Oh, what's up? What's up, Nick? Oh, Loper here. Welcome to this side hustle show because without struggle, there's no progress at tip to Frederick Douglas for that one.

It is 2022 and this is the audio version of my Q3 slash Q4 progress report and annual review in this special bonus episode.

I'm going to attempt to highlight some of my most important projects and the impact that those had on the bottom line as is often the case.

This was a year of trying to make incremental improvements rather than wholesale changes and maybe that's a fixed mindset thing at me.

Do not say what could I do to 10X this thing, but in any case stick around to hear about my biggest wins of the year.

What I've been working on lately, my favorite purchases and books and more ready. Let's do it.

All right, my nine biggest business wins of the year. The first is what I'm calling Saturday resends.

And so this was a email marketing tip that I picked up from Pat Flynn early in the year where I developed a process to resend my weekly newsletter, which typically goes out on Thursdays a couple days later to everybody who didn't open it the first time around.

And typically I used to see maybe 22 to 30% open rates on the high end. I would love to hit 30% consistently.

But doing this simple extra step has bumped the overall open rate to over 40% pretty consistently.

I typically change the subject line, change the opening of that message and emceeing thousands of incremental opens every week.

So it's a lot more people being exposed to the content. Hopefully that gets the word amount flywheel start to spin a little more positively.

So that was a big win for me Saturday resends. The second thing is this you might also like section of the email newsletter started adding that to the bottom of each newsletter that goes out typically including three curated links to interesting articles or resources that I found either mine or other people's.

And it just gives me this opportunity to highlight other people's content events even promote affiliate offers in there, plus there's been a lot of fun over the course of each week to just keep an eye out for interesting stuff to include there.

That was a win number two number three is a stupid simple marketing win. This has been underlining links on the website talked about this a few weeks ago on the show.

Either my theme didn't have them underlined by default or I disabled it years ago for aesthetics for a long time links were just a different text colors like the green kind of call to action color on the website.

So they were a different color, but they weren't underlined since underlining them, which was a simple CSS change. I'm seeing an 8% increase in outbound clicks and a 12% increase in affiliate commissions very easy marketing win in my case.

Number four is bench. So bench is a remote bookkeeping service that I signed up for in late 2020. And so 2021 this was my first full year of doing zero bookkeeping and it's something that I honestly should have let go of a long time ago.

The reason I didn't is because I'm the weird person who actually likes keeping track of all the revenue and expenses, but it was definitely distracting and time consuming.

And every time an email notification would come in, hey, somebody paid you on PayPal, like I'll go into my spreadsheet and I can tell you up to the minutes, you know what the profit and loss of the business was for the year for the month.

It was just unnecessary, right? And so that's kind of my early on. That was my beef with bench is like, well, you know, it takes some some time after the end of the month to tell you tell you what you made.

And so I was kind of like, I want to know, you know, mid month reports, all that stuff can't really do that. But I think it's still been a worthwhile trade off like removing this stuff off my plate.

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