Summary: Nick Loper is an author and online entrepreneur featured on The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and speaking at a TEDx event. His latest role is as Chief Side Hustler at Side Hustle Nation, a growing community of aspiring and part-time entrepreneurs, where he also hosts the top-rated Side Hustle Show podcast. <br> <br> He is the author of 4 books including Work Smarter: 350+ Online Resources Today’s Top Entrepreneurs Use To Increase Productivity and Achieve Their Goals, which became an Amazon bestseller in 2014. Nick has been working with virtual staff since 2005 and has a free course on how to hire a high quality and long-term virtual assistant. He also runs the web’s leading virtual assistant company directory and review platform, Virtual Assistant, with more than 100 VA companies and 700 user reviews. He has helped thousands of readers identify their outsourcing opportunities and take action. <br> <br> Period in full-time business <br> <br> Nick has been self-employed full-time since 2008 and worked in business as a side hustle since 2004. <br> <br> Core revenue streams <br> <br> His biggest revenue streams on his podcast, The Side Hustle Nation, include sponsorships and affiliate revenue. He also has several other affiliate websites that do well. He was able to leave formal employment because of an affiliate website. It was a footwear comparison shopping site built on an affiliate model and used to refer traffic to Amazon and Zappos, and Nick would earn commissions from the resultant sales. <br> <br> He does self-publishing with books on Amazon including some on side hustling. He also does some freelancing work which including book editing for other non-fiction authors, sales courses on Udemy, and selling products on Fiverr. <br> <br> Key focus going forward <br> <br> The podcast has been his main focus in the last year. It started out as an afterthought experiment but it has grown faster his blog to become his main focus. <br> <br> Reason for podcast growth <br> <br> Nick thinks the main reason the podcast has grown so fast is because of word of mouth marketing but he also highlights podcast marketing and iTunes optimization as some of the other reasons. Some episodes have had people engaged and talking about the podcast. <br> <br> Focusing on his niche <br> <br> Nick says that focusing on the side hustle side of business may have contributed to the podcast’s success. He only had an email list of 11 people to market the podcast to when he was starting the podcast and that’s how he built his audience slowly. <br> <br> Leaving corporate <br> <br> The footwear comparison shopping site was the business that helped him leave his job. He used to intern at a shoe retailing company in Seattle which had a brick and mortar store but decided to try selling the shoes online. The online segment of the business grew 10 times faster than their brick and mortar shop. That’s how Nick got exposed to affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which enabled him to build his own footwear comparison shopping site. <br> <br> When he was running the site, he was very reserved and heads down working on it. He didn’t mingle with any people in the business world and faced a lot of challenges with the business. At one time he had a problem with Google and it was very frustrating because 80% of is traffic was coming from Google ads. Later the problem was sorted but it taught Nick the importance of diversifying his business. Later on he started several other different side hustles, most of them flopped but a couple have stayed afloat including the Side Hustle Nation site. <br> <br> Knowing when to leave corporate <br> <br> One of the factors that helped him leave his formal job included the income he was making from the site. It was not replacing his salary in the beginning but he felt that if he could work...
