All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a Canadian podcast about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside My Canoe Head. Thanks for joining us this week.
We're going to have a really cool topic today. I mean, we need to talk about some interesting stuff on this podcast to keep it lively, keep it going. Preparedness is important. It's the basis of this.
We've got a little globalization talk going on about what's happening in the world to try to put a frame around the nauseating news cycle that we see. But let's talk about side hustle today. Let's talk about you chasing a dream. Let's talk about you learning to rock that incredible life by doing a side hustle.
How, why, and what is what we're going to talk about today. So let's get to it. So you've heard me talk about side hustle many times in several different podcasts that I've done before. But you know, what's a side hustle?
I mean, you hear about it all the time. Everybody's got a hustle on the side. Everybody's doing something on the internet. They've got some platform.
Everybody's out there trying something different, or that's what you seem to believe. But really, when you look at the statistics that are publicly available, there is an exceptionally small portion. I mean, seriously, when you think about it, Apple Podcasts just went over a million. Okay, so if you consider Apple Podcasts to be the premier podcast platform or place you can launch and play your podcast, if you think of all the podcasts that everybody's talking about doing, and Apple just recently went beyond a million shows.
So that just gives you an idea. There's always a difference in a void between the rush that everybody says is out there and what is actually going on. So why would you, why a side hustle? Like, why waste your time?
You have a finite amount of time in this world. Why would you do a side hustle? What about passion? What are you passionate about?
Like, what gets you riled up when you see an injustice in the world or some activity or something, and you just want to give it a voice? You have a voice. You have something to say. You have contribution to make to the world in a genre, and you don't know how to do that.
Like, you're not in a position. You don't have a public figure position. You don't have a position with an employer that gives you the opportunity to express these views and have them widely distributed. You want to help others.
You have a very, very important passion, and you have a voice, and that's a very good reason. Help your community. There are a lot of people out there who truly, honestly, down in their vibes and their internal soul, honestly want to provide people a service and help out their community. Make their community a better place.
They want to help fill someone's void. They know somebody is out there looking for a piece of information or a how-to, and they figure some ingenious way out, and they just want to do something to make people's lives better. And the other part is economic. Let's be frank.
There's nothing wrong with economics. I talk on this podcast regularly about you should have, as a parent of your preparedness plan, as a family, however you define that, you should have five lines of income. Minimum three, but five is ideal. Now, you probably, if there's two of you in a relationship together, two adults and however many other folks in your family, you probably have two jobs, right?
So you have two major lines of income, and that gives you a bit of cushion. But you've probably built a lifestyle that requires those two lines of income to carry on, and if one disappears, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. So the idea of an economic side of a side hustle is you both get to meet the passion. You both get to do the community service, but you also get paid for it, right?
And that's not a bad gig. You get a little bit of money coming in to help with your five lines of income. It falls apart, right? You know, the rent may not get paid.
The car payment may be a month late, but I will always be able to eat, and that's a pretty darn important thing, especially in today's inflationary world. And as well, it gains you confidence. Let's put it this way. If you have an idea, if you have something that you want to get paid, you want, and it gives you great confidence.
Listen, you know, I started a page called Buy Me a Coffee, right? Up until this point, nothing, and inside my canoe head, there was no way to pay me. I mean, you could probably reach out and say, I want to give you money, but that's rare. But there was no way to pay a creator, right?
So I decided I started a website on BuyMeACoffee slash IamCanoehead, and on there you can buy me a coffee, and you just press a button, and you put in your credit card information. I cover the credit card fee, and bang, you buy me a coffee for like three or five bucks or something, right? So when somebody does that, when somebody goes out of the way and spends their hard-earned money for no other reason than to just say, thanks, I appreciate what you do, that is an incredible confidence gain for you, acknowledging that, hey, you know what? Maybe I can just do this, or you make scrunchies, right?
Or you make doilies, or you do something of value, and you have the internal audacity, and you take that step, and you put it up for sale on Etsy, or eBay, or BuyMeACoffee, or whatever your platform may be, and you launch it, and you do a little bit of marketing on social media, and somebody buys something from you. Somebody spends their hard-earned money on a product you created, gets it, and then leaves you a great review. That is such a personal confidence builder, in that I'm not pegged and identified by the job that I do for the federal government, or for a business, or whatever it may be, that I have the ability of going out, creating something on my own, and that somebody is going to find enough value in that, that they are going to spend money on. It's a huge personal confidence.
And you know what? Most side hustles buy you coffee money, and I say, BuyMeACoffee, and BuyMeACoffee, but the point is, most side hustles, for the vast majority of us out there who do these side hustles, we get coffee money. That's it. But that's incredibly powerful.
To literally know that when I go to Starby's, and I order my frappe latte, whatever, and somebody else took the time to pay for that for me. It's incredible. So that's your why. I mean, we all are going to have a different why, but let me tell you, when you talk about passions and community, and then having the opportunity to get a small remuneration from somebody for that, that's powerful, but what?
Like, okay, oh, that sounds really good, but what the heck am I going to do? Well, you know what? Let me ask you this important question. What would you do if you could do any work?
Now, of course, yeah, I want to fly 747. But what would you be doing if money wasn't an option? If you had, say you lived in this magical world where we had universal basic income that was sufficient to pay for all of your basic needs, you weren't going to starve, you had a basic rent, you had a bicycle to get to and from. Okay, let's say the basic stuff is met.
What would you do? What would you love to do to swing your legs out of bed in the morning, to jump at a project, to do an activity? You know, what are your dreams, right? We all have a dream.
Like, you know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a firefighter. I mean, I really did. I'm a stone colorblind, man. There's no way I can be a firefighter.
That old dream got shut down. But maybe I can work in the emergency management field that helps out firefighters. Like, you figure out a dream, you have them somewhere. You have them as a kid.
You still have them as an adult. They're deep down there, buried in your busy, crazy morphing life that's 100 miles an hour in the middle of a pandemic. And it's, you know, crazy government action. We've got wars.
We've got inflation. But man, you're an incredible individual. You've got dreams. What are they?
You know, and then, like I said, there are limitations on how to be creative. Like, there are certain things you're not going to be able to do, right? You don't have good vision. You're probably not going to be a pilot.
But in reality, you can start something about airlines. So you've got to think about your what. Like, what is it that you really want to talk about? If I put a microphone in front of you and a producer and said, you're going to record podcast and you're going to talk to the world about what really gets your goat, what you're passionate about, what gets you out of bed in the morning.
You're just going to put a voice to what matters. What would that be? Like, what would that thing is there? And you know it's there.
You just got to take the time to dig it out. And the how? The how? Well, I'm sorry, folks, but you just got to do it.
You just have to do it. It's the Nike saying. Like, if you're an incredible introvert, it's going to be difficult the first time you launch anything. If you're an extrovert, it's going to be difficult because you think there should be 10,000 sales in the first month.
Like, it is a huge, difficult obstacle and hurdle to step over something and start that passion. I like to listen to Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk. Yeah, he can be a little crass at the time, but so what? I mean, if somebody swearing turns you off, the modern world is going to be a difficult place for you to operate in.
Gary Vee talks about start your passions. It's going to take a very, very long time, probably years before somebody pays you for what you're passionate about to a point where you could actually make a living at it, right? So I'm going to use the podcast as a platform and I'm going to use Inside My Canoehead here. And I'm going to tell you how this whole thing brought out and how my passion for people's individual emergency preparedness and people's lack of it looked like the sky was falling every time I heard.
I grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Every time a hurricane would drop by, it seems like it was a massive, new, incredible thing that nobody had heard of before, but it had been happening for time immemorial, but it seems like it was new. And I didn't understand why people didn't do anything. And then everybody kept saying preparedness is freaking expensive.
You got to buy all this crap to get ready. And I'm like, no, preparedness is free. So how did I do that? Well, I decided that when the pandemic started, what a better time.
I was a PhD candidate at university doing a public policy degree. So I was studying about the government frameworks that put in something that is designed to change citizenry behavior. So podcast software. Like I said, okay, I want to start a podcast because I really wasn't sure I wanted to put my face in my name and have videos up that would be there forever on YouTube.
So I figured, you know, a podcast would be the least intrusive. I'd put a voice out there. I wouldn't tell people much about me. If it crashed and burned, it would just literally go away and there wouldn't be much knowledge or anything of it.
I didn't, I didn't understand how many people listen to podcasts, but I figured podcast is pretty simple, right? So I have everything at the time. I bought myself Google a blue Yeti microphone and you'll see the microphone that I use. It's just because it looks really cool.
I'll talk a bit about later about what you actually need to start a side hustle, but let's be honest. It was, it was a hundred bucks. It was totally unnecessary. I still use it today.
I think it's pretty cool. It just gives me that vibe when I'm doing a podcast. So I looked out for podcast software and there's lots out there. Okay.
When I decided that podcast was what I was going to go to be the least intrusive and easiest from my way, I found a software platform called Buzzsprout. Now there's lots out there. I found Buzzsprout. I looked up the reviews.
I looked them on social media. It just seemed a good vibe and it seemed very, very simple, very intuitive platform to you. So for somebody like me, who's not incredibly tech savvy, I didn't want to get into this world of all of these files and RSS feeds and all this, like none of that makes any sense to me. All I wanted to do was talking to a microphone, record it, upload it and get her going.
So, and they had some fantastic YouTube tutorials on how to record in the free software. Now I'm a Mac guy. So I use GarageBand and on the Android side, on the Google Chrome side, on the Microsoft Windows side, there are free, great platforms, but I'm a Mac guy. So I use the GarageBand.
So I still record this in the free GarageBand software that comes with a Mac. I'm staring at it right now. And it's very, very simple to use. And there are great videos on how to use that.
So I basically took the computer that I had at the time and added a microphone, which was unnecessary. I could have done it with the microphones that are available on the laptop and spoke clearly and maybe get a little less sound quality, but you would have been good to go. So I found the software program. Now Buzzsprout has a free option, which means you can upload your podcast.
They only stay live for 90 days and then they disappear forever and ever. Now, if you want a minimum amount of time, the lowest plan is $12 American per month. So for $12 American per month, I get four hours of podcast airtime, three or four, I forget. And basically my podcast episodes never go away.
So I'm talking to you, this is the 110th or 111th podcast of Inside My Canoe Head. And if you look on my Buzzsprout feed or through any of the podcast platforms, they're all there. And so I uploaded, you know, a couple of, at the time I was doing one episode a week. That totaled under the timeframe.
I put them up there. It's intuitive software. It's easy to use. They show you step-by-step how to get added to Google, how to get added to Amazon, how to get added to Spotify, Apple, and all the other podcast apps that exist around the world.
I'm on pretty much all of them that I'm aware of now. And I get downloads from all of them, but all of this is intuitive. So for the grand price of $12 American per month charged in my credit card, I got to provide a podcast to the world and then it would never go away. And then the marketing of that to get lots of listeners is just up to me to go on my standard social media that I already had and tell people on Facebook about Inside My Canoe Head podcast.
So that's what I did, right? So I paid that little bit of money. I bought the microphone again. It was just a luxury gig item and I still love it.
And then you have your side hustle. You've got a voice. If a podcast is a thing, if it's simple for you and you like to talk, I've tried interviewing some people. The vast majority of them went well.
You know, I'm Inside My Canoe Head. What's that? Well, it's a podcast about individual emergency preparedness and I'd like to talk to you about that. Well, how many listeners do you have?
Well, I said I have X number of listeners, active listeners in 35 countries. Yeah, not really interested. It's actually harder than you think to get somebody to agree to come on the podcast. I've had a few guests.
You've listened to them. People have liked those episodes. I've got three invitations out right now to people who are thinking, shall we say, about coming on the podcast. So it's not always easy to do that because you need a different platform.
And I use Zoom because I have a Zoom paid account for my research I do for my PhD, but a Zoom regular account is fine. It's free of charge. And you just record it and you use that sound. Sometimes the sound is great.
Sometimes it's not perfect. But again, you're putting the podcast out there. You get your message out, whatever that message may be. And so that's great.
So that's all you need to do. And then you take time. So Gary Vee says, you know, for a social media podcast to really hit it off, other than getting exceptionally lucky, you're looking at three to five years to build a significant enough base of listeners that somebody is going to want to come along and collab with you, collaborate. You're going to get some advertising revenue thrown in there.
You know, so if I had, say, 5,000 listeners every month that downloaded my podcast, I would have, you know, there'd be a place there for some company to come along and say, hey, listen, I sell emergency kits or I sell emergency fire blankets or whatever it may be. I'd love to do an ad on your podcast and I'll sponsor an episode. I'll pay you a grand. We'll do some ads and et cetera.
But, you know, that takes three to five years to build. So you have to be patient with a side hustle. Now, YouTube is another great side hustle. And I have a YouTube channel right now.
It has about 11 videos on it. I have a grand total of 33 subscribers. Yeah, I actually think that's really cool. I have 33 human beings.
That's OK, 32. I'm one of them. But but I'm starting the YouTube channel. So I did a series on canoe because backcountry canoeing is my passion.
That's where Inside My Canoe Head comes from. I did a great trip in northern Saskatchewan in the Churchill River with a whole bunch of people. So I took a bunch of video. There's a series on that.
There's a couple of older year old videos on preparedness on there. We're going to be starting some new series on there. So I'm trying now YouTube to add to the platform. I have an Instagram.
TikTok is coming in. I always say it's coming next week and something happens. But we're going to expand to TikTok. We're going.
We're on Instagram. We're on Twitter. And we're starting to expand the presence. We just started a Facebook page.
inside my canoe head so what we're trying to do here is we've got a message about individual emergency preparedness that I'm passionate about that it's free and I want to provide all of this information I can to hopefully help people do better in disruptions be better situated for life's disruptions especially in the 2020s which is really going to be a chaotic decade as Jen Gerson said in the lines Weekly Dispatch that this is probably the last good summer for some time and so with these difficult challenging times ahead how does somebody get ready so I'm trying to provide this service I want to get it out on all mediums I have sufficient confidence in my message now to get on YouTube to put a face to it to get out there and make it happen and if you don't want to do that but you're really good at a passion there are sites like Freelancer, Upwork, Fiverr and basically what they do is if you think you're an editor say you're a great editor or a great writer and you want to do some editorial writing or be an editor for people then you start a freelance business you go on Freelancer, Upwork and you set up a profile and you start bidding for work people are always on Fiverr and Upwork and they're putting on Upwork saying hey listen I want to write a book for example I actually do and I'm in the middle of about halfway through first draft of writing a book on individual emergency preparedness which will be available I'm going to record all the chapters I'm going to talk out loud I'm going to walk around I'm going to think out loud but I need somebody to turn that into a book so I go on Upwork and I post the job hey listen I've got 10 hours of audio files here and I want you to turn it into a chapterized book for me bid and then all of these freelancers will bid on how much they think that work is worth and you get somebody that says okay they say they'll be able to do it for $450 Canadian I'll turn that into a beautifully chapterized and editorial book you know you got 10 hours of audio I can turn that into a book no problem so you pay somebody this next thing you know you get this book in your inbox and it's done so you go on Upwork and say hey listen I need a drawing cover and this is my book somebody says okay I can draw you great cover for $100 so you're creating a book through somebody else but you could be on the other end of this Upwork and be bidding for freelance work because you have a skill set that you'd really love to do right you're a great editor you love editing you love correcting you've been correcting people's work for a long time you're really good at grammar thought lines thinking presenting ideas that type of thing why not start a side hustle doing that so when you think about it a lot of people think about well there's a barrier to side hustles because of cost well most of my listeners listen to this podcast on a smartphone if you have a smartphone it came with a set of headphones that had a mic in it whether they're wired or wireless you now have everything you need to monetize and make a killing over a period of years on side hustle that's it smartphone you don't need anything else you don't need a big computer you have garage band on Apple you have free things otherwise you can make entire movies on iMovie software on your iPhone it's a little bit harder with your thumbs etc but it's completely doable you can record voiceover you can insert music every task you need to do to create any one of those hows and the podcast the YouTube the Upwork the freelancer anything like that that you want to do that doesn't require that's not in the business of a physical good you can do it with your smartphone and if you're in the business of a physical good all the marketing and running and selling and monetizing of your site distributing and everything can also be done with your smartphone and that set of headphones you literally need nothing more than you already have now Etsy costs money to post things for sale eBay costs things for sale a podcast costs a hosting site a little bit of money you're going to have to have 20 to 40 bucks a month I know that sounds ridiculously low that's all it's going to be for you to run it and you could run it for free buy me a coffee this is why I keep coming back to this site is ingenious buy me a coffee is free it costs you nothing you set up your site there you can put something called extras like I have an extra for $75 you can book a time with me and we'll have a one-on-one zoom conversation to talk about preparedness you can sell all of your stuff on there to the world free of charge I'm dead serious it's all free of charge what they take is a small percentage of sales and I'm talking about 1% or so 1.5% they use the Stripe payment platform which again is free so you have it going to your bank account you set it up and link they take usually the going rate is 30 cents plus 2.5% of the sale as the fee to process the financial transaction so in other words you set up your sales of your physical goods or your drawings or your paintings or your doilies or whatever it may be on buy me a coffee free of charge it costs you absolutely nothing and then you jump on social media you set up you create a name that's really cool say Inside My Canoe Head you set up a social media channel for Inside My Canoe Head on all the channels and you just market the living crap out of it Gary Vee has got a great video on how to do hashtags you follow that you have put zero money up front absolutely zero maybe $15 Canadian for a podcast subscription which I always recommend with BuzzFro because you want your voice to stick around because people stumble across you and then off you go and then it's just time investment so the side hustle is there for you it's there it's important and it's of great benefit let me be honest with you when I'm struggling at times with my PhD in the twice times a week I get to sit here in front of this microphone and I get to talk about something I'm passionate about it helps me it's like my own mindfulness people meditate I do a podcast this brings me hope and joy and it lifts up my spirit knowing that I may be helping somebody out there and that other human beings are going to download and listen to it and then they're going to come back and download the next one that gives me great comfort and great joy which then helps me deal with the difficult things of finishing a PhD or the difficult things of challenging all the other struggles that are in life I mean I have a business that I'm trying to start at the side and she's not going very well right now to be frank and so with that I mean you just keep pushing through struggles right and you just figure your way through them and having the side hustle is a great way to bring you joy so hopefully all of these things that I've said today about side hustle have given you an idea that you can go ahead get out there do it add to your awesome incredible life get your message out to the world speak your truth I don't care if it's environmentalism if you have a humanistic issue that you want put a voice to get people together start a podcast have guests on there to talk about this issue with you market it free of charge on social media and before you know it you have 33 subscribers on YouTube and really people laugh because people have millions of subscribers and people you know Matt D'Avella's got 3 million subscribers Canadian Prepper has 750,000 subscribers I have 33 okay 32 not including me I truly think that's incredible and it gives me joy that I can create content that somebody would consume so hopefully these are great points for you and you'll take that thanks again for listening to Inside My Canoehead drop over to our website at insidemycanoehead.ca all of the links to our products are there as I add more social media and different streams I'll put it on there the buy me a coffee site if you want to go check it out it's there buy me a coffee it's great but if you just want to go and look at buy me a coffee seriously go have them a look it's free of charge it costs you nothing to do this you can put up extras there are people making six figures off of buy me a coffee there's people out there that do drawings they do artists and they sell their art on the side on buy me a coffee you just have to find an audience and your audience isn't generally going to be built with buy me a coffee it's going to be built on Instagram and you send people to buy me a coffee to do the purchasing so you figure that out you make it happen have yourself a great time keep the communication coming and if you have any ideas for inside my canoe head drop me a line at jeff at preparednesslabs.ca or go onto the website and drop me a comment whatever it is I'd love to hear from you and I appreciate all of your comments thanks again and why not side hustle who knows you never know what could happen and you'll never know unless you try take care have fun and rock an incredible prepared life