Tod's Side Hustle: Mastering Digital Marketing with a Podcast and Newsletter

Hi, I’m Tod and I host a fast-paced daily 10-minute podcast called Today In Digital Marketing. In each episode I cover everything you may have missed in the world of digital marketing, e-commerce, and social media that day. This goes out to thousands of listeners in the digital marketing sphere to help them stay up to date with all the constant changes going on in the digital marketing world.

I also write a newsletter which covers the same thing.

After 10 years building websites for clients, I broke out onto the public speaking circuit and spent 20 years giving keynotes at marketing conferences around the world.

From there, I started a full-time digital agency (engageQ.com) which is still running today and then I also created this side project of the podcast (TodayInDigital.com). After a few episodes, many of my listeners asked if they could get the podcast in a newsletter format as well, so I also created the TodayInDigital email newsletter which both work hand-in-hand with each other.

The podcast and newsletter are still both technically side projects, but we do have three people working on it now, so it’s starting to turn into a business of its own. Since it's a daily production, there's a lot to be done and having a team work with me on this makes things much more manageable while still providing quality content every day.

Since these are daily releases, it’s beneficial on the monetisation front as we can fill up our ad inventory and earn much more than what we’d do from a weekly release. The monetisation allows us to produce more content, and in return the content provides us with higher earnings.

It may sound obvious, but I define success with two metrics:

1). Profitability.
2). Job enjoyment.

Literally, our success is measured on whether we're making money. I don't care as much about specific margins, as long as it's in the black. However, most importantly, success is really centred around whether everyone on the team is enjoying their work and sustaining a healthy work-life balance.

My advice for starting out is to try to do it for a year, push hard, with a high focus on growth — and (this is the most important) DO NOT CHECK YOUR NUMBERS in that first year.

It’s difficult but don't look at your subscriber numbers, don't look at revenue, just focus 100% on putting out a quality product. After one year, then you can peek the numbers and then decide if it’s right for you.

Our newsletter is TodayInDigital Marketing and the podcast is TodayInDigital.com.

You can find all my socials, like LinkedIn and Mastodon here.