The year was 2011.

Side Hustle Nation’s Nick Loper had an idea: Add to his existing expertise in the virtual assistant space and build some affiliate income.

And so virtualassistantassistant.com was born.

Year 1: $1000 in earnings. That was enough to convince him this was a viable idea.

Here’s his story.

His post/outline of his story offers plenty of value, but running the full 46 minute podcast is well worth your time.

Just a few takeaways…

• What worked well–early on–was ‘trying to crowdsource a critical mass of honest user reviews’.
• “One thing that did work on the SEO front was not a lot of people were creating dedicated content about hiring on these different platforms.”
• Close to 90% of his traffic was organic.

Pete McPherson from Do You Even Blog plays guest-host and steers Nick’s review of the 9 1/2 year process.

Pete’s own takeaways from the interview:

• Patience. You’re in it for the long haul.
• Scratch your own ‘niche’.
• Diversify your income streams.

**As always with Nick’s podcasts, if you’re short on time, I suggest using his convenient table of contents to guide your listening.

---

My Manifesto