How can one income stream turn into a whole lot more?
Simplify first, diversify second—that’s an idea I have always advocated on the show.
The first step towards diversifying is to have something working. But how do you know it’s time to diversify?
That is exactly what Bjork Ostrom (our previous guest from Ep 46) has done as he (and his wife Lindsay) masterfully “stacked” multiple online businesses that have developed out of their original food blog, Pinch of Yum.
This 10-year-old blog has been a launchpad for Food Blogger Pro (a guide for aspiring food bloggers), Clariti (for optimizing your site’s content), and the holding company, TinyBit.
And this is the framework he uses to decide if an idea is worth pursuing.
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The Shiny Object Test: 3 Questions to Evaluate Your Next Project
1. “Is the adjacent thing making you better at the main thing?”
If you can create another task that complements your initial one, it reduces the chances of losing out on ROI since it’s likely that your current task is making progress.
But don’t simply spread your wings. Focus and go deep on what works rather than constantly seeking new opportunities/diversifying too quickly.
If you find something successful and engaging, continue to pursue it and extract as much value from it as possible before exploring other opportunities.
2. Consider Who You Are as an Individual
Follow your excitement.
What excites you? What are you curious about?
If you don’t have a good understanding of yourself, it’s easy to lose interest and give up on something in the long run.
3. Is It Time to Diversify?
Diversifying income streams is especially important for online businesses that are subject to algorithm updates and policy changes.
You’re basically creating a financial safety net.
Ideally, these new streams should be unrelated to your core business, like Bjork venturing into SEO tech tools like Clariti, as opposed to his food blogging business.
Or like investing in real estate while you’re doing an online business.
Round 2: Donate a Business Idea
“What are the support mechanisms you can build adjacent expertise within that realm that can fast-track you to revenue by having it be service-based or productized service?”
Provide a specialized service/product that can support the needs of the “participants” in an industry.
For example, with more and more people becoming content creators, there’s a need for things like organizing files, understanding analytics, editing videos, and backing up data.
Optimizing things like Google Analytics and data pipelines could make for an interesting agency or SaaS offering to creators who have very specialized needs.
It’s like finding ways to help them do their job better by offering useful services or tools.
What services could you “productize” to sell to these new infopreneurs?
Round 3: The Triple Threat
Bjork promoted these three things:
Marketing Tactic: manual outreach and actually having real 1-on-1 conversations with potential partners and customers to understand their needs and goals. It’s not scalable but has been effective.
Tool: Monarch Money – an all-in-one dashboard for tracking finances across your personal and business accounts.
Book: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell – Resource for those seeking strategies to delegate tasks and free up their time for strategic work.
I hope you were able to take away some practical tips and strategies to implement in your own side hustle journey.
Keep chipping away at your goals each day, stack on complementary income streams when it makes sense, and don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas that excite you. Extraordinary things can happen when you show up with discipline over time.
Bjork’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation
“Get a tiny bit better every day.”
Episode Links