Side Hustle to Digital Agency: How to Build a Profitable Online Business

It's a low cost low risk way of getting into a side hustle. You know, we're seeing them do anywhere from $30,000 to around $70,000 as a side income as a side hustle per year. Hi, welcome back to How Much Can I Make? The podcast about jobs, money and opportunities and that's what we're going to talk about today. What if you can start an online business from home with no capital, no technical skills, without quitting your job and still make very good money? Sounds like a dream? Well, there is a way to do it, apparently. Matt Rad, who was here last week talking about digital real estate, is back again on the show and I'm so excited about it. He's going to tell us about a different way to build digital assets that does not involve e-commerce, which could be a nightmare, and will generate money monthly. It sounds like a dream, I know, but there are many people who are actually doing it and Matt is here to tell us all about it. All right, Matt, I'm excited to see you again on the show. Likewise. And today we're going to talk about digital agencies for beginners, you said. Yep, for beginners. So tell me a little bit about that. Where do I start, Mirav? This is really exciting. This is a really exciting strategy. So for your listeners, maybe they heard me on the last podcast interview that you did with, which was awesome, by the way. Thank you so much. My background is buying and selling businesses and we teach people how to do that with online businesses. But what we've also found over the years, and we've always taught this for about over a decade now, to get really good digital skills, because one of the things I think I mentioned in the interview with you, one that you were asking me, well, what do you need to do to be able to work online from home? And I never asked you why is it important to learn to build a website? Because you need the foundational digital skills. They are just because it teaches you how online businesses work. It gives you a really good understanding of no one wants to hear the technical side, but you do need a bit of tech experience. And luckily it's a lot of drag and drop and drag and things like that. But there is a technical element to working online and it's really helpful to be able to understand that so that when you're building your business and you come to outsource without sources, you know what they're doing on your websites. What I want to talk about today is what we've seen because it's such a practical skill, teaching people how to build. I believe it's a very fundamental skill. If you want to work online, also wrapped into that is understand how they work, how do they get traffic? I'm doing a funnel thing here. So where does traffic come from? How do you build the site? What do you need to do ongoing? And then what we do is once we're comfortable with the practical side, then you outsource all that anyway. There's lots of outsource and go to Upwork.com to help you do that. But in that journey, we've been teaching this now for 15 years, what we noticed is that people, we've always said to people, look, one of the quickest ways to learn in a very practical way how to build a website, but also earn while you're learning is why not build a simple little website for your local trading? So your local electrician or a plumber or even a dentist or a white collar like an accountant, something like that. Because there's a massive opportunity, Google puts a lot of effort, even in this day and age of AI, into what we call local sites. So local sites are very specifically, they're websites that rank in a very specific geographic area, pretty much your local town. And you would have seen them if you're looking up for plumber near me. Right, exactly. Yeah. That's a sort of site. So what we've observed over the years for people that want to get out of corporate, probably the quickest way to learn and earn an income. And if you like it and you're good at it, basically what it can lead to is literally replacing your income. We've seen people do it within one year, replace their incomes. Wow. So, but let's back up a second. How long does it take for somebody to learn how to build a website? You can learn how to build a website in a weekend. So I know it sounds. Yeah, it's pretty easy to learn, but you need, but like it's not a get rich quick thing. Okay. You need rep. So we're about, so you don't really know what you're doing even once you've built a basic website. Then you need to refine it and understand, this is the part I was saying, no matter what strategy you do with an online business, it's not just good enough to build a web. Lots of people can build websites. You need to understand how they convert and how they work. Like what's the primary goal of that website? Is it to get someone to ring a phone number? Is it to get people to fill out like an email form for more information? Or is it to get people to buy something on the website? So that's the fun part of what we do. It's kind of learning, basically it's learning very basic digital marketing. And again, I want to reiterate for your listeners, if you want to learn the quickest way, I think, to learn how to do this and actually earn some money as well so that you can see this is a viable business is literally just build a basic website for a local business owner. We recommend you do it for free at first. That way there's no obligation on you or them. So this is a really, really cost effective way to get into a little digital business just to see if you like it. If you don't like it, walk away from it. Don't do it. But for a lot of our members, once they get into it, they build a few free sites, then they might charge like a minimum fee like $500 to build a website. This is all stuff that you can do in the evening, part time. And then you can step it up and start to charge $1,000 to $2,000 to $3,000 for a website build. So you can imagine you get three business owners. Well, there's almost $10,000 just for building three simple websites. Not that I want to burst the bubble, but I have a question. I know that AI today can build a website. You could tell the AI what to do. What we teach. So you teach them how to use AI to build a website. Yep. Oh, that's fantastic. So Liz and I, Liz is my wife. We just built a website just the other day purely with AI. And we had it up and running within about an hour. The AI built websites, they're not perfect. You've still got to understand how to tweak them up. And then what we will do, that website that we've bought, it's for a business. It generates leads and gets the phone ringing. What we will do now, we've built the basic foundations of the website within about an hour. And now if we work on it once a week over the next, say three months is a part time side hustle thing for us. We just rent out the leads. So if someone rings it, we get paid $40 every time they ring that phone number. That's another strategy. I'm jumping ahead a little bit. But basically we will just build that site out like we'll tweak it up. But they ring for what? They ring the website to do what, to get what? For a plumber. And we sell the lead to the plumber. Oh, wow. That's an idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just rent the website out. Essentially, we're renting out the website. Wow. But you need to get the strategy is very, very simple, but you need to learn the foundations. That's what we're all about. You've got to understand the basics of this. And again, I want to reiterate, the easiest way to learn is literally just build a basic website and build it for free for the next tradesperson that comes to your house. And say, hey, do you have a website? And that's how we get people doing it. And then you just build it. It's like anything in life is just steps, reps, reps, reps. You just go the next one, the next one. Once you've built five, you've got a fair bit of experience and you can probably start charging. And then you can go on from there. Once you know what you're doing, you can find tradespeople or local businesspeople, like accountants and things that have websites that are poorly performing and you can fix them up for them. It's pretty easy once you know what you're doing. We have, Mira, we have total beginners. When I say total beginners, people that have never done this before. That's a total beginner. Yeah, within a year, literally quitting their job. So our best result ever is Derek and Courtney. Derek was working in, had a senior sales role in the alcohol industry here in Australia. He was burnt out. They just had two little kids and his wife, Courtney, was working in a very senior role for a charity in a senior management role. She decided to keep her job. Derek took a six month sabbatical, like he does, stress leave and never went back. And in that first year, he generated $160,000. Whoa, how? He was a machine. He just went out and sold websites. So he learned, so what Courtney did, it's on our podcast. You can see these two are unusual. They're go getters. They're very, very driven and they were totally burnt out. So what happened was he would go out during the day every single day. So I coached him through this. I taught him how to build basic websites and Courtney did it as well. She would come home from work and then feed the kids and then they'd both sit there on their laptops at the kitchen table when the kids go to bed and they'd build these websites. And then during the day, Derek would just go out and network and sell websites to local business owners. You think about it, you've only got to sell three a month. That's 10 grand a month. He went bigger than that. And they got some big clients. Once they got better and better. So this didn't happen straight away. This was towards the very end of their year. They'd hit $160,000 and now they're hitting in their second year, they're doing $50,000 months. So that's within just two years. From never building a website in his entire life. And the thing was at the end of year one, it went so well, Courtney quit her job as well and now she works with Derek full time and they're building this digital agency together. And yeah, they're really successful with it. Because he's a sales machine. So he knows how to sell. Everyone thinks it's all on the technical side. Like you said, anyone can build a website with AI. It's actually, that's not the secret source. The secret source is getting out there and talking to business owners. If you can do that, you've got a zero cost business. It costs them nothing to set this up except for the coaching with us. That was it. But once he sells the website is out of the picture completely or does he? No, not at all. That's the beautiful part because then you do recurring revenues. That's where you earn monthly incomes because you can do add on services like updates. They do what's called ongoing SEO. So now in their second year, now that they're good at this, they can start charging anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 a month per client. And that's why their income has gone up dramatically. Wow. No, you don't let the client go. But at the minimum, you can charge $50 to $200 a month just for maintenance, for updating the website. That doesn't sound a lot, but you do the numbers. If you have 10 clients at $200, this is a good, so we have a lot of clients do this as a side hustle. Most of our clients are earning six figures plus and they've got the, as you know, golden handcuffs. They've got a mortgage. They don't want to walk away from that. So most of our clients do this in the evening. They're seeing them do anywhere from $30,000 to around $70,000 as a side income, as a side hustle per year. We've got one client here in Australia. We've got the mining industry is really big. So we have a lot of FIFO. Do you have it in America? It's called Fly in, Fly out workers. We have traveling. Yeah. Well, maybe that's what it, so here in Australia, it's a really big thing because they're really highly paid. So what they'll do is they fly to a remote mine site in the desert in Australia. They work on it for seven days and then they come back home and they've got seven days off. So it's seven days on, seven days off. Well, sometimes it's one, two weeks on, two weeks off. And so it's perfect for this sort of a business. And last year we had this, a young guy, he's called Josh. He's got three kids. His commute is to the entire other side of Australia, which is Western Australia. He's got a seven hour commute, right? He's paid lots and lots of money. He's got a, he runs 20 guys. He's a fitter and turner, like, you know, keeps all the machinery going. But on the side, guess what his side hustle is, is what we're talking about. And he's become an AI expert. So he uses AI now. He's working with tradies. And so when he flies back to the Gold Coast, he goes out and talks to tradespeople and business owners and he builds them websites. He's now making $5,000 a month plus on his two weeks off. And it's going bigger. He said, if he keeps at it and he's got two or three big clients, like these are big businesses now he's getting really good at, he's become really good at AI automations. And he just, everyone, all these businesses want AI automation. So he does that as his side hustle. And he goes, Matt, it's on, it's on the podcast. He said, I think next year I'll be able to quit my high paying job. He won't have to do the five-fold thing. He's earning him that much money. So he and his wife is thinking about joining him as well. Again, she's working full time. He's young. He's got a lot of energy. So basically he works full time. So he does FIFO and when he gets back he works on this because it's worth it. It's setting him up for a future. But also he doesn't want to do FIFO work. You get really highly paid, but you're away from your family. And you know, it's a lot. So a lot of, we have quite a few here in Australia, like I said, it's a big thing. We have quite a few clients who are FIFO, fly in, fly out, and they're all want to transition out like they, they, Mirab, they literally have the golden handcuffs. They like, they're in their early twenties and they're earning hundreds of thousands of dollars working one week on one week off. Right. But when you build a site for a professional, do you need to really know about their business or is it more or less generic? It's not generic. That's part of the skill of sales. What we get people to do is you don't just build a basic site. You actually go and talk to them. Derek did. He went around every single day meeting people face to face. You chat to them and you find out we have a business assessment checklist and you just find out off them, what are the main things that you sell or the services that you offer? And you actually talk to them face to face and figure out what are the main things that you do and what are the main sort of clients that you want? Okay. That's how we're going to build the business. We'll focus the business so that it highlights your strong points. Definitely not generic. That brings me to the question because you also teach basically your school for everything digital but you also teach digital marketing. Except for e-commerce. Right. But you also teach digital marketing. Yes. I would say so because most people that come to us are total beginners. They don't understand what digital marketing is or how the online space works or even for that matter really how businesses work. A lot of our clients don't come from a business background. So what we've got to do is teach everyone the basics of not only how a website works but why the good ones work so well. And essentially that is digital marketing. We just don't use the term digital marketing. A lot of web developers don't do this. They won't talk to the owners properly and they won't find out exactly what they want. Say there's an accountant or it might be a lawyer and they specialize in commercial law. So we need to build the website around that. So the digital marketing we would go and spend time with them or their 2IC or whatever or but ideally the owner say all right what sort of leads do you want. We don't want to be getting divorced lawyer leads or we don't want to be getting DUI leads and we don't want to be getting general lawyer leads. We just want commercial law. So then we've got to start putting out marketing hats on talk to the owner and go show me what the competition is doing. What are the sort of leads. What's working out there now. And what sort of content do we need on here. And most importantly how can we display your authority or trustworthiness. They're also SEO signal search engine optimization signals. So everything feeds everything just fits together. Once you understand the whole picture and this is why we don't want beginners going out there and charging money straight up the building site because I don't really know what they're doing. But once you understand the whole picture you'll realize OK for this lawyer site it's not as simple as just slapping up a basic website and then part of the marketing mix might be where on the Internet do we present these guys because we've got AI now. So do we integrate their LinkedIn profile which you would do with a lawyer obviously. What other social media channels might be useful for this business and we can integrate that as well. And then we think about ongoing. What ongoing content do we need to get out there. And this is the fun part. Once you understand if you like this sort of thing it's really good fun. It's really easy work. What kind of character traits or skills somebody needs in order to be successful in that. I mean first off I was just going to say it can be anyone you just got to get in have a go and see if you like it. OK because it's very it's really good for your brain. It's a bit of a puzzle thing but it's generally the skills that we find are people who are empathetic the best skills like if you're the best skills people that are willing to listen and talk to the business owner and find out what they need. And then you've got to have the skill sets to put that together on a website. You can outsource that the technical side once you know the basics of it. Really the best skill sets are empathy listening to people and getting out there and talking to people believe it or not as much as this is a digital business the best skills are personal skills and that can be taught. That is something you know I think it boils down to ideally if you're good at sales like Derek he's probably one of our most successful clients in a very short amount of time to earn 160 grand in 12 months. That is mind blowing like really in terms of as a total beginner. I think part of Derek's success was he's very good personally with people. He's very tenacious. He follows up with people. He's really good at door knocking going and chatting to business owners really essentially he's really good at sales. And that is a very very powerful skill set to have in this day and age. If there's any young people listening to this I would highly recommend no matter what you are doing in life learn to learn sales. It is the ultimate skill in this day and age of AI. It goes hand in hand with everything we do online. I think that's one of the reasons Liz and I were so successful online very quickly. You know how I was talking on your last podcast about buying content sites or online websites that generate money off ads and things even with those you need sales skills. The online websites no matter what they are they essentially work like face to face sales. They're designed to draw in attention help solve a problem and present a solution for someone. That's what we do face to face. The best sales people are doing that when you think about they're really best sales people are trustworthy and they present a really good solution once they've figured out what the problem is what someone really wants. And so I think they're the best skills you can have in this day and age. Isn't it funny it comes back to soft skills. I know you know someone listening to this right now is probably thinking well I don't have those skills man I work as a manager in health or whatever in a hospital. Well I'd like to say most of our clients don't have any of those skills at all and that's the beauty of this strategy. If you want to get into your own sideline business or side hustle I think this is the perfect strategy. It's probably the best one we've ever seen where you can gently learn these skills very safely earn a little bit of money while you're doing it and just gently build up not only the technical skill sets but the sales skill sets. We literally have on our podcast you'll see story after story of total beginners who've never been able to sell. I'll give you a really good example. The most extreme example I can think of is Jing. So she's here in Australia. She is Chinese background. So English isn't her first language and she's got quite a strong accent right. Her husband's at work as an accountant and she's a stay at home mum raising three kids pretty full on role. They'd moved to Brisbane, Brisbane Australia. She knows no one in the community. She has no business experience whatsoever. She can't even speak the language particularly clearly right. She's a young mum. What does she do? And she for some reason she wanted to do our course and she decided I'm going to have a go at this and go Jing. She's tenacious and she literally got out there joined. So she dropped the kids off at school and then one of her other ones was still with her full time and she'd go to these business networking things like we said and she was so shy. She had no idea how to sell at all. She just talked to people and said look I can build a website and she just started building them for free for people in her little local area. She was also in a local church. Should be in English or Chinese? In English, very much in English. So she's talking to tradies, plumbers and lawyers. One of her first client was a lawyer and a plumber literally in this business networking group. She also got business through her local church group. She was very active in her church group as well on the weekends. So just full on networked and talked to people. Didn't know how to sell. Doesn't even speak the language really. Like she does. She's good at English. But she's not confident in sales though. She's never done that sort of a thing. And in her first year she made $30,000. Now to your listeners maybe you're thinking that's not a lot of money. It's not a lot of money compared to what a husband earns. Point is in her second year the income went right up and her husband was able to quit his job as a accountant. And join her in her little business that she started as a side hustle with no sales skills whatsoever. And now they both work together in this digital agency. They sold up where they live and they now live in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia called NUSA. Just Google NUSA. It's the iconic place to live in Australia. It's stunning. And they've moved there with their kids and they have a lifestyle business. So that's where it can lead to. So it doesn't happen overnight. Her journey's taken her about three or four years to get to the point where they're earning a significant income from this now. But my point is in her first year she knew nothing about sales. You know English not her first language and yet she still managed to make $30,000 on the side whilst raising three kids. Any parents? Amazing. This is really amazing. Three kids under five are under eight. Three kids under eight. Like I said you're in Australia. Do you teach people in a physical room or is it online? Is it an online course? No it's all online. All online. We have American clients as well. It works particularly well in America because you have so many businesses. Because people say wouldn't there be saturation? You know everyone's building websites for local businesses. Here in Australia there's two million businesses. I think in America 15 million a year started or something. America's massive. Massive, yes. Mind-blowing numbers. We have people in rural America doing this and we have a lot of people in rural Australia doing this. It's a good way to make money in rural areas because rural people want to speak face to face with people. They're sick of any digital agencies from foreign countries contacting them. This is all about community. If community now is a huge thing in society, we're noticing it. A lot of our clients mentioned we get people to go out and network within their community and people say it's wonderful. I've met so many nice people now I'm part of the community. So it's a really good way to establish yourself if you move into a new area or a new community. It's a great way. One young girl we've got here in rural Australia, she's in quite a remote part of Australia. She's 19. She didn't know what to do in life. So she had enrolled at uni. University these days is very expensive and it was actually her parents who enrolled her in our course because in Australia your average degree is anywhere from 20,000 plus. She had two part-time jobs in her country town as well. She had to support herself because her parents don't have a lot of money. She built a website for a real estate agent in a nearby big regional area and she got paid $12,000 for that. But how much the digital education cost her? What our main course is around $3,500. And then we've got a much higher end coaching course as well which she's now on because she's making enough money. She quit uni because it was costing a family too much and she's making anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a month building websites in a, this is a remote rural area. And then she's found business in a big regional town next about an hour's drive away and she meets people on Zoom now and she gets all the leads through social media, would you believe? I hear a lot about that. She just DMs people. That's it. She says, hey, I build websites. She's building them for real estate agents, farmers, big industrial, you know, welders and things like that, electricians, plumbers and local accountants. She's just out there networking. Can you imagine at the age of 19, she now has a full time business doing this. She's in her, I think this is her second year and she's making a full time income. That is not a kind of business that you could sell. You can keep it and make a lot of money for many, many years. No, no, no, no, no. You can, you can, I was just about to say, you can sell that as an asset. Absolutely. Oh, really? Once you get to 30 grand a month, you're looking at a seven figure asset. Oh yeah. They sell all the time. Tell me about it. Digital agencies are worth a lot of money. Buyers, especially in America, buyers are paying cash for digital agencies. If they've got recurring income, they're worth a lot of money. So you've only got to get them to around 30 grand a month, but that's recurring and it's profit. It's got to be profit. We've got clients doing that within about two years and they're worth seven figures because most businesses sell on a three times multiple. So 30 grand a month is around $300,000 a year plus a bit more. The $300,000 profit, that's a million dollar asset. You'll sell that for a million bucks. But when you say repeat income, that is from maintaining the websites that they are building. And SEO. How often do you have to upgrade the SEO constantly or once a week? It's constantly. It's one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's an on that's what you do, but it's all automated. Like, well, it's outsourced. You outsource it. So a lot of our clients are really successful at that. Like the coaches at work for us, a lot of them have agencies themselves and they are charging anywhere from $2,000 to about $5,000 a month per client. So this turns into a six figure and seven figure business over time. This isn't get rich. This they've been doing this for five years plus, but they're making six figures a month. That's a fantastic income. Yeah, but that that's over time. But the you know what the amazing thing is? This doesn't cost anything to build. It's just that's the thing. That's the genius thing about it. But you've got to build it up. It's not a get rich quick thing. This takes years to build this up, but you're not out of pocket. Anything you're not going into debt for these businesses, unlike all the businesses that Liz and I used to do 20 years ago. Right. So that's why in this day and age, if I was to start over completely in business, I would only do a digital agency and I'd offer AI automations because there's this. There is no downside. So look at Alyssa. She hasn't had to spend a single sense, except for the knowledge to get the knowledge. OK, you've got to invest in knowledge. You've got to spend money to make money. But compared to a traditional business, she has had to spend hardly anything. Other than that, it's just your own hustle, your own grit. I want to ask you about your business, your business, because I saw that you organize events. Yes. Live events and online events. Right. Yeah, yeah. For 15 years now, right? We used to run big events here in Australia. What do you do in the live event? Just explain to the listeners what is we coach people? We show live websites that we're building or that our clients are building. So like at our last live event, we had all these people up on stage and we interview them and we show people like what have they done on certain websites? We teach strategy or everything that we're talking about here. And all our live events now, we do them all online. We run a lot online event at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, sometimes three times a week. So online, we're getting away from 100 to a thousand people. Wow, that's great. And where can people find you if they want to join these live shows? ebusinessinstitute.com.au I will also put it in the show notes. We'd love to have people on. Check out our free masterclass if they want to get a taste of what we do. There's a you just see there's buttons everywhere for free masterclass. Or just listen to our podcast and get an idea of what we do. I think there's a lot of info there on you and get a whole idea of the strategies because a lot of our clients do all sorts of different strategies. We just teach the foundations. We're like the catalyst and get people out there doing it. How do you see the future of e-teaching? e-teaching. Yeah, where do you think you'll go in the next five years? Yeah, it's a really good question. We're asking ourselves that right now. Obviously, it's very heavily AI driven. I think what's going to work is it'll fragment out because obviously information is about to become free because of AI. So I think what's super important going forward, no matter what business year is a really good question, particularly with e-teaching, but any business that's online now, it's all about community and that real. They were people want real people like they want real experience because you can get information pretty easily through chatGPT, but can you get the real experience? Like how did Derek actually do it? Yeah, I can go to GPT and chatGPT and ask, but I want Matt to explain to me step by step. I want to hear the real story off Derek himself or off Matt himself or off my wife, Liz or Alyssa or any of our clients. And I want to do it in a community as well. I want to know this is real. It's not AI generated. Like is this for real? Yeah, people don't believe these sorts of numbers that we throw around. That's why we do it publicly on our podcast. And I think going back to your question with everything now, particularly with e-teaching will revolve people saying you can create courses with AI and stuff. I'm not sure about that. Definitely can. But I think if you want to go next level to answer your question, it will come down to real people turning up at live events that are online, but learning in a community, I think community is huge now. I think that's why social media now is is actually really, really handy, particularly like private Facebook group, private YouTube channels or private webinars. Like we run lots of private webinars all the time on a bespoke platform. You can do it on Zoom. We used to do it on Zoom five or six years ago. Now we've gone to another platform. Those private communities add a lot of value to people's lives. And I think that's the way forward for e-learning. It's kind of the hybrid between traditional university and being online virtually. So, you know, like when our kids go to uni, they say it sucks. Now other students don't turn up. Everything now is done online anyway. That's why we're so proud of what we created when people come to ours. OK, it's online. It's not an in-person event, but there's chat going on. It's the same people. People help each other, little groups form up. They all help each other. I think that's the way of the future. Sounds good to me. Going back to community. I'm happy to hear that. That's good. All right, Matt, thank you so much. I'm so appreciative that you came back to the show. That was so interesting. That is amazing digital side hustle. It's a great side hustle. I think it's a very low risk way compared to buying a traditional business. But it's a low cost, low risk way of getting into a side hustle. So if you're listening and you're interested in something like that, check it out. All right. Great to see you again. The same here. It goes live. Yeah. Awesome. OK, bye-bye. That's it for today. If your brain is buzzing right now and you already have a mental picture of the website for your plumber, good for you. Big thanks to Matt Radd for telling us about new opportunities in the digital world, in the online world. And if you like this episode and you like the show, please follow us. Leave a review that always helps. And until next week, stay curious.