years since I've been doing this. Headline, we use the same headline over and over again. You, you know, we will give you the most thorough, amazing, unbelievable pest control service guaranteed, or it's free. That headline got phone calls.

Over and over.

Over and over again. Probably did 100 websites like that.

And could you plug that headline into other businesses? We will make your house cold or it's free. We will fix your leaky toilet or—

We will fix— you will not— your roof will not leak. We guarantee it or it's free. And of course, what we discovered, nobody ever asked for the— maybe one or two people.

They just want to feel safe.

It's— are you familiar with Dan Kennedy? And I don't know if it's okay to mention names.

Yeah.

I've spoken on Dan's stage 10, 15 times. I'm the guy— have you ever heard the term VSL?

Video sales letter.

Okay, well, I invented that with my friend Jim Edwards 20 years ago.

That's awesome.

Because Jim was a— Jim, several people in that internet marketing world that I came from were believers in direct response marketing taught by Dan Kennedy. And they, in fact, they used to speak on how ugly one-page websites, sales letter websites, made more money than million-dollar sites, even in e-commerce. I told Jim, because I came from radio and television and music, that Flash video was, was brand new at the time. And I said, Jim, we can shoot a video. Instead of having a sales letter, we have a headline, a video that does the same information the sales letter does with a call to action, and then testimonials or social proof. So it's a model: headline, video, social proof, sales letter. And then everything else is if you want to or not. And if you get traffic to that Formula, even though it's considered ugly and maybe even dated, it still works on a cell phone screen. Yeah, because you're saying you got this problem, I'm the solution. Watch my video, and I'll prove to you in 45 seconds or less that I'm the guy to tap to call.

Yeah.

So since Jim Edwards and Dan Kennedy and all these mentors of mine called it a sales letter, I said, well, that's a video sales letter. So Jim and I, we had we sold half million dollars of a course called Website Video Secrets. It's got its It's so dated, but you can go to YouTube and see we sold it with a video sales letter. We sold half a million dollars of that course. So I know video sales letters work.

Yeah.

And I don't— I never got documented, but I believe we were the first to ever say on stage, don't create a sales letter website, create a video sales letter with a sales letter.

And they still work today.

They— because people will watch before they read.

Yeah.

It's just human nature, all generations. So anyway, the video sales letter Optimized. Then I discovered number 4 because I came from the music industry. I owned a recording studio for 20 years in Atlanta. You're too young to remember, but we had a hit record called Pac-Man Fever. I was in a band that had a number 1 record. I learned the music business early on. That's why in my retirement years— and I'll tell you what I think retirement is, I hate doing that, but I did it anyway— I moved to Nashville because I love the music industry. And the music industry is just They can't understand that streaming and the internet is what you have to master. I've been in meetings in Nashville. I said, you're not in the music business anymore. The music business in the '60s, '70s, '80s was selling just, you know, widgets— vinyl, CDs, cassettes. That's not a business anymore. That's a novelty. The world gets their music on their phone through streaming. They get their information— streaming is—

Everything.

The future. And of course, AI is the next wave. And I told people, I told people that you got— you're in the fan building business and you can build, you know, one of the things that I saw, you've built a following with this content and the content's good and it's helpful. So you deserve to grow and grow and grow. Well, that's what radio and television has always been. But what I did discover, because I knew radio, that in the internet, There is a word for the phrase that people put in a search engine that— what is the first results page? And that's called SERP. Do you, you've heard of SERP terms?

Yeah, it's an acronym. I don't know what it stands for.

Well, I'm gonna share it with the audience.

All right.

Search engine results page.

Okay.

If people type in fix my toilet, what comes up?

Yeah.

Paid results, organic results. You can find out what SERP terms will bring you business. But there's one SERP term people totally ignore. Everybody has 2 to 3, 2 to 3 to 4 words that they dominate a search engine on. Do you know what yours are?

Like for local businesses?

No. Well, you're for yours. I checked yours. You're worldwide.

Okay.

Big Dev. Well, I know the Koerner. Here's one of the challenges. You can typo your name, The Koerner Office, and you still come up.

Okay. That's good.

Okay. But the fact that you gotta spell Your name with a K and E R. Yeah, but you dominate the first page of Google for the Corner Office.

Yeah.

So your SERP terms for your business, whether it's a worldwide business, Chris Corner, your name. All right. Oh, there it is. Biz ideas deep dives.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Those are SERP terms. So if I search Chris Corner, okay, biz ideas deep dive. If I Google biz ideas Deep dive. 4 words. Your videos dominate. AI dominates. Apple dominates. Your website dominates Apple. Everything that you post, you dominate the first. That is, so those 4 words are unique to you and they are your SERP terms.

Yeah.

So from the, from the music business and the jingle business in the '80s and '90s, I used to write and produce radio jingles for small businesses in Atlanta, car dealerships, Potato chips companies, you name it. In fact, you have Waffle House around here?

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, if you go into Waffle House, I produced all the Waffle House records.

Oh, no way.

I have, I have a golden waffle for Raisin Toast.

That's amazing.

And I have to send you a picture of it. But at any rate, you know, those were corporate and local business jingles and national jingles. We did Ford, we did everything. But right when Google started, there was a plumber in Smyrna, Georgia. Near a suburb of Atlanta, and the owner's wife got breast cancer and she was healed. And he made a commitment to change the name of his plumbing company to the Pink Plumber and donated proceeds for the rest of his life. And that was kind of his market— marketing angle, that he was so grateful that she was cured that the, the pink ribbon.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So 30 years ago, this jingle ran in Atlanta on the radio. Google Pink Plumber, or forget, click the link or call 404-222-PINK. I can't remember your address and I just came here, but I, because I heard that jingle 20+ times on the radio, I remember his phone number to this day. But he said, Google Pink Plumber. You could Google Pink Plumber, 2 words, his SERP terms, and he dominated the first page.

He invented that phrase and he owned it.

Right.

Yeah.

Then he advertised it in what's called an earworm jingle. Earworm is the phenomenon of when you associate marketing verbiage to melody.

Hot Pocket.

Yeah, well, I don't know if you— 800-588-2300. Okay. All right. If you Google Empire today, it should be Star Wars.

Yeah.

No, it's a carpet company.

Yeah.

That's the power of a SERP term jingle. I invented SERP music that I've done for all my clients. And so, for instance, we set their SERP terms. Google the painting place for the best paint job you'll ever get. That just searched the painting place. I checked it. Those, those, if he had a jingle running today, he would, he, he would get embedded in the subconscious because this is a psychological fact. When you hear marketing information set to melody 20 times, On the 21st time, you'll never get it out of your subconscious for the rest of your life. So how do you get the world to hear your SERP terms over and over and over again? You open your podcast singing. We, our podcast used to be Google Pest Control Marketer, grow your business like never before. That's pestcontrolmarketer.com. That's how we got traffic because our podcast always opened with our subtime, our SERP terms.

Yeah.

And if you still to this day, which we had, we ended the podcast. About 4 years ago, because my partner was 78 years old and he said, I want to play Bob Dylan songs. I don't want to do this anymore. And I said, okay. And I said, well, here's what I learned from the pest control industry, that I tested all these things and I saw the results. And then I started realizing every service business in the world needs to understand these processes. So how did I do SERP Term Jingles up until about 2 years ago? Well, I'm a musician. I have a recording studio in my house. I've know how to perform it. And you could throw a rock in Nashville and hit a singer. You know, there's amazing— that talent, there's so much talent in Nashville, it's just amazing. And, and they don't know how to make a living. So if you'll hire them to sing a jingle, yeah, they'll take it. Yeah, they'll take it. And you can do it virtually. I used to send tracks over to Adam Cunningham, who came in 4th on The Voice. And I used to watch The Voice to see who lived in Nashville, and then I'd go network and meet with them.

Oh cool.

So that's how I, you know, got the, got the singers. And we sold Our pest control jingle over 100 times at $2,000 a pop.

Wow.

To who? To pest control owners.

Interesting.

In fact—

the same jingle? Yeah.

We just give it to them for a 50-mile market because that's all that mattered. In fact, there was, there was a client. One of my first clients was in Abilene, Texas, and he was called West Texas Pest Patrol. And Wendell calls me up and he says, he says, I got a customer complaining that Every time he goes to YouTube, my jingle plays. And I said, Wendell, we don't control when the jingle plays.

Yeah.

You know, that's like telling the 6 o'clock news to stop running lawyer and car dealership ads.

Right.

That's their bread and butter. Okay. You know, I said, good, they can skip it. But here's what we discovered with, with that model. And I'm looking for my YouTube app. There it is. There is a thing in Google AdWords called Skippable video ads. Okay, when you front-load a TV ad with a SERP term jingle, it plays for free in the market. So the cheapest local TV advertising we discovered in the world is buying TV ads limited to a mile radius or zip codes that are skippable YouTube ads, and we hope they skip them because they're going to hear the jingle and the positioning statement.

So you, you hope they skip them because The only thing you need them to hear is in the first 5 seconds or whatever, and that's the jingle.

Google West Texas Pest Patrol, no bug will survive. In fact, this is the horrible jingle, and you can look it up. It's West Texas Pest Patrol. And now we did— we bought ads 4 years ago only in Abilene, Texas. He's had probably 8 million skips that heard the jingle in his local market for a little or nothing, but 3 million people watched the whole ad. We actually have had customers, clients of mine with, with the SERP term jingles, mothers, stay-at-home moms with kids, they're in there watching Bluey. My grandkids watch Bluey on YouTube. Well, Wendell's commercial come up and they'd hear it in the background and the kids wouldn't skip the commercial.

How long is the whole commercial?

Any length you want, but I tell people to keep it under 60, just like television. Keep it under 30, 60 seconds.

What did you pay for 8 million plays?

Oh, it's pennies on the dollar. Yeah, you know, you can usually get 40,000 listens for a couple hundred bucks. So anyway, skippable YouTube pre-roll ads with a SERP term jingle. I don't see anybody else doing this, but I want to tell you the story how it came about.

Well, how— what did that do to his business?

He's quadrupled, tripled his business. I've got, I've got testimonials, and one of my best testimonials is my pest control guy in Australia. In his Google review, he said, I listened to Mike's podcast for about 6 months. I knew he knew what he was doing.

Yeah.

I contacted him to sign up for his program, and he says, he made me a jingle, he built me a converting website at no extra charge because I can build a converting page in 15 minutes. It's just a template. And he says a whole bunch of other stuff. I don't know what he does. I manage his Google AdWords. Which is usually when you find the right keywords and you set up the right— I've got a little trick in my headlines. Problem, agitate, next step. That's Dan Kennedy. Problem: tired of termites? Scared of termites? Afraid termites are infecting your home? Do you want them gone and solved now? Watch my video. Yeah, watch my video. Quadrupled the click-through rate.

Just adding that line?

Just adding that line.

Interesting.

That's making sure that the video, the jingle, and the Google ad and the headlines all synchronize. So like with my guy in, in, in Perth, Australia, he had a goal of hitting 500,000 in 5 years. That was his goal. He was a one-man operator, which is the, the target. Small businesses, a big change. Terminix, Starbucks is not a customer.

Orkin.

Orkin, none. Well, in any service business. Sparky Electrical. You know, Chris Koerner Plumbing would be a customer.

Yeah.

You know, a sole man operator. Those are the guys that need the help and they're out here. They're out here by the thousands. That's why Google created Google Guaranteed.

Yeah.

They know that small local businesses is the backbone of the economy.

Yeah.

You know, we all can't be Apple. We all can't be Waffle House. You know, those are big corporations, but that small one location to location operator. He just wants to grow his business.

Well, thankfully there's, you know, in America there's about 31 million of the small operators and like, you know, less than a million of the big businesses.

Well, there you go. So, and the big businesses have whole marketing teams and resources that a small business doesn't have. So at any rate, pretty much everybody I've worked with that will cooperate and do what I tell them to do Have doubled and tripled their business.

Yeah. How many clients do you have today?

All right, when I started the pest control thing and I moved to Nashville, I didn't want more than 15 clients because I charged 15 clients $500 a month. And I'll tell you what I did for them. Well, here's what I did. I fixed their problems, which was one, you know, one afternoon fix, and then I would produce their podcast and their jingle, and I charged an extra $2,000 for the jingle. And the biggest thing that was pulling teeth was getting that— I would tell them what microphone to buy. You know, this is an SM8, this is the podcasting standard. You know, I sold a bunch of these as an affiliate. I'd tell them to get audio studio, something to where they could just hit record and talk and send me the MP3. And if they could send me that MP3 of their podcast, then I would do everything else. I would post it, I would transcribe it. So We would do 4 podcasts, uh, 1 podcast a week, 1 blog post a week, fix their Google My Business, set up their Google Ads, and the rest of it's pretty much on autopilot. And I would meet with them if they had a problem. So my time consumption was about an hour a month for $500. So in 4 hours I could make $2,000. But that's, I was fast. I was an audio engineer.

Yeah.

And the, the thing that was hard to do was to get them to record Their content and write their, create their content. That was hard, but I did it.

Nowadays you could use AI to tell you.

Well, we're gonna get there. We're gonna get there.

Okay.

We're gonna get there. Uh, but anyway, I'm just telling you, I did this and was successful when it was hard to get service business owners to take the time and, you know, not sit in front of a microphone and freeze. If you've noticed, I don't freeze up on a microphone. I mean, it's just, it's, I, if you ask me a question, I can talk. For hours. But that worked. And the reason I didn't want any more than 1,500— 15 clients is because I could make enough extra money with my residual income. And I have multiple streams of residual income from different things. I'm a GoDaddy reseller. I sold the jingles. You know, I'm of the age, I have Social Security. I want my money back. So I have, you know, and I have other businesses and I want to share some of those in a minute. But when AI came along, I started realizing, oh my goodness, I can teach these business owners how to go into ChatGPT. It doesn't matter which flavor. I like Gemini because it's a Google product. Everybody seems to like Claude. But at the end of the day, there's a prompt that will write a pretty daggone good local-centric piece of content.

Yeah.

Now I tell my clients, I'll say, I can do it for you. But you could get it done and send it to me faster than I could do it. And then you sit on it and send it back to me.

Yeah.

So I've never had any resistance of them learning to use Gemini for free.

Yeah.

To write 4 blog posts in about 15 minutes and send them to me.

Yeah.

Now, because of ElevenLabs, have you heard of that?

I use it to dub all my videos.

Well, there you go.

This video will be in 13 different languages in our cloned voices.

Well, there you go.

Yeah.

You knew that, Mr. Bug Guy.

Yeah.

Mr. Roofer. Doesn't care what ElevenLabs is.

Yeah.

So I take his script, I clone his voice. Now he reads it perfectly in any language we want. We've done some in Spanish because if there was a big Latino market, but mostly time English is all we got to do. And I mix the jingle on the front, take the ElevenLabs in the middle, put the ad on the end of the podcast, and in 15 minutes I've satisfied the customer and he can track organic traffic.

Yeah.

When we do, when we track all the traffic, we can see how much is social media, how much is Google AdWords. It really, it's, it's 20, it's 20/80, 80% of social media and Google AdWords, because buying traffic is the most guaranteed way. But if it converts and makes money, I don't care. But getting 20% organic traffic, 20 to 30%. So now I don't have to ask them to do anything. I can do it for them.

Yeah.

And COVID was a, the, the things that I was doing in Nashville was going to networking meetings, but really to build relationships in the music industry. COVID put an end to the networking. And then pest control, which was all I did, was a, a requ— what'd they call it? Necessary business or something like that. People were home finding bugs and rat and rodents.

Yeah.

So pest control owners During COVID boomed. Their biggest problem is they couldn't find anybody willing to work.

Everyone was home seeing all the bugs.

Well, in fact, knowing too much about the pest control industry is the number one supplier of food for bugs and rodents are restaurants. They go to the trash. That's why there's rodent traps all around restaurants, because that trash and the food waste, you know. Well, the rodents went, hey, no, there's no restaurants. So where do they go? They came to your house looking for food. You know, my wife, there's a bug in here, get him out of here.

Yeah.

So they were getting people to search them. They found them because of the marketing we had done. They're calling them. They had more work than they knew what to do with. Their problem was finding, you know, was hiring people. It's time. It still hasn't died, but it backed off a little bit and networking came back after COVID. But now with AI, the writing of the content is simplified. The voicing of the In the owner's voice is simplified. Even AI can now write the jingle.

Yeah.

I use Suno. There's several of 'em out there. I sing, but I don't like it writing it for me. I will write my own melody.

Yeah.

And I know the prompts to give it to get the results I want.

Yeah.

And I give the jingle away free. I don't charge $2,000 anymore. If you'll sign up for my monthly program, the jingle's included for life and for free, even if you cancel after The first month, a long-term curve. So I hadn't had any resistance on that.

Is that the playbook, is to run the jingle on YouTube ads? Like that's the playbook for all of them, or you do the other stuff with the jingle?

Well, you can put it on radio if you wanted to, if you have a radio budget, but it's, yes, the YouTube ads. But YouTube about a year and a half ago or whenever it was, said, we want the RSS feed of your podcast. So the jingle is running in the podcast. That's in the RSS feed. Because most of these small businesses, I can look at their YouTube channels. Yeah, their headers are wrong. Yeah, yeah, there's a thousand mistakes they don't know they're making. I don't know if you've ever heard of a good friend of mine, there's a guy named Derral Eves. Derral?

Yeah, he's the YouTube guy.

I'm the number one internet audio guy in the world, have been for 20 years ago. But anyway, that's, that's where I got in, in with these guys and learned where Michael Preppapizza learned about.

Yeah.

So the, the, the, the final thing is, is that, uh, getting customers in the local business area requires networking.

Yeah.

I sold all of the pest control people that I worked with. They'd listen to our podcast. The only advertiser on our podcast was our services, our coaching, our events, our book. I mean, we had all kinds of paths of income and jingles. And so the podcast was a steady flow of customers. I didn't need local customers. Or care for them. Because I wanted to work 2 days a month and go after the music business. So I noticed all these things with pest control. I want to prove that it works in my backyard. So my wife loves junk. She— we got more— they call it collectibles. I call it junk. She loves to price it. She loves to find it at Goodwill and sell it, you know, for a profit. That's her passion in her retirement. She started buying local honey from a beekeeper and putting it in her junk store. And people started buying.

She has a retail store?

She has a retail booth.

Okay.

In a venue.

Yeah.

There's— they're all over the place that you can rent a room. She had a room and it's stocked full of clothes and junk and belts and she sells a lot of jewelry. But the thing that was unique to her was this. I I said, why are you buying local honey? Oh, it's good for allergies. You know, there's a whole laundry list of whether it's true or not. They believe it's true.

That's what matters.

That's— they believe it's true. And local honey. Well, thousands of people search local Nashville honey. So I said, I'm going to build a business for my wife and I'm gonna buy that URL. So now when you go to Google anywhere in the world or even in YouTube and you put in local Nashville honey, So that domain name was available? Yes.

Wow.

And it's just a one-page website. She doesn't want to do e-commerce. She wants people to come into the store because then they see her junk. We quadrupled her local honey sales. Wow.

And she doesn't even have to make the honey.

No, she just buys it from the— she doesn't even go get it. He delivers it. So anyway, so this we did all the things that I do for local businesses, I did for Susan. So I post a blog post, created her a jingle.

Tsuno.

Taste of Middle Tennessee, your guide to our local honey varietals. Hey there, Susan Stewart here from Local Nashville.

So I like it.

She does nothing and she's had the biggest honey months ever since.

Wow.

So now I had a local business I could go to networking. Well, who in Nashville have you worked with? You know, well, my biggest client's in Perth, Australia, but, but now I have Local Nashville Honey. And I want to tell this story real quick because it's the same principle. Last May, I'm a big-time pontoon boater. A pontoon boat to me is a living room with a motor and sunsets on the lake are just magic to me. And in fact, most of my creativity comes out in the middle of the lake. So there was a young man who I was out riding on his boat with his dog last May and he's a pontoon boat captain. Nashville is the top bachelor Bachelorette? I can't ever say the word.

Bachelorette party destination. Yeah.

So they're searching what to do in Nashville.

Yeah.

So I found out the number one search term was party boat rental.

Hmm.

And he had— he was working for another company that sadly was closing down because of a divorce in May, and his whole season got wiped out. I said, Jason, congratulations. I said, let me do some research here. And I found out— so this is kind of what I do with clients. His term was Nashville Party Boat Rental. That domain name was available. Party Boat, boat rental. We implemented my strategies of all the things. We created a simple website with one call to action, book your boat. We send traffic here and they're one tap away from booking our boats. And we went from zero to probably, it's gonna be $80 grand this summer.

Holy cow. From that new website?

Well, that's a one-page website.

Right.

You know, it's, it's, and we're doing it with, last year we did 40, what we call charters with organic traffic. I finally convinced him to spend $250 a month on advertising. But Jason, I sampled his voice and of course he, he flipped out over ChatGPT. You know, he, he wrote enough articles to, to last me for quite some time. But you know, it's all about the keywords that people search when they're coming to Nashville. So this was the jingle.

Now you run that on skippable.

In 2026, the Nashville skyline isn't just made of steel and glass, it's built on the star power of country music's biggest.

Now do you go so far as to tell YouTube, show this to 25 to 40-year-old Women, or do you let Google's algorithm figure it out?

I let the algorithm do it.

Yeah, so you don't target the person by interest or anything, just geography?

Just geography.

Okay.

We know the cities that come here, and so we only advertise a 20-mile radius in those major cities.

Okay.

And we're not, you know, we'd get a lot more traffic if we spent more money, but, you know, he's booked every weekend.

Yeah.

So it's a success and it's growing. So now I had 2 Nashville businesses and I said, okay, this year, for the first time in my life, everything that I have been doing that took my skill set can be done by AI. And it's scalable. It's never been scalable before, but it is scalable. So what is the disconnect of getting new customers? Well, I was, I was calling myself last year the local Big 3. There's 3 things a local business owner needs to do. And quite honestly, nobody believed They just go, he's just trying to sell me something. So I said, what is it that I am selling as a solution to a small business owner like Nashville Party Boat, like Local Nashville Honey, like West Texas Pest Patrol? What am I selling? A local internet presence. In fact, if you Google local internet presence, my picture pops up.

Of course it does.

Why? Because nobody's looking for that. Yeah, they don't know it's important. So the job of networking is doing one-to-ones with business owners and Showing them that this is important and why you need to focus on making converting, converting a webpage, doing all these strategies that other digital— I don't see other digital— digital agencies should be referral partners to me.

Yeah.

But for whatever reason, they're not. So I don't care. But what I'm doing is I'm going to— I got involved. We have in Nashville, we have a networking group called Connect Nashville. 20,000 members in the Facebook page, one Google review. So what I wanted to see, could I train others to sell to small businesses like I do? And my partner in the Pest Control Podcast had a nephew in Tampa. His name's Ted Yates. And about a year ago, I spent 2 Zoom calls with him and showed him what I did. And now he has— it isn't a side hustle. He's got a full-time business from networking in his network. In fact, his networking group is one of our podcast customers.

Oh, cool.

So because I'm scalable now with AI, the jingle can be done in AI, the content can be created in AI, it can be, it can outsource. I have a team in the Philippines that I could just train to do it. So I'll take on as many customers as I can get. But the disconnect is the per— the person who's willing to regularly go to a networking meeting and say the things over and over that creates one-to-ones.

Yeah.

And every time I've done a one-to-one, Well, in fact, I got a text just this morning. We're gonna, we need to do business. I need your help. My God, you blew me away. I learned so much. I had no idea. These are the, the feedback. So I know it's real.

Yeah.

And the opportunity for your audience is if you learn to use these tools like Soono and learned. So look at these, these principles. Soono, ElevenLabs, ChatGPT, your flavor of it.

YouTube ads.

YouTube ads. Managing those things, they're not hard. It's something, in fact, I've got training online that I give, I'll give people.

Yeah.

You know, I don't want, I don't expect or want money from that, but there are baby boomers out there especially who don't want to be Walmart greeters. Half the Uber drivers in Nashville are baby boomers. I'm retired. We want to go take a cruise, so I'm going to go out and make 3 grand so we have cruise money.

Yeah.

You know, because I can shut it off, go do the cruise, and then if I want to make another $3,000, I can come back. So Uber is a side hustle. Baby boomers, the only other side hustle was Walmart greeter. You know, I look at people my age and older, you know, standing on their feet all day at fast food.

Right.

You know, that's— this is something that's fun, that all you have to know how to do is go out there and get the attention of the decision maker of a, of a business. Recurring income is what the side hustle you want.

Yeah.

And you sell it once, and as long as they stay, you get paid.

I'm curious about the jingles. What is the optimal length for a jingle?

15 seconds.

Okay.

The YouTube ad or not, because you want it to be able to say the SERP terms in the first 5 seconds. They, they can't get up to the skip button fast enough, so they're going to hear 8 seconds. So if you say The SERP term and the positioning statement. You know, whatever business you are.

Business ideas and deep dives.

Okay. Side hustles that'll change your life. Learning business opportunities you didn't know existed.

I've actually tested this and the phrase that resonates the most is listen, get rich.

Okay. Then you go, that's what you sing.

The Koerner Office Podcast. Listen, get rich.

Boom.

There you go.

Right. If that played every, on every one of your podcasts, Yeah. You know, and I would put Google or search, search your SERP terms.

Yeah.

And if that precedes every time somebody hears you, how did you get into this side hustle, Mike? Well, shoot, I listened to—

Yeah. Yeah.

It puts it to the top of the list.

And with Suno, like, let's say I wanted to do hyperlocal. I could say, you know, Provo, Utah, Schenectady, New York, Kissimmee, Florida, and I could just swap out the prompt and make a jingle for each market.

If you wanted to.

Yeah. Just to make it extra effective for those people. They're like, oh, this is a podcast for people in Kissimmee.

Absolutely.

You know, but before that'd be $2,000 a pop.

You're wasting that skippable opportunity, right? Trying to sell or educate because, well, the stats are we've had people as much as 60% watch, but you're going to get somewhere between 30, you know, 70%.

The whole thing you're saying?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So front load it with something that will teach your local market or your worldwide market for that. Nashville Party Boat Rental is US only. We're not targeting other countries, but you could. It's all about traffic and conversion. It's all about doing whatever you can to help people remember how to find you. And when they find you, it amazes me how many small business websites don't have tap to call on the bottom of their website.

Yeah.

They expect people to know how to hit You know, ask a baby boomer, what's a hamburger menu? Well, it's probably an In-N-Out, isn't it? We got an In-N-Out in Nashville, so we're all excited. We got Whataburger too.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Texas guys. But they don't know what any of this stuff is. That's not their business. They sell tires, they sell paint jobs, they sell fixing the roof, whatever.

Yeah.

So networking is so important, dumbing it down to where they understand it. And I believe, well, I've already done the math. 300 customers is a million-dollar business, and every bit of it can be outsourced.

Yeah.

Now, if you're willing to work 40-hour weeks, you could keep all the money yourself or outsource it and get a team that does it.

Yeah. Well, I've got another interview coming in 20 minutes, so is there anything you'd like to leave us with that you'd forgotten to mention?

You know, no matter what your age, whether you're a young person like some of the people you had on that are in their 20s, you're a millennial like my son who fell in love with making a pizza dough recipe that I said, who in the hell is gonna do that. Yeah, well, a lot of people are doing it. A lot of people are buying his dough, but he, he understands the traffic and conversion situation. But my generation, baby boomers, we've got a lot of wisdom, we've got a lot of knowledge, we've been through a lot of decades of marketing, and direct response marketing is always more better results than image marketing.

Yeah.

And I'm not a— I'm not that I'm not a proponent of social media. But the challenge is social media is what's called in a walled garden. It doesn't live forever. But YouTube content, podcast content, blogs content live forever and get indexed in Google and generate traffic to your website that can be converted into buyers. So how does that affect baby boomers? Well, it's a great side hustle to go out and talk to business owners and make a difference in the business. And if you do enough of it, you can double your investment income. Just to give you a perspective, and I don't know if you know this, what's the figure to make $50,000 a year with investments? A safe investment that'll make $50,000 in retirement?

A million bucks?

Yeah. Well, financial planner who's a good friend of mine, $1.5 million. Less than 4% of the world has $1.5 million in the bank. So sadly, and to me, $50,000 At that time wouldn't pay my house payment for the year. So the reality is baby boomers should have side hustles that they enjoy, that they're not climbing on roofs or up in attics. Yeah, they're not out in the heat. Networking and talking to a business owner and making a difference in their business and getting recurring income is a heck of a side hustle for anybody, but especially us retirees who don't want to live on fixed income.

Yeah.

You know, if I want to just sit at home, watch TV, and do nothing, I could do that. But I don't. I want to get on an airplane and meet Chris Koerner. I want to play concerts. I'm playing in Deadwood, South Dakota next week.

Oh, cool.

I'm in a band called the Box Tops. Google them.

All right.

But here's where I want people to go, and this will be the final thing I say. Google localinternetpresence.com, and there is a website there, and all my website says If you want to grow your business, you got to grow your local internet presence.

Yeah.

And I know how to do it. I've done it hundreds of times. And when you grow your local internet presence and you fix the other part of the equation, you make sure that conversion is right, then you make money. And if you're not in it to make money, then enjoy your hobby. Yeah, man, there's opportunity everywhere.

Yeah. Amen.

Amen.

Thank you, Mike.

Thank you.

Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because You haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a 5-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.