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

Want to know the absolutely safest business you can start with $0. 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. You 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 3 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. Of all means. There's this one that stuck out to me called the Contrarian Thinking newsletter. Arriving 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 spend 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 Contrari 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 Cs, 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. I'm curious. What 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 videos, games all day and you don't have to do anything. The third one that I look at is cash. I want to make sure one of two things happen. One, people are either already spending in this area or two, I can make them money. I'm talking about this, I can 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. 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 draft. 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 dun dun 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 $0 to start. If I was doing it today, I'd use Beehive. They're I think the best platform out there. Basically costs 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 free 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 BCC 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 leads us to February 17th. Oh, hi. Hello. 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, 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 means the world to me. 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. 3. I did a sign up sequence. Really easy. Also within your email service provider. Basically, the more creative you can get with your signup 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. My then I went to LinkedIn to announce the news and I did a post like this on LinkedIn and like WA wa. 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 TikTok badly. But it's okay because we 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 Substack. So I switched to Substack and they have two pieces that I read that really change how, how I grow in general. What are they? This first one, 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 in 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 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 on Twitter and Instagram. I know rocket science, but I didn't realize that was important back then. And I create this doc 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 every week, Wednesday at 9:15am 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, I'm killing it. So at the end of day six, we're sitting at 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 it at the Wind and nobody cares, but it happens alone. 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 1,790 subscribers in my second week. First I decided I'm working way too f Cking 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. Ten 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 Substack and I looked for other newsletters that were right about my same size. And I said, hip 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 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 going to tell you all about it. So we get to week three. This is a big week. 3,800 subscribers. That's two times the growth of the previous week. What starts basically happening is everything compounds the podcast. 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 Rs because we're fancy. They basically, I think, cost me like 50 bucks. And I created an ebook based on one of my best articles. I put that as the lead magnet and that basically 3x'd 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 gonna be back here for week four. Week four was a big week. How big? Let me tell ya, 11,003 subscribers. Totally nailed it. Now, what took me over the edge this month is what I'll call optimizing on the edges. What 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 contrarian Thinking co 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 contrarianthinking co 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 going to 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 going to 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, 11,003 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 breakdown on how to grow an entire 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. But.