Jared Bauman: Earning £2,500 a Month in 90 Days on the Amazon Influencer Program

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains Podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and today my guest is Jared Bauman, founder of 201 Creative and host of the world-famous Niche Pursuits podcast. Now, Jared joins us today to discuss all about his entrepreneurial journey so far, and he’s absolutely killing it out there. But we also have a very special brand new side hustle, which Jared is absolutely killing it with, and that is the Amazon Influencer Program. Now, Jared is making an extortion amount of money in just 90 days after being on the program. And we show how you can do the same. And if you want to join the program, what you need to do to get onto it. But for now, if you are listening on YouTube, please do click that subscribe button if you’re listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Please do hit the follow friendly reader. For now, let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast. So, Jared, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How are you doing? You well?

[1:12] Jared Bauman: Yeah, very well, Sammie. Thanks for having me. I really enjoy uh the podcast episodes I’ve listened to, and I’m excited to be here. Awesome. Well, yeah, the roles have reversed. I was uh I was on with you not long ago. I think the episode came out a few days ago. Uh it’s pretty cool. So yeah, a little bit of a role reversal today, but super excited to get into learning all about what you’ve been doing along over the years and obviously, you know, your your businesses, your side hustles, they’re all incredible. But um, would you mind giving the audience a little bit of a fall on one into you? Yeah, sure thing. Um, my name is uh Jared Bauman. Currently I run a marketing agency that specializes in SEO for clients, uh, 201 Creative. But I have about a 20-year background, actually over 20-year background in starting, growing, and then selling businesses. This is probably my third foray into um owning a business. Um and like you mentioned, also do a lot of blogging on the side uh where I build websites, uh, grow them, kind of talk about how they’re grown, and then eventually monetise them and potentially sell them. Uh, just recently joined on with the Amazon Influencer program. And then perhaps my favourite side hustle is that I host a podcast, which is a niche pursuits podcast that I was a longtime listener of and then started hosting a couple of years ago.

[2:29] Sammie Ellard-King: So it’s a big repertoire. I’m sure we’re gonna get really into it. But I’d like to give the audience a little bit of a flavor of who you are and what your relationship has been like with money and how we’ve got to where you are today. So kind of tell me a little bit about growing up as Jared. What were you, what was your money situation like and how did you interact with money as you grew up? Yeah, I grew up um in an uh like an upper middle class family where money was uh talked about quite a bit. I got I was brought up in a family where money wasn’t taboo to talk about. We talked about budgeting, expenses, savings, the whole nine yards. Um, and so you know, understanding money and personal finance was probably really akin to me as a kid. I probably knew more about money and stuff like that than most of my peers did as I grew up. Um I uh I would say that I grew up in a family where saving was really, really important, which was interesting as I became an entrepreneur and you have to kind of take some measured or calculated risks, because risk taking was not in our DNA and certainly not with our finances that we were brought up in. Um but yeah, money was a very big topic and money education. My dad actually um uh he worked for the federal government, so had a steady paycheck, but um it didn’t feel like the school system was doing a good job of teaching money and actually started what became known as Bauman University or BU, where he taught us kids about things like balancing chequebooks and savings and what a 401k was and other things, but outside of money. But the things I remember the most were the the money conversations. It actually was popular enough with with the people we knew that my uh my friends started asking my dad if he could teach the course to them. And so on Sunday evenings, my dad would host whoever the neighborhood wanted to come over and teach BU to the neighborhood kids. So so yeah, finances and money was talked about quite a bit. And I feel like I did have quite a good financial literacy as I hit adulthood.

[4:29] Sammie Ellard-King: Seems like he was like ahead of his time there. That’s like he’s like one of the like local financial influences. I absolutely love that. I always, I mean, my dad and I teased writing a book about it at some point. We looked into it at one point. Um, I mean, man, if it was nowadays, my dad would be, uh Man, Dad, we got to get you on YouTube. That’s a course right there. Like, man, because he really was ahead of his times in terms of teaching people kind of some more of the basics about money that that a lot of people just don’t get taught as they grow up. Man, that content would go viral in TikTok these days. Like people would love that, you know, the kind of dad teaching personal finance, like all the kids sitting around. Man, I I just imagine that would be so cool. So you’ve obviously had yeah, oh god, yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s the baby life, man. It’s like one of those things. I think we you know, from doing all of these interviews, everybody has such a different background, and I just really enjoy learning about that. And I think it’s so important because it does show how a person then forms and takes their next steps into the world. So you’ve obviously had this great upbringing from your father, you understand you understood money and how it works. So, how does that kind of translate? When was this kind of moment for you when you stepped out on your own? How were you then when you were managing your money?

[5:52] Jared Bauman: I’ve always been uh a saver. I’ve always been uh, you know, uh the family lineage nickname is spare no expense Bauman. And so um, you know, uh I wouldn’t say I’m quite as uh quite as much so as maybe my my upbringing would dictate, but I think that’s always just been a bit inherent in how, you know, when you’re brought up a certain way, these money habits, like you kind of alluded to, they they tend to stick to you until you find a lot of confidence to maybe explore outside of them, whether they’re healthy or unhealthy. And there’s a shadow side to all these too. Like there’s a shadow side that we can talk about when it came to entrepreneurship of saving that that had negative impacts on me. But certainly from a high level, being a saver by nature has a lot of, you know, a lot of um, a lot of uh good things going for it. So that was certainly the way that I carried into my adult life and started businesses with that in mind and probably has been a really, a really good thing because entrepreneurship is a lot of ups and downs. And even when you’re doing really well in business, small business has a lot of inherent risks. So it’s played itself out well there. But yeah, it definitely carried through. And as much as I might try to shed that nickname, there’s probably a lot more truth than falsehoods to it.

[7:06] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s kind of you probably wouldn’t tell anyone when you were like 18, 19, but now when you’re looking back, you’re like, that was pretty damn cool. Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, you know, my friends will still give me a hard time to this day, which is a good sign. That means that they’re comfortable enough, and apparently I don’t get offended enough about it. But yeah, it sticks. I love that, man. So you’ve gone out. Did you go to college? Did you study something? I did. Yeah, I went uh I went locally here. I’m I’m born and raised in San Diego, California, still live in the region. Um uh definitely traveled a lot for work and pleasure in some of the years, but uh, you know, stayed in San Diego, went to the University of California, San Diego, um, and uh went to college for about three and a half years there, graduated in three and a half years, got a degree in what they call management science. Kind of a funny story. Basically, like I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Um, by about sophomore year, they’re like, you have to kind of pick a major. And um, so I was like, well, I’m I’m into this business thing, so let’s do business. And like, that’s good. We’re glad to hear you found what you wanted to do. We don’t have a business degree. I’m like, who doesn’t have a who doesn’t have a business degree? I mean, geez, it’s like the third most common degree. But what they had that was closest um was this management science, which is based on like statistics, economics, regressional analysis. So that’s what I ended up majoring in in college, and I got a minor in photography. So two worlds completely opposite of each other in many ways, but I ended up with a major, a BS in management science and a minor in photography.

[8:39] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s okay. So then you’ve gone in when you’re still sort of tapping into your business. You wanted to do it, you knew you wanted to do it. Did you know you wanted to go out and start being an entrepreneur straight away? Or was there a period of like working before that before you found out what it is? Because you, you know, I I I know from talking to you that you, you know, you did go into your photography stuff. So, like, how did how did that transition happen? Yeah, it was there was a couple of key pivotal points. I always knew that somewhere deep in inside me, I had an entrepreneurial spirit about me. I mean, I remember from an early day, like my favourite computer game was the lemonade stand game, where you could uh like figure out how much lemonade to buy and how much lemonade to make and how sweet to make it. You were trying to figure out the pricing model. And I mean, what nine-year-old likes that? You know, like that’s fairly indicative. Um, and funny story, actually, as a kid, uh I tried to do a lemonade stand and uh we lived on a busy street. So I was like, this is gonna go crazy. Like we live on a busy street, it’s California, man. It’s warm in the summer. People want lemonade, and I sold nothing. And um I came back in after a full day out there. I I don’t even know if I made a dollar. I made like very little. And um my dad was like, you know, most people don’t like to buy lemonade from from uh from from you know, like you gotta have your sisters go out there. Why don’t you try them? Like everybody wants to buy lemonade from from from uh from from you know, like your little sisters and you could help them and all that, and you guys could do it together as a group and it’d be a much better thing. And I was like, oh, so maybe I should focus on, you know, all the aspects of marketing, like putting up signs and making the lemonade, and then have them help me by just selling it, and I can focus on the other aspects. And sure enough, we did a lot better when I focused on these things that helped drive people to it and then had other people very indicative of of the future. But back to your question. I started a photo business in college to pay for my photo gear because I wanted nicer photo gear. And the cheap skate in me couldn’t justify spending thousands of dollars as a college student on the kind of on the kind of camera gear I wanted. But if I could start a business that would pay for the gear, well, then I was, you know, more internally speaking, I was off, I was off Scot Clear. Um, and so I did that. And by the time I graduated college, a couple years into this business that I had just started to buy photo gear, well, I had what was amounted to a very good part-time job, and I had to make a decision because I was doing too much photo work to take a full-time job, but not enough photo work to have it be a full-time job yet. And I had an internship at the government, and I remember sitting there, and I remember one day as I was coming up on graduation and I had to make this decision. I was looking out the window and I thought, you know what? I could not do the photo business. And I will sit out, I will sit here and look out a window like this for the rest of my life and wonder what if I’d tried. But if I go try the photo business and I fail, I could probably come back and get a seat just like this and sit here and do this job, and at that point not have to look out that window every day in my life and wonder what if. And so I chose to do the photo business, fully expecting to fail, but just so I could check that box off and go about my life without wondering. And then I ended up succeeding at it, ironically.

[11:58] Sammie Ellard-King: So there is such a big lesson in there, like for me, hearing those words of what if, and knowing that and making that decision. I feel like it’s something that everyone should try and explore in some capacity during their lives, whether that be, you know, happened to you at quite uh early point in your life, let’s say, but it can happen to people in their forties and fifties and sixties, you know, Harrison Ford as a carpenter until 40, you know, these there’s all of these analogies of people doing successful things later in life. But if you have that idea sitting inside of you, going to your deathbed with that what if in mind, just you I don’t feel like you should ever let yourself do that. And even if you explore it and try and find that one, two hours a week just to see if you can forward that idea, is so so so important for me. Um and it sounds like you, you know, you you jumped in, and often there is this element of risk involved there, and you know, you you saw that you weren’t gonna perhaps pay for everything, but you understood the sacrifice that it took to perhaps get yourself to that goal. Now, what did you you know, how how does this journey go? What was the next kind of step from here? You jumped out on your own without the uh you know, without the secure paycheck. What happened then?

[13:30] Jared Bauman: Um you know, I I I agree with your point, and I uh but I’m always quick to remind people like 2122, much different scenario and much different risk equation than maybe 4142 or 5152 or 6162. So I had that opportunity, and I don’t want anyone to feel like, well, you know, Jared did it. Why I should just do it. You know, life is always full of complex situations. For me, it was something where I was able to do it, but I didn’t have any responsibilities at the time. I have started businesses since then, and it’s been a lot harder. So I can I’ve kind of lived all sides of it. But um, yeah, the first year or two is is super tough. I’ve started three businesses now and it never got easier. It’s never gotten easier, and it’s really tough. So I think that um, but but again, the the feeling that you talk about, like I, in the tough moments, was way happier, way more excited than I was driving into work every morning with the what if question in the back of my mind. And so a lot of times that’s what will drive you is the draw to not have to go back to the what-ifs, because I don’t wake up, I haven’t woken up since those days with the what if in the back of my mind. It’s been 20 years of waking up with passion and excitement about what I’m doing that day, even if there’s trepidation and some stress and fear and question marks, because those all come part and parcel no matter where you’re at in business, but there isn’t the what if anymore.

[15:43] Sammie Ellard-King: Just to be clear though, like it, you know, if your dream is to be in that role in that nine to five and have that solid income, that is totally cool too. There’s not a an entrepreneur-only path here, you can have a very successful, very safe, and very happy life. Um, being a part of a machine and being, you know, driving something else. And that that is totally cool too, because a lot of people find themselves in those in those roles, you know. So I just want to make that clear that we’re not banging that drum there. But you know, if you do want, if you do have an idea and you do have uh that what if in your mind, then you know, I I implore you to it to to to look at ways that you can try and explore it. So you started the photography business. Um when did it sort of kick off?

[16:36] Jared Bauman: Let’s see, I graduated in 2004, and I think 2006 was our first big year. Um that was the first year that I remember making like six figures and feeling like, what the heck? I mean, I never anticipated making that kind of money uh that early in life, or from a photography business. I mean, that was really more of a passion play when you think about it. And we we were able to kind of uh figure out a lot of other things like marketing and you know, scale and just different things like that. But um, you know, so 2006, for me, I think I was 24, 23, something like that. So that was a that was a big moment and we made some big decisions. Speaking back back to that risk conversation, we um coming out of the on the heels of 2005, we were still very young. I mean, I I had to wear a tie to weddings just to make myself look older. This that’s when I started growing this goatee, is because I look so young that like I was trying to do anything to look the professional part and not look like a kid that just came out of college. And um we made some big decisions going from 2005 to 2006, raising our prices. I don’t remember how much, but I remember being a big deal, like 50% or something, putting ourselves into a totally different, you know, market at that point, and just a lot of risk taking, my first experience in trying to take risks that are healthy and good for growth, but they’re a bit counterintuitive to the way that I was brought up. Um, trying to learn and understand the balance of what good risk taking looks like versus kind of bad risk taking. And that was my first venture into that. And thankfully it worked, which kind of buoyed or underpinned a lot of my future entrepreneurial side of me that that started to try to understand the balance of my upbringing and my safety and my savings versus the need, especially as an entrepreneur, to take risks that are calculated to grow. So so that was kind of when that all uh started playing itself out in me in my head.

[18:35] Sammie Ellard-King: So you you you you know you you’re doing really well. The business is growing. How are your how is your relationship with money outside of this? Did that change where you’re sort of exploring risk? Did it did your finances take a toll with this new found money? How are you managing that? No, not at all. I think I was managing it the same way with my finances that I was with my business. They were almost mirroring each other. I was such a saver, put money in the safest investments possible as I as I earned it. And as I was taking these challenges and these risks in my business, I was starting to open my mind to, well, maybe, you know, maybe my 401k isn’t the only vehicle for retirement growth down the road. Maybe that isn’t the only savings vehicle I need to look into. Um I was no one in my family has that I’m aware of uh is a real estate investor. Well, I I I’ve bought and sold and hold um and hold real estate now as investments, right? And that was something I started to look into, started to try to learn about, started to try to understand, and then would go on to buy real estate after that and stuff. So they almost mirrored each other. They didn’t change uh in any dramatic way, but just as I was learning and taking risks in the business, and more more often than not, not always, but more often than not, seeing that pay off, I was starting to do that with my own personal finances as well.

[19:57] Sammie Ellard-King: So cool. So you you’re exploring risk, but in a business sense. And I suppose that kind of leads us very much into um where you are today, because you did the photography business for many, many years, but you transitioned out. So what why and what was that catalyst for you? Um well, as my wife would say, about every seven to ten years I end up kind of adjusting my my focus or where I’m going. I I see it differently to be honest with you, but I guess that’s kind of marriage. Um I mean, you know, I think I’d gotten it, I sold the company after 12 years. Um, and uh it’s uh it for me it was a decision of my time. I had started a second business that did editing for professional photographers. And at the end of the day, I loved both and I believed in both, and they both scratched different itches. And once again, here we are back to that original almost origin story where I couldn’t do both anymore. The editing company had grown and was growing to the point where it needed my time and my energy more so than I could give it at that point. And obviously, the photo business, while it was very scaled out and did not require me every day and all that sort of stuff, still, if I was gonna stay there, I needed to stay there. And so by the same sort of evaluation process, I chose to sell my photo business and put my time and effort into what I thought was more of a future for me, which is this editing business. And so went on and did that. And then uh, I don’t remember how many years later, but maybe about a decade later, ended up selling my shares of the photo business to my business partner and again doing the same thing, which was turning my attention towards um online marketing and helping other businesses with their marketing through my agency.

[21:46] Sammie Ellard-King: Hey guys, Sammie here. Just a quick one. If you wouldn’t mind heading over to upthegains.co.uk, hitting the subscribe button in the top right hand corner, and entering your email into the box for your troubles. You will receive a free net worth calculator worth £25. Now, this net worth calculator, if you enter your assets and your liabilities, will tell you exactly how much you are worth today. Now, what you can also do is set yourself some financial goals and track your net worth along the way using this tool. It’s totally free. So head on over to upthegains.co.uk, hit the subscribe button, pop your email in, and you’ll be sent straight to your inbox in a matter of minutes. Now, back to the podcast. Now I mean, now your repertoire with websites and and 201, uh your digital marketing and online SEO business is like, you know, you’ve come such a long way from a photography business. Where was that kind of moment that you picked up uh You know, like, okay, this is for me. I love this stuff.

[23:58] Jared Bauman: This would be a personality quirk of mine, uh just to be transparent. We um the last company, the editing company I was at, we um we grew that on the back of of digital marketing. We were a little, we were pretty early to the to the game um of content marketing, uh, you know, email marketing, lead generation, um, nurturing leads into sales qualified leads, handing that over to a sales team, that whole, that whole thing. And um we did very well at it. We were really good at it. We were um uh good at all the aspects of it except for one thing, SEO. Um, we just never got that. We never did well with it. And um, it bugged me. It drove me nuts. And no matter how many times I tried to find someone to help with it or whatever, like I we just never were good at it. And it drove me to finally saying, fine, I’ll roll up my sleeves, I’m gonna figure this out myself. And um in almost that obsession to try to figure out SEO for for my editing company, I I I fell in love with it, became pretty good at it, um, really enjoyed the challenges of it. And then when it came time for me to leave that company, I just couldn’t get my mind off of starting an online marketing agency, but one that kind of really focused on this area that I had fallen in love with.

[25:12] Sammie Ellard-King: And now, you know, you’ve got the business, but you also started your own websites on the side. So do you want to give us a little talk about those? Yeah, that’s a great transition, actually, because um, when I was transitioning out of my editing business and into starting the agency, I did a lot of research on agencies and you know, why you might want to start one, might you might not want to start one. Um, and one of the biggest pieces of feedback I got from everyone I talked with was agencies are great, but it’s very difficult to manage your um your team and manage the the back end because it’s it’s a very up and down experience, uh, not only in terms of clients coming and clients going, in terms of what they’re ordering, how much they’re ordering, and inside of that, what specific deliverables that they order. And that has a huge implication on your staffing and on the team you have. And long story short, I was part of this community that does build websites on the side, monetises them, whether it’s through an affiliate relationship with like an Amazon associates, whether it’s through putting ads on the site or making your own products, whatever it is, you can build websites and monetise them. And a lot of the same things you do to build those websites were very similar when we look at what we delivered to clients. They were packaged differently, obviously, and for businesses that were selling their services. But I started our uh websites as uh basically a way to uh give our team at the agency something to work on when work was flow for certain clients or for certain deliverables. And so let’s say that one month we have a lot of uh content that we need to do for uh for a client. And then the next month, not as much. Maybe we didn’t even lose a client, maybe we didn’t even churn anybody, but we didn’t have as much work in that area. Well, now we had our own properties, our own websites that our team could go work on. And I like that because at the end of the day, that allowed us to grow a team, train them up, and keep them employed through up the ups and downs of agency life, but still putting them towards something that would provide value for the company and hopefully also grow as a secondary asset for the company.

[27:24] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s so cool. So you you’re basically creating your own properties, which you can grow as the business, but then you can pull the team into those when there’s a downtime in client work. That’s really smart, man. Like, you know, that keeps the team active, keeps them also motivated, and it’s quite cool because they’re watching the their own little assets grow within there too. I quite I love that. So for someone who’s like listening to this and thinking, wow, that’s super cool. Like, what goes into creating a blog and and and a website from sort of the first stages right through to sort of monetisation? Yeah, I mean, the most important thing you can do in the early days is picking uh what we call a niche or, you know, just a topic that uh is viable. Um couple things to look at. Um, first and foremost, do are people interested in it? You know, we would say is there search volume? Uh are people uh interested in that topic? Um are there a wide range of topics inside of that topic, you know? Uh do people have questions they need help with? Uh are there different levels of expertise you can gain as you dive more and more into that topic? Uh, do people spend money in the topic? You know, like you know, underwater basket weaving might be something you’re passionate about, but if nobody buys anything there, if there’s nothing to sell there, it’s kind of hard to monetise it, you know? But um it’s kind of the first thing you have to figure out is is uh a topic uh that people are interested in and that people by and large spend money on. Um I would argue it’s important to have an interest in it as well because um it’s a it’s a long, it’s a long play. And as a result, the less interested you are in it, the harder it is to stay focused on it. But really, once you kind of settle on the idea, you get a website, you get that launched, a lot of different ways to launch a website. WordPress is probably the simplest way, a lot of different tools out there to make that easier on you. You just have to write a lot of content. You have to cover all the topics that people are curious in and do it in a way that that makes them satisfied, that gets them their answer, that, that, that, that sets yourself apart as someone who brings something to the table that’s different, that’s new, that’s that’s that’s helpful. And over time, I’m making it very simple, but you know, for the sake of just a quick overview, over time, Google will start to to rank you and give you traffic, and that traffic can then be turned into dollars one way or another.

[29:37] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, yeah. That that you know, there are there is so much more to it. But the the real crux of it is you need to write content, and writing content in something that you enjoy is a lot easier than underwater basket wheeling, which I love that analogy. Um so if someone’s also thinking, right, side hustle time, I like the sound of that, how long does it normally sort of take someone to monetise if they’re saying writing, you know, if they’re in a nine to five job, let’s say, for example, and they think, right, I can knock out, you know, two or three blog posts a week, how long have you seen in your kind of experience with multiple websites over time? How long does that process normally take before they’re starting to make money? And also how much money could they expect to make? I’ll be real general, but in the name of trying to make sure that everybody gets a good framework for it, like six months would be a very quick path to success there. But a year is very realistic. If you stay focused, you um continue to just get better at it and you stay consistent. Because at that point, with the numbers that you shared, um, you’d be well over a hundred blog posts. And assuming that they’re all targeting, you know, different questions, different topics inside of your niche, you’re gonna have a good amount of content. And so I’d say within a year, you should be seeing traction, you should be seeing um daily uh clicks, people showing up with a website. You should be seeing thousands and thousands of page views every month. And I would hope at that point, again, depending on what niche you pick and how profitable and lucrative it is, but you should be making at least a thousand dollars a month at that point.

[31:09] Sammie Ellard-King: So that’s not small change by any standpoint. Like, you know, that’s that’s good, good money. In in UK terms, is about 800, 850 pounds a month, which you know could be a considerable difference of whether you’re going on a family holiday this year, whether you can cover the car expenses, you know, there’s all these types of things, and you’ve just basically built that in your evenings at home or on the weekends when you’ve got a bit of spare time to knock these things out, and that’s why blogging as a side hustle is just insane because after that year it can really take off. And as you know, you know, from hosting the you know, uh at the Niche Pursuits podcast, you you know, these numbers that people report are absolutely insane. You know, after two, three years, you could be making uh job replacement income and some uh on top of that. Um, if you stick at it, of course, it’s like that consistency thing, isn’t it?

[32:09] Jared Bauman: It’s you know, every it’s because like you said, interviewing people, you you get to hear all the success stories, right? Nobody wants to hear someone who spent two years and then gave up and then their website’s just sitting there dormant, you know. But uh by and large, like you said, if you stick to it most of the time, um, you know, and you’re open to a feedback loop, you kind of get to know other people in the space and you you’re open to hearing the areas that are going well and not going well. More than often, if you stick to it, you’re gonna see some results from it. And here’s the other thing I always tell people like, look at websites uh like this type of website that we’re talking about here, look at it like real estate. It really is very similar to an asset because you’re not just creating that monthly paycheck, akin to if you owned real estate and you got a monthly uh check from your tenants, but you’re also creating an asset that can be sold. And that’s the thing. These websites, there’s lots and lots of marketplaces and people interested in buying them. And they’ll sell for 30 or 40 times what you earn a month on it. And so you’re not just building a monthly paycheck, you’re also building an asset that, should you want to, you can sell. And so it really, I love to think about it in terms of investment real estate. Um, and to that point, for listeners that maybe don’t have a lot of time or don’t have the uh the patience to wait, you can also buy a website that’s already making money and then add to it to grow it and whatnot. So you can even buy into it, very much like you would buy an investment real estate property, try to find one that fits what you’re looking for, and try to find one that fits within your budget and what you want to be making every month, and then you can grow that and work off of that. So there’s a lot of different ways that this is a great side hustle that can have many different benefits for you long term.

[33:52] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Like that’s not something we’ve covered for. You can, there’s website um marketplaces out there you can go and just purchase a website for. Obviously, you know, they do sell at the multiples that you mentioned before. That’s 30 to 40 uh times monthly profits, which you know can put it out of reach for some people. But there are websites on there for you know three, four, five thousand pounds, which are a smaller site which are doing a higher couple of hundred quid a month, and then you can go in there and really add value and create content in that niche niche or niche, as you as you know that famous argument is um could be, but you know, you can really get that going um with a with a few hundred quid, um, which is which is super cool. And uh, you know, that’s why something that I I think people should look at if they if they if that’s something that they’re interested in. But I want to segue this slightly because something that you’re working on uh that we’ve never spoken about uh on this podcast before is something brand new to the table, um, and that’s the Amazon Influencer program. Um would you mind telling us all about it, Jared? Because you you know you’ve been nailing it.

[34:56] Jared Bauman: Yeah, sure thing. It is new. It’s new for me, but I think it’s new for a lot of people. Um it has been around for a couple years, this program. I’ve come to find out. I didn’t hear about it until the springtime of really of this year, 2023. Um, and so I’m on month three or four now. Uh the Amazon Influencer program is is wide-ranging, it covers actually a lot of stuff. Um, I’ll go through the area that I’m focused on, but just know there are several other areas that it touches on. The area I’m focused on is creating shoppable videos for Amazon product listings. And there’s a lot that happens inside of any product listing on Amazon. And the product listing would be like the page you could make the purchase on. So you’re saying you’re buying um, I don’t know, a coffee mug. That’s what I have in my hand right here, uh or maybe a tea mug since I am talking to the UK here. But um uh let’s say you want to go buy one, and there is there’s a shoppable page there, and that page has everything from the specs of the product to the customer reviews of the product. There is a section on most pages now that includes what’s called shoppable videos or videos created by influencers. And these are one, two, three-minute videos where someone who has a uh uh an approved influencer account just makes a very quick video about the product. It’s not a review. You could do a review. You don’t need to. You just want to show the product. And people love these videos because um they they get to see things about the product that the description andor the reviews don’t tell them. You know, like how big is this mug really? You know, when I say it’s a 20-ounce mug, is it taller or is it wider? Is it heavy? Is it comfortable? Um, when I heat up my coffee or my tea, does it stay warm for a while? So it’s really just sharing your experiences, showing the product. They’re very easy to make. You don’t even need to show your face on the video. It’s just literally a couple minute video that showcases things about the product that people can’t see. And when you do this, when you are an influencer and you make these videos, basically, as long as people watch about 30 seconds of the video and then make a purchase of any sort on Amazon, you get a commission for that. And um uh it’s really been wonderful. Uh, happy to share some of the results from the first few months, uh, happy to share how to get qualified. But suffice to say that I’m earning the same income with the influencer program several months in that I earn on a typical blog that I start maybe a year or two in. So it’s a much quicker path to earning side hustle income.

[37:28] Sammie Ellard-King: Okay, that’s so cool. So you’re creating videos, I imagine just of things around your house that, you know, if you look around your house, pretty much everything’s on Amazon, right? So it’s like you’re looking around, you’re like, okay, the fan, you know, the the you know, the stand over there, the lampshade, they’re all things that I could buy on Amazon. All you need to do is just check that out. And suddenly you walk around your house. I reckon you can probably find about a hundred products that you can suddenly make start and make videos for. So what does it take to get onto the program and and kickstart these things? Well, and to your point, Sammie, because I just want to jump in. The number I it’s ironic because you said the exact number that I thought. I’m like, I probably about a hundred things around my house. Um uh that was my thought. I was like, okay, I probably got about a hundred videos I can make from stuff I’ve I’ve got around my house from Amazon. And that is what I started doing. And what I’ve what I’ve what I’m at now is I’m at over 400 things in my house that are available on Amazon, which is embarrassing in many ways, but I think everyone listening, you you’d be a little shocked how much is available on Amazon. You don’t have to have purchased it on Amazon, it just has to be available on Amazon. And you’d be a little shocked once you dig in how many opportunities there are. Um, but um uh uh anyways, uh let’s see. Sorry, I blanked. What was your question about in follow-up to that first part?

[38:42] Sammie Ellard-King: Uh yeah. So see, yeah, no, I was saying basically um how do you get on that program? How do you qualify? Great question. Yeah, there’s a little bit of a barrier there. You have to have a qualifying social media following. Um and I guess it’s more than a following. They say it’s also engagement based, but uh it that you have to apply with one of four platforms, and you have to have a minimum number of followers plus engagement to be accepted. They want influencers, right? I’m using air quotes, everyone listening, like, you know, I am not an influencer. Let’s that’s why I I laugh that I when I share with people, I’m I’m in the Amazon Influencers program, and they’re like, you’re a 40-plus-year-old male that’s not very attractive. Like, how are you an influencer? I’m like, I know, it’s wild. So um, but yeah, so to qualify, you need to be um have a following of roughly like a thousand to five thousand people-ish. They don’t make it clear, it’s just vague. But it’s on either TikTok, uh, YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. And it’s one of those. So I had a YouTube account from one of my websites that I had built up. And it has um, it had, I think at the time that I qualified it, it had about 9,000 subscribers. It has pretty good engagement. So I applied with that. They tell you right away you can apply every day if you want. There’s no, you know, so if you’re growing a social media account and you get rejected, don’t worry, just keep going, and you can apply tomorrow if you want. And at some point, um, you get in. Word in the street is about a thousand is where you’re starting to get the ballpark of getting accepted. Some people get accepted lower or higher than others.

[40:09] Sammie Ellard-King: Sounds really interesting because a lot of people will have just even their mates and they’ve got over a thousand followers, and actually, so straight away, you know, you can then just utilize your Instagram channel with your mates and go and then start this Amazon influencer thing straight away. It seems like the ultimate side hustle. And what’s really interesting about it is that you know you’ve made the video once and you’re letting it run, and then you’re earning money off it, which means that it’s like one of the only real, truly passive kind of income streams that you could out there really. You’ve done it once, now you’re just reaping the benefits of it. So, so what’s the kind of um journey been like with the revenue? Yeah, so within the first 30 days, I was making over a thousand dollars, just over a thousand dollars. Um uh in month two, yeah, I know, right? 30 days in, thousand dollars. Like it’s pretty crazy to have that kind of uptick. Um, second month, I earned just shy of $3,000. So that would be about a hundred dollars a day, which is, you know, I don’t know, probably what, 80 pounds or so a day, um, uh, roughly speaking. But certainly, I mean, that that’s the kind of money that has an impact on your day-to-day. Um, the third month was actually a little bit lower, which speaks to the uh the nature of this still being pretty new. Um, you know, like you can have good months, you can have some down months. It was weird because I’ve actually had more videos on the platform that month than any of the previous months. But then now this month, which is the start of the fourth month when we’re recording, it’s um it’s already trending significantly higher. So there’s a lot of seasonality. Amazon’s still figuring out where they want the videos, where they don’t want the videos. So I think, you know, not to create a contrast, but if you look at a blog and a lot of the things we talked about starting a blog, much slower to get going. Much slower, right? Like you’re talking about $1,000 a month. I said maybe after a year. And then here I got $1,000 a month in my first month. So the blogging path is much slower, but you don’t typically see quite as many oscillations in your monthly income as I’ve seen with Amazon influencers. And you’re also building an asset that you have control over more and more so, and you can even go on to sell. Whereas I can’t sell anything with my Amazon influencer account. When I’m, you know, the day I’m done is the day I’m I’m done. I don’t own that. So just different platforms, different things to think about. But, you know, um uh it’s it’s it’s really an interesting model or idea to kind of, if you’re looking for that side hustle to get you some of that quick, some of those quick wins, Amazon Influencer is fantastic. And then you can leverage some of that added income to then maybe move on to the next thing that you want to grow or to the more of a long-term side hustle, or maybe give you the bandwidth to be able to leave your job to start something bigger. So there’s a lot of things that come into play, but certainly that out of the gate, the results have been so quick and so um so really just really good with the influencer program.

[43:01] Sammie Ellard-King: I suppose your uh photography background is coming into play here where you’re like setting up these videos to make them look good. But I’ve seen ones where they’re just handheld, like and the guy’s just got the thing in their hands and they’re just moving it around and saying a few things, and you know, they’re not like overproduced, they’re one take, like you know, they might cut it sometimes where they’ve messed up a line or something they wanted to say that it wasn’t true. But you know, that’s so easily stitched together on any of these like really basic editing programs, and like they’re not it’s not like it’s like perfect in any way, and that’s something that where I think that like anyone these days with an iPhone camera has got everything they need to go out and make this happen. If you’ve got a thousand followers and an iPhone camera, you know, Amazon influencer program is really something that could be huge for you, like as you as you say, you’ve got tons of things in your house, but it is certainly competitive. I imagine like a TV or an Xbox is going to be quite competitive, right? There’s gonna be quite a few people going after that. So where have you made the money on the most sort of where what what products have been the sort of interesting ones for you? Or yeah, if you don’t want to talk about those, that what style of product?

[44:11] Jared Bauman: Yeah, no, you’re you’re 100% correct. I mean, anyone can do this. Um, and I have not taken a very calculated approach to it. To your point, um, if this were not just a off-the-wall side hustle that I love to share about with my newsletter and my audience, you know, like I like I like doing side hustles. And um when I see something that looks attractive, I want to go for it, not just because I want to do it, but because I know that the people that I that I interact with are also interested. But if you want to take a more measured approach, exactly to what you talk about, like you kind of want to go look at the product. Maybe you have A versus B product in your house and you’re like, which one do I want to go after? Well, you know, I have noticed that higher price products do make you more money in the end. Yeah, you don’t sell as many of them with your shoppable video, but the commissions are high enough to compensate for that. And so I do have found generally speaking that higher price products are better to focus on. Not that you shouldn’t focus on lower price products, but the high-priced ones are where I could routinely see the bulk of my income coming in. Um, and yeah, some competitive research. Like if you have a product and you, you know, going back to my coffee mug and I were to go look at this exact product on Amazon and I don’t see a video or I see one or two videos, typically speaking, that means if I make a video, it’ll be there tomorrow. And so uh trying to go after topics or, well, not topics, products, where there just isn’t very much um uh interest. And so then you’re really trying at that point to go after um topics that are purchased a lot that don’t have shoppable videos. And you’re trying to find that sweet spot. And so you can kind of go like, oh, this product has a thousand reviews and one shoppable video. This product has 10,000 reviews, but all six spots are filled. With video. This product has 10 reviews and there’s no videos. You know, like in that case, I’m thinking that 1000 review product probably sells a lot. That’s how it’s gotten a lot of reviews. And there’s, but there’s plenty of bandwidth still available there. So, anyways, that’s just a little window into how you pick. But remember, I didn’t do any of that. I literally just said, I’m going to do this Amazon influencer thing. I’m going to try to crank out as many videos as I can. I’m just going to walk around my house and I’ll make a video about everything I see that I bought on Amazon. Bam. That’s all I did to get the results I’m sharing.

[46:26] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s incredible, man. You know, it’s got my cogs thing. Like I’m thinking in my drawer downstairs, I’ve probably got like tons of gadgets which are just sitting there. I’ve got a shed full of garden tools. I’ve got, you know, gadgets for the car. There’s so many things like you can think about that. Like actually, you know, they’re all on Amazon. And my whole house is full of, you know, we get probably one or two Amazon deliveries a week for stuff that we’re buying. And my girlfriend, uh Charlotte, she buys stuff for work off there. So we get quite a lot of stuff coming through for there. So that’s quite interesting because she’s in a in a quite an interesting field. So the you know, the products on there I don’t think would have been like really sought after. So it gets you kind of thinking. So um that’s I, you know, I to your point to jump on this.

[47:13] Jared Bauman: To your point, happy to share some of the trending ones that have done well. And they’re as bizarre as you can imagine. Um, some of my photo gear from my photo business that I I still have because I’m still I still love photography, you know. Um so some of my photo gear, the expensive, you know, stuff that I I own from a professional standpoint, um, has done well. Um, and you could say, oh, well, that’s because you’re an expert, Jared. You know, maybe this Amazon influencer thing isn’t for me. Yeah, well, I have a sunshade that sells several a day and they’re over $100. Um, I have some different equipment for my travel trailer that uh has been selling like crazy all summer as people are looking to get travel trailer stuff. Um, there’s like uh a shoe cover that we have for our shoes when it rains. Um I didn’t even know we owned it, but I found it in the closet. I made a video of it. I think it was, I’m not even sure it was a minute long. And um very low price product that sells a ton. So really spreads the gamut. And again, you’re not asked to be an expert on this. So again, if you’re thinking, well, I, you know, I don’t, I’m not, I’m not an expert in ceramic coffee mugs. I can’t make a video about it. And I just want to reference back like, you’re not asked to. You’re just asked to make a video as a customer sharing your experience with it, what it looks like, what it feels like. You don’t need to, you know, get fancy. Your iPhone works great. You don’t need to have a lot of video and photo experience, although that has helped me, certainly, and my speed and my delivery. You just need to be able to talk candidly about something and and and whatnot. It’s so, you know, very, very, uh, very wild, off the beaten path type of stuff that’s selling, but people, you know, it just speaks to the fact that you don’t have to be an expert in this stuff to really make a good video that helps people.

[48:49] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s like it’s as you say, like you kind of can, I’m sure as well, it’s the same with like anything you do in life, the first couple are gonna be terrible, but then you’re gonna get into a swing of it and you’re like, okay, now I understand what these people are gonna want to hear. But also you can jump on Amazon and see what people are doing and go, oh, okay, cool, this is what I’m gonna do, and get yourself a good framework from that. Um, like, you know, uh I’m just thinking out of the box here, but like an air fryer, for example, it’s like, you know, the the the handle and you pulling it out is is you know, it’s X, Y, Z round. And you know, if I put a bunch of carrots in here or you know, these potatoes, I could probably make enough for two or three people. Any more than that, it won’t do. And then there’s these types of things by you holding it, you’ll know. And then that person’s then gonna go, oh cool, that’s perfect for me, or I need the bigger size, it’s not perfect for me. So if um quick question, just something popped into my head. If they buy that product and then then they go and buy three, four, five other things on Amazon, which you know we all end up doing, it’s like the best thing for constantly buying stuff that you don’t need. Do you get paid on those as well, or is it just that product?

[50:00] Jared Bauman: Well, this is uh this is a good segue into a broader topic, which is they tell us very little. So a lot of what we say as influencers is either educated guesses or things we’ve kind of picked up on as little com the little community that I understand there to be around this. Um, from what I understand, you get a commission on their shopping cart that at that point in time. Um that’s what I understand. With that being said, they do have a report, a dashboard that you log into, similar to the associates program, where you can sell affiliate products off-site. They designate that as off-site. So if you’re in a website and you write about hiking and you recommend a hiking boot and you say buy this hiking boot on Amazon, that would be an off-site sale because you recommended it to them off-site. These shoppable videos are considered on-site because your video is placed on Amazon’s site. And just the same as associates and the off-site purchases, they tell you everything that is purchased under your uh affiliate ID. And even though from what I hear and from what I can piece together, we’re supposed to get the commissions on other products, I think. I don’t see many products that I’m getting commissions on that I didn’t make videos about. So I don’t know.

[51:18] Sammie Ellard-King: Cool. But look, like $3,000, £2,600 in three months is a lot of money. You know, that’s if you can manage to average that out, let’s say you average that out at £2,000 a month over a year, you know, that’s £24,000 for making some videos around your house. I suppose my last question on this, real Jared, is like, what happens if John next door gets wind of this and he’s like got all of the same products as me and makes videos two, three, four weeks later? Do I get replaced? And how does that work? And how have you seen that working? Uh every day that I check my numbers, uh, I notice two things. Number one, a lot of the products that I sold a lot of yesterday, I sold a lot of today. Number two, almost every day, something I sold a lot of yesterday, I don’t sell much of today. And what I’ve started to notice now, three, four months in, is back in month one, something I sold a lot of, and then stopped selling much of in month two, all of a sudden I’m selling a lot of again. So, all that to say, there’s a lot of oscillation, volatility in terms of what videos they put in the carousel and what they don’t. I don’t see any evidence that they have much in the way of performance metrics. Uh, they do tell you how long your video has been watched on average, and so they certainly have the ability to say, hey, there’s eight videos available to us right now, and we can only put six in our uh allocated spots. So let’s put the six that get watched the most or that have the highest conversions. So over time, my belief is they’ll start doing that if they’re not already doing that. And that speaks to like, hey, you know, make a good video. Like you don’t, you don’t need to go over the board, but don’t make a junk video just because you don’t have any competition. And I think that over time, the people who make truly helpful videos that actually show that you’re trying to help people out rather than just slam out another video. I think over time they will win because we’re already seeing that they have those metrics available. But yeah, I do not understand why sometimes my video is there and sometimes it’s not. And what makes that all work and what makes that engine happen? There’s not a lot of transparency yet that I or anybody I’ve talked to has found.

[53:29] Sammie Ellard-King: Well, it would make a lot of sense from Amazon’s perspective if you know John’s video does better than mine because you know that the customer buys 10 times more products than when they watch his video versus mine, then why would they show mine as much? And so you do have a responsibility to try and do as best as you can. But as you say, they’re not like YouTube heavy cuts, edits, swooshes, and sound effects. They’re they’re good, they’re good solid videos, and really what you’re trying to do is showcase the product to the best of your ability and everything that you know about it, um, just from having it in your house, which you probably are using already, so you’ve got a pretty good idea, which makes it so much easier. I love this. I absolutely love this. Um, Jared, I’m conscious of time here, but this has um been an absolute blast. Like we’ve we’ve flown through, like, you know, entrepreneurship, blogging, now Amazon Influencer program, you know, there’s there’s there’s no side hustle that you seem to have not covered in some way or form. Um I just want to ask this question because you’ve come so far in business and you you know you you you’ve done all of these things. Um who who do you look up to? Who who drives you?

[54:43] Jared Bauman: Yeah, uh the answer isn’t probably the sexiest of answers. It’s uh probably no one that anyone’s heard of. It’s uh my neighbor, it’s uh someone at my church, it’s uh a fellow business owner who is uh doing certain things that I’m not doing. I mean, to me, um, you know, business is wrapped in intertwined with the rest of my life. And um, you know, I’m an entrepreneur because it I believe it gives me more ability to be a better dad. I believe it gives me more freedom to be a better person. I believe it gives me more time and energy to put towards serving my community and my church. And so my inspirations are the people who have figured out how to do all this and be a better dad, who have figured out how to balance the stress or the amount of work that uh being an entrepreneur takes and still serve their community, who have figured out how to like have a healthy marriage and take time off, but still be able to be a good employer. Like these are the people that I do have, thankfully in my life, like mentors or you know, neighbors or just people that I interact with. That’s the people to me that are inspirational. I look up to, like someone who’s figured out how to um, you know, take every Friday afternoon off to go to the beach with his kids and still run a successful business. Someone who is able to take three weeks off in the summer and truly disconnect, someone who’s able to just truly disconnect every night and not be missing an action as a parent. These are the types of, I guess in my later years, doing this 20 plus years now, these are the types of people that I look to for inspiration, honestly.

[56:17] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, I love that. You know, I wasn’t expecting you to say that at all. You know, people call out figures as their most thing. But actually, you know, it’s the everyday individual you’re looking at and looking at how you can emulate them and bring that into your own life. It’s that’s beautiful. I love it, man. Um, where can people find you? Where’s the best place uh to come and say hi to Jared and you know learn about all these things because you’re posting about them all the time. So I think you know, people get a lot of value out of following you. Yeah, I mean, I probably most active on Twitter, uh, and my handle is at Jared Bauman, just my name. Um, you know, the agency is 201creative.com. So, you know, uh, we serve you know businesses large and small who are looking to grow their their website and really their their marketing presence, but you can find out any more information about who we serve and how we handle that there. And then if you’re into side hustles, weekend growth is I finally had to break it off and put give it a home. So weekendgrowth.com is where I share about side hustles and you know, we do a weekly newsletter and um you know just try to share whatever I’m doing and and what’s working and what’s not working over there.

[57:25] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh man, awesome! Yeah, no, I I absolutely love your newsletter. Um every time it comes in, it’s one of my only ones. So I’m not like, oh, okay, I know I star it and I save it and I wait until I’ve got a good time to read it because you know that it opens your eyes to so much possibility and uh you know some of the case studies and stuff you’re doing on there are wicked, man. So yeah, thank you for bringing all this type of content. And yeah, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Sammie. It’s been a real treat. And um, I’m uh I’ve yeah, I think, you know, for a while I struggled with the concept of side hustling because I think there’s a lot of uh good information out there about what happens when you split your focus. But I’ve come to learn over 20 years that for me, and I think for a lot of people, it’s really healthy to have a side hustle, something that you can put different types of energy towards, something that can financially create freedom for you down the road. It certainly has for me. And I think you can do that in balance with maybe your main thing. And I think it’s healthy to pursue that balance, but healthy to pursue a side hustle if um if you can find the bandwidth. So happy to share about it. Hopefully, for some one person, it might help them.

[58:33] Sammie Ellard-King: Awesome, man. Thanks so much. And uh yeah, we look forward to chatting again today. Sounds good. Talk soon.