The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The Most Overlooked AI Side Hustle Of 2026 - Ep. #328
Episode Date: August 21, 2026Check out my newsletter at �...�https://TKOPOD.com and join my community at https://TKOwners.com━Mike Stewart is a 30 year music and radio guy who figured out something nobody else in local marketing is doing. He writes jingles for plumbers, roofers and pest control guys, then runs them as skippable YouTube ads in their zip code. Everybody skips. That is the whole point. They already heard the name.He sold the same pest control jingle over a hundred times at two grand a pop. One of his clients got eight million skips in Abilene, Texas for almost nothing. Another went from zero to 80 grand in a summer off a one page website and $250 a month in ads.The part that matters for you: he used to need a recording studio and a session singer in Nashville to pull this off. Now it is Suno and ElevenLabs and about fifteen minutes. Which means anybody can do it, and there are 31 million small businesses in this country who have no idea it exists.Mike's site: https://localinternetpresence.comEnjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
We've made millions of dollars.
I don't see anybody else doing this.
300 customers is a million dollar business,
and every bit of it can be outsourced.
It's a great side hustle.
This year, for the first time of my life,
everything that I have been doing that took my skill set can be done by AI.
And it's scalable.
It's never been scalable before.
We created a simple website with one call to action,
and we went from zero to 80 grand this summer.
Holy cow.
Yeah.
From that new website?
Well, that's a one-page website.
So I just ran across the godfather of the internet marketing world.
He's a baby boomer.
He flew here to my house in Texas from his house in Nashville to talk to me all about making money, selling a very specific thing to local business owners.
Or if you're already a local business owner, how you can explode your business through a little clever tactic that I've never heard of anyone doing.
It's simple.
It's based on human psychology, and it just works.
A few years ago, you needed to pay thousands of dollars and have a bunch of studio equipment like
this to make it work.
But now you can use AI tools to make it happen.
Please enjoy.
So tell me what your business is.
The business that, well, I have multiple businesses.
But the main business that I have been doing for about 15 years is helping small, local
service businesses.
And what I mean by service business is a tire store, a pest control, HVAC, roofing.
Businesses that people have a problem.
My roof is leaking.
My toilet is leaking.
I got bugs in a house.
That's a problem.
And they need to find somebody they know I can trust or at least trust that's going to solve their problem.
And then they're willing to do business with it.
So it boils down to the basics of most local small service businesses don't think in the lines of traffic and conversion.
Traffic and conversion is not that geeky of a term.
But at the end of the day, I actually make it as simple as possible.
traffic is people who find you on whatever device they're looking, which is 90% cell phones for
local businesses. And when they find you, are they within three seconds of finding you
convinced that you're the person to do business with? So that's conversion. The conversion that a local
business needs is that this guy has a leaky toilet. I'm the plumber to fix it. Let me call
and book an appointment to solve my problem. Then that turns into a conversion of business.
So give me an example of a customer you have and what problem you solve for them.
Like it's a...
That I solve or the problems they solve.
Either one.
Well, the problem that I see that is so massive is that, and of course, web designers will
probably not like hearing this, but most people build award-winning websites.
And what they don't build is high converting websites.
You can, when the bounce rate for most local business websites is 90%.
They never go deep past the first page.
Some people don't even go past the Google.
business profile. And just so our viewers aware, a bounce rate is the percentage of people that
hit a website never click through to that website and just end up leaving, right? Well, according to the
new Google stats, anybody who doesn't say 10 seconds is a bounce. Even if they click to another page.
If they click to another page, that's considered not a bounce. Okay. So it's kind of like,
let's leave this place. Let's bounce out of here. That's what it means. So the point being is,
if you got somebody to your marketing information, if you don't convince them to stay longer than 10
seconds or take another action like look at another page or tap to call or any of those other
conversion strategies, then you're considered a bounce rate and how you got them there.
There's only three ways to get people to your website.
Paid traffic, organic, free traffic, or borrowed traffic, an affiliate or somebody else
sends you to your website.
And so small businesses in the masses don't understand traffic and conversion.
So it's like you could get a lot of people to your local business website.
But if somebody's confused and they don't understand who you are and why you're the best at what you do and something that convinces them, the data is out there, they're going to bounce.
And it's not going to result in a transaction.
But what a lot of web designers will do is they'll build what's called hero image websites that have beautiful photography.
Wasted real estate.
Wasted real estate, hard to read text.
And what marketing information or reviews or social proof that this is the guy to solve your.
your problem is usually under the fold and people never scroll down.
So therefore, beautiful websites that win awards for the web designer.
I've heard it over and over.
I spent $5,000 on my plumbing website and I can't track one piece of business to it.
It's usually a negative indicator how good their website is it converting.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
So I help small business owners, I say, do you want to see your business grow?
Yeah.
And if they say, I have all the business I need, then they're not a customer.
Yeah.
But any business owner that I've ever met, I've never met a millionaire that says I want to make less money.
Yeah.
So my business is to show them and analyze the things they could do to improve their conversion or the results that they get from their online presence.
And also, the reason I call my business local internet presence is because if you're a small business, I was just driving down the road here.
And there's the painting place.
Yeah, right down the road.
Right down the road.
They're a prospect.
Yeah.
They don't know what they don't know what they don't know.
So the business opportunity is that when you can show definitively that this is a problem,
and if we solve this problem, you'll make more money.
That's the business I've created.
Increasing your local internet presence by increasing your traffic or the people who find you
and increasing your conversion, the people who spend money with you.
And everything else is fluff, in my opinion.
So the last customer of yours that you spoke with, for whatever reason, tell me what type of business that is and what you do for them.
All right. Well, I've got, in my business, which anybody could do, I have five areas that are unique that I don't see other people doing.
There's some things that have a little bit digital agencies.
The competitors to what I do are called digital marketing agencies.
And number one, most people ignore their Google business profile.
That's where you see the reviews.
That's Google Maps.
It used to be called Google Maps.
It's now the GMB, Google Business Profile.
And never paying attention to that, never responding, never adding photographs and videos, not replying to the reviews.
Is Google sees that you're ignoring it and the world sees you're ignoring?
You know, I've seen customers that have 30 reviews and seven of them are one star.
They can't calculate the amount of business they're losing by not paying attention to it.
I've had customers say, well, what do I got to do to get rid of the bad reviews?
There's nothing you can do.
Just drown them out with Good Review.
Drown them out.
Well, that's obvious to you.
But the owners of these small local businesses, they don't think like that.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm the baby boomer who's been doing it for 25 years and seeing it.
You know, I remember when the only social media site was Friendster.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I saw my space go up and down.
You know, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, you know, didn't exist when I started.
Yeah.
But social media is where too many people, I believe, focused too much attention and they ignore the five things.
So number one, optimize the Google My Business profile by telling a business owner what he needs to do.
You need to get more reviews.
I don't know how to get reviews.
Here's a way.
Here's a card we can get a review.
You ask reviews.
You can't pay for them.
You have to do everything and anything.
You ask everybody to leave you a five-star review.
You know, are you networking?
And I'm going to get into why.
In fact, I listened to a great podcast of years with a young man who's built his whole AI business by networking.
networking is so important in the local business world.
So anyway, number two is I've heard local businesses, can you help us with our social media?
And I go, well, think about what the word means.
YouTube is social media.
Your blog, your podcast is social.
Content that can be shared is social media.
All Facebook and Instagram and TikTok did is they got huge because they made it easy from your phone to create content.
post it and share it. But media is video, audio, text. Social means that it's real easy to share with
your friends. But if the only social media you do as a business owner is your Facebook business page,
your Facebook posts, TikTok, and Instagram, which I'm not saying you shouldn't do,
you're leaving out the most important, which is blogging and podcasting. And here's the reason why.
When you blog, it gets picked up by all the search engines.
blog posts on your website that you own with a website address that you pay for,
not something that belongs to Facebook, Instagram, they all own the meta.
You don't own them.
They control it.
They can change the rules tomorrow.
But when you own your own web address, then it's not going to change because you own it.
And when you post content to your own web address, that gets indexed in Google.
So what are the disconnects with people blogging?
And you're talking about what my business is.
If the second tier is creating a blog and a podcast on a regular basis, it's, you know, most podcasts fail because people will do three episodes, not see any results and quit.
Yeah.
It's the consistency.
And I have a case study where we've made millions of dollars in the pest control industry with a partner of mine.
It was called Pest Control Marketing Podcast.
And it was geared towards people who were starting or owning small pest control companies.
And our whole thing is you want to grow your business, you need to listen to us.
And then the podcast gave us a steady flow of customers on autopilot for years and years.
Digital marketing customers, agency customers?
People, yes, but the reason I've listened to your content, you guys know what you're talking about,
I want you to help me grow my business.
And they don't know what that looks like.
Yeah.
So unbeknownst to them, I came up with these, and that's what's been tested for the last five years.
But when you're working with guys that own pest control agencies, you're going to say, you need to write a blog post.
I don't know what's to say.
Well, name 50 problems that your pest control company solves.
Well, we kill bugs.
No, no.
Break those bugs down into bed bugs.
Rats, mice.
I said, there are problems that people are searching for, and you need to create content about that.
Well, I don't know what to write.
I don't like the right.
Well, then a good mentor of mine years ago, he says, it's easier to record and transcribed than it is to write.
It's a shorter distance from your brain to your tongue than it is from your brain to your hands.
So you write it, you speak it and be truthful and then transcribe it.
Now you have an audio file or a podcast and you also have a blog post.
Yeah.
And you'll be amazed how good it is when you transcribe some, you know, so I'd say,
what are subterranean termites and why are they bad?
Yeah.
Well, when they got a question like that, you can't shut them up.
They know the information.
the world of small business service business owners are not proficient at creating content.
So I had to coach them in what to do.
I assume you've heard of Gary Vaynerchuk.
I met Gary many years ago.
How did he build VaynerMedia?
He did a WordPress blog every day for three years on Wine at Wine Library TV.
His books talk about how to grow your business with your passion by creating content.
He built his audience.
His mom and dad's wine store went from $2 million to $50 million
because they could have bought wine anywhere in the world,
but they wanted to order it from him because he was the wine authority.
And then what he learned from content marketing,
this is all based on he has a thing,
which is if you search the Gary Vaynerchuk content model,
it's called a Jab Jab,
Jab, Hook.
Well, it's pillar content to microcontent.
Okay.
And that's what this business is based on for people who would never know how to do a podcast,
never know how to write a blog post.
All they know is they want a website that the phone rings.
So that's number two is like I said, content marketing.
But number three is paid advertising and making sure that you go to a conversion landing page.
A word like landing page to a pest control guy means nothing.
Well, it's Mr. Bug Guy.
It's when somebody clicks on a blue link in an ad, they land on a page.
And if that page addresses specifically the problem that they're encountering, then the conversion will go up.
Yeah.
So we developed landing pages.
The homepage is a general landing page.
And we created a model, a very simple model for In the Fold that has worked 15 years since I've been doing this.
Headline, we use the same headline over and over again.
You know, we will give you the most thorough, amazing, unbelievable pest control service.
guaranteed or it's free.
That headline got phone calls.
Over and over.
Over and over again.
Probably did 100 websites like that.
And could you plug that headline into other businesses?
We will make your house cold or it's free.
We will fix your leaky toilet or...
We will fix...
Your roof will not leak.
We guarantee it or it's free.
And of course what we discovered, nobody ever asked for maybe one or two people.
They just want to feel safe.
Are you familiar with Dan Kennedy?
And I didn't know if it's okay to mention names.
Yeah.
I've spoken on Dan.
stage 10, 15 times. I'm the guy. Have you ever heard the term VSL? Video sales letter. Okay, well, I
invented that with my friend Jim Edwards 20 years ago. That's awesome. Because Jim was a gym, several people
in that internet marketing world that I came from were believers in direct response marketing
taught by Dan Kennedy. And they, in fact, they used to speak on how ugly one page websites,
sales letter websites made more money than million-dollar sites, even in e-commerce. And I told Jim,
because I came from radio and television and music, that flash video was brand new at the time.
And I said, Jim, we can shoot a video. Instead of having a sales letter, we have a headline,
a video that does the same information the sales letter does with a call to action, and then testimonials
are social proof. So it's a model, headline, video, social proof, sales letter. And then everything else
if you want to or not.
And if you get traffic to that formula, even though it's considered ugly and maybe even dated,
it still works on a cell phone screen.
Yeah.
Because you're saying, you got this problem.
I'm the solution.
Watch my video.
And I'll prove to you in 45 seconds or less that I'm the guy to tap the call.
Yeah.
So since Jim Edwards and Dan Kennedy and all these mentors of mine called it a sales letter,
I said, well, that's a video sales letter.
So Jim and I, we sold half a million dollars of a course called website video secrets.
God, it's so dated.
But you can go to YouTube and see, we sold it with a video sales letter.
We sold half a million dollars of that course.
So I know video sales letters work.
And I never got documented, but I believe we were the first to ever say on stage.
Don't create a sales letter website.
Create a video sales letter with a sales letter.
And they still work today.
Because people will watch before they read.
Yeah.
It's just human nature, all generations.
So anyway, the video sales letter optimized.
Then I discovered number four because I came from the music industry.
I owned a recording studio for 20 years in Atlanta.
You're too young to remember, but we had a hit record called Pac-Man Fever.
I was in a band that had a number one record.
I learned the music business early on.
That's why in my retirement years, and I'll tell you what I think retirement is,
I hate doing that, but I did it anyway.
I moved to Nashville because I love the music industry.
And the music industry is just they can't understand that streaming and the internet is what you have to master.
I've been in meetings in Nashville.
I said, you're not in the music business anymore.
The music business in the 60s, 70s, 70s, 80s was selling widgets, vinyl, CDs, cassettes.
That's not a business anymore.
That's a novelty.
The world gets their music on their phone through streaming.
They get their information.
Streaming is the future.
And of course, AI is the next wave.
And I told people that you're in the fan building business.
And you can build, you know, one of the things that I saw, you've built a following with this content.
And the content's good and it's helpful.
So you deserve to grow and grow and grow.
Well, that's what radio and television was always been.
But what I did discover, because I knew radio, in the Internet, there is a word for the phrase that people
put in a search engine that what is the first results page? And that's called SERP. You've heard of
SERP terms? Yeah, it's an acronym. I don't know what it stands for. Well, I'm going to share it with the
audience. Search engine results page. If people type in, fix my toilet, what comes up? Yeah. Paid results,
organic results. You can find out what SERP terms will bring you business. But there's one
Serp term people totally ignore. Everybody has two to three, two to three to four words that they
dominate a search engine on. Do you know what yours? Yours are? Like for local businesses?
No, well, you're for yours. I checked yours. You're worldwide. Okay. Big dev. Well, I know the corner,
here's one of the challenge. You can typo your name, the corner office, and you still come up.
Okay, that's good. Okay. But the fact that you've got to spell your name with a K and a, you're
O-E-R.
Yeah.
But you dominate the first page of Google for the corner office.
Yeah.
So your SERP terms for your business, whether it's a worldwide business, Chris Corner, your name.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Oh, there it is.
Biz Ideas Deep Dives.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Those are SERP terms.
So if I search Chris Corner, okay, biz ideas deep dive.
If I Google biz ideas deep dive, four words.
Your videos dominate, AI dominates, Apple dominates.
your website dominates, Apple, everything that you post, you dominate the first.
That is, so those four words are unique to you, and they are your SERP terms.
Yeah.
So from the music business and the jingle business in the 80s and 90s, I used to write and
produce radio jingles for small businesses in Atlanta, car dealerships, potato chips, companies,
you name it.
In fact, you have Waffle House around here?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Well, if you go into Waffle House, I produced all the Waffle House records.
Oh, no way.
I have a golden waffle for raisin toast.
That's amazing.
And I have to send you a picture of it.
But at any rate, you know, those were corporate and local business jingles and national jingles.
We did Ford.
We did everything.
But right when Google started, there was a plumber in Smyrna, Georgia, near a suburb of Atlanta.
And the owner's wife got press cancer.
And she was healed.
And he made a commitment to change the name of his plumbing company to the pink plumber.
and donated proceeds for the rest of his life.
And that was kind of his marketing angle that he was so grateful that she was cured that the pink ribbon.
Yeah, yeah.
So 30 years ago, this jingle ran in Atlanta on the radio.
Google Pink, Plummer, or forget, click the link or call 404-2-2 Pink.
I can't remember your address, and I just came here.
But because I heard that jingle 20 plus times on the radio, I remember his phone number.
to this day. But he said, Google Pink Plummer. You could Google Pink Plummer, two words,
his SERP terms, and he dominated the first page. He invented that phrase and he owned it.
Right. Then he advertised it in what's called an earworm jingle. Earworm is the phenomenon
of when you associate marketing verbiage to melody. Hot pocket. Yeah, well, I don't know if you're
800, 500, 588, 2, 300.
All right.
If you Google Empire today, it should be Star Wars.
Yeah.
No, it's a carpet company.
Yeah.
That's the power of a SERP term jingle.
I invented SERP music that I've done for all my clients.
And so, for instance, we set their SERP terms.
Google the painting place for the best paint job you'll ever get.
Just search the painting place.
I checked it.
If he had a jingle running today, he would get embedded in the subconscious.
Because this is a psychological fact.
When you hear marketing information set to melody 20 times on the 21st time,
you'll never get it out of your subconscious for the rest of your life.
So how do you get the world to hear your SERP terms over and over and over again?
You open your podcast singing.
Our podcast used to be Google Pest Control Marketer, Grow your business like it never before.
That's Pest Control Marketer.com.
That's how we got traffic because our podcast always opened with our sub-trial.
are SERP terms.
Yeah.
And if you still, to this day, which we ended the podcast about four years ago because my partner
was 78 years old and he said, I want to play Bob Dylan songs.
I don't want to do this anymore.
And I said, okay.
And I said, well, here's what I learned from the pest control industry that I tested all
these things.
And I saw the results.
And then I started realizing every service business in the world needs to understand these
processes.
So how did I do serp term jingles up until about two years ago?
Well, I'm a musician. I have a recording studio in my house. I know how to perform it. And you could throw a rock in Nashville and hit a singer. You know, there's amazing. That talent, there's so much talent in Nashville, it's just amazing. And they don't know how to make a living. So if you'll hire them to sing a jingle. Yeah, they'll take it. Yeah, they'll take it. And you can do it virtually. I used to send tracks over to Adam Cunningham, who came in forth on the voice. And I used to watch the voice to see who lived in Nashville and then I'd go network and meet with them. So that's how I got to, you know, got to see.
singers. And we sold our pest control jingle over a hundred times at $2,000 a pop. Wow.
So to who? To pest control owners. Interesting. In fact, the same jingle? Yeah, we just give it to
them for a 50 mile market because that's all that matter. In fact, there was, there was a client.
One of my first clients was in Abilene, Texas. And he was called West Texas Pest Patrol.
Okay. And Wendell calls me up and he says, he says, I got a customer complaining that every time he goes to YouTube, my jingle play.
And I said, Wendell, we don't control when the jingle plays.
You know, that's like telling the 6 o'clock news to stop running lawyer and car dealership ads.
That's their bread and butter.
Okay.
You know, I said, good, they can skip it.
But here's what we discovered with that model.
And I'm looking for my YouTube app.
There is a thing in Google AdWords called skippable video ads.
Okay.
When you front load a TV ad with a software.
term jingle, it plays for free in the market. So the cheapest local TV advertising we discovered in the
world is buying TV ads limited to a mile radius or zip codes that are skippable YouTube ads,
and we hope they skip them because they're going to hear the jingle and the positioning statement.
So you hope they skip them because the only thing you need them to hear is in the first five seconds
or whatever, and that's the jingle? Google, Google West Texas Pest Patrol, no bug will survive. In fact,
this is the horrible jingle
and you can look it up
it's West Texas Pest Patrol
and
Now we bought ads
four years ago
only in Abilene, Texas
He's had probably
8 million skips
that heard the jingle
in his local market
for a little of nothing
but 3 million people
watched the whole ad
We actually have had
customers, clients of mine
with the SERP term jingles
mothers, stay-at-home moms with kids,
they're in there watching Bluey.
My grandkids watch Bluey on YouTube.
Well, Wendell's commercial come up,
and they'd hear it in the background.
And the kids wouldn't skip the commercial.
How long is the whole commercial?
Any length you want,
but I tell people to keep it under six.
Just like television.
Keep it under 30, 60 seconds.
What did you pay for $8 million in place?
It's pennies on the dollar.
You know, you can usually get 40,000 listens for a couple hundred bucks.
So, anyway, skippable, usually.
YouTube pre-roll ads with a serf term jingle.
I don't see anybody else doing this.
But I want to tell you the story how it came about.
Well, what did that do to his business?
He's quadrupled, tripled his business.
I've got testimonials.
And one of my best testimonials is my pest control guy in Perth, Australia.
In his Google review, he said, I listened to Mike's podcast for about six months.
I knew he knew what he was doing.
Yeah.
I contacted him to sign up for his program.
And he says, he made me.
me a jingle. He built me a converting website at no extra charge because I can build a converting page
in 15 minutes. It's just a template. And he says a whole bunch of other stuff. I don't know what he does.
I manage his Google AdWords, which is usually when you find the right keywords and you set up the
right eye. I've got a little trick in my headlines. Problem, agitate, next step. That's Dan Kennedy.
Problem. Tired of termites. Scared of termites. Afraid termites are infecting your home. Do you
want them gone and solved now, watch my video.
Yeah.
Watch my video quadrupled the click through rate.
Just adding that line?
Just adding that line.
Interesting.
So that's making sure that the video, the jingle, and the Google ad and the headlines all synchronize.
So like with my guy in Perth, Australia, he had a goal of hitting half a million in five years.
That was his goal.
He was a one-man operator, which is the target.
small businesses.
A big change, Terminix, Starbucks is not a customer.
Orkin, none of, well, in any service business, sparky electrical, you know, Chris Corner of plumbing
would be a customer, you know, a sole man operator.
Those are the guys that need to help.
And they're out here.
They're out here by the thousands.
That's why Google created Google guaranteed.
They know that small local businesses is the backbone of the economy.
Yeah.
You know, we all can't be Apple.
We all can't be Waffle House.
You know, those are big corporations.
But that small one location, two location operator, he just wants to grow his business.
Well, thankfully, there's, you know, in America, there's about 31 million of the small operators and, like, you know, less than a million of the big businesses.
Well, there you go.
So.
And the big businesses have whole marketing teams and resources that a small business doesn't have.
So at any rate, pretty much everybody I've worked with that will cooperate and do what I tell
them to do have doubled and tripled their business.
Yeah.
How many clients do you have today?
All right.
When I started the pest control thing, and I moved to Nashville, I didn't want more than 15
clients because I charged 15 clients, $500 a month, and I'll tell you what I did for them.
Well, here's what I did.
I fixed their problems, which was one, you know, one afternoon fix.
and then I would produce their podcast and their jingle.
And I charged an extra $2,000 for the jingle.
And the biggest thing that was pulling teeth was getting that.
I would tell them what microphone to buy.
You know, this is an SM8.
This is the podcasting standard.
You know, I sold a bunch of these as an affiliate.
I'd tell them to get audio studio,
something to where they could just hit record and talk and send me the MP3.
And if they could send me that MP3 of their podcast,
then I would do everything else.
I would post it.
I would transcribe it.
So we would do one podcast a week, one blog post a week, fix their Google my business, set up their Google ads, and the rest of it's pretty much on autopilot.
And I would meet with them if they had a problem.
So my time consumption was about an hour a month for $500.
So in four hours, I could make two grand.
But that's, I was fast.
I was an audio engineer.
Yeah.
And the thing that was hard to do was to get them to record their content and write or create their content.
That was hard.
But I did it.
Nowadays, you could use AI to tell you.
Well, we're going to get there.
We're going to get there.
We're going to get there.
But anyway, I'm just telling you, I did this and was successful when it was hard to get service business owners to take the time and, you know, not sitting in front of a microphone.
If you've noticed, I don't freeze up on a microphone.
I mean, it's just, if you ask me a question, I can talk for hours.
But that worked.
And the reason I didn't want any more than 15,500, 15 clients is because I can.
could make enough extra money with my residual income, and I have multiple streams of residual income
from different things. I'm a GoDaddy reseller. I sold the jingles. You know, I'm of the age.
I have Social Security. I want my money back. So I have, you know, and I have other businesses,
and I want to share some of those in a minute. But when AI came along, I started realizing,
oh, my goodness, I can teach these business owners how to go into chat GPT. It doesn't matter which
flavor. I like Gemini because it's a Google product. Everybody seems like Claude. But at the end of the day,
there's a prompt that will write a pretty day-gone good local-centric piece of content.
Yeah. Now, I tell my clients, I'll say, I can do it for you, but you could get it done and send it to me
faster than I could do it, and then you sit on it and send it back to me. Yeah. So I've never had any resistance
of them learning to use Gemini for free to write four blog posts in about 15 minutes and send them to me. Yeah.
Now because of 11 Labs.
Have you heard of that?
I use it to dub all my videos.
Well, there you go.
This video will be in 13 different languages in our cloned voices.
Well, there you go.
You knew that.
Mr. Bug Guy.
Yeah.
Mr. Roofer doesn't care what 11 Labs is.
Yeah.
So I take his script.
I clone his voice.
Now he reads it perfectly in any language we want.
We've done some in Spanish because if there was a big Latino market.
But mostly time, English is all we got to do.
And I mix the jingle on the language.
the front, take the 11 labs in the middle, put the ad on the end of the podcast, and in 15
minutes, I've satisfied the customer, and he can track organic traffic.
Yeah.
When we do, when we track all the traffic, we can see how much is social media, how much is
Google AdWords.
It really, it's 20, it's 20, 80 percent of social media and Google AdWords, because buying
traffic is the most guaranteed to wait.
But if it converts and makes money, they don't care.
Yeah.
But getting 20% organic traffic, 20 to 30%.
So now I don't have to ask them to do anything.
I can do it for them.
And COVID was a, the things that I was doing in Nashville was going to networking meetings,
but really to build relationships in the music industry.
COVID put an end to the networking.
And then pest control, which was all I did, was a, what they call it,
necessary business or something like that.
people were home finding bugs and rodents.
Yeah.
So pest control owners during COVID boomed.
Their biggest problem is they couldn't find anybody willing to work.
Everyone was home is seeing all the bugs.
Well, in fact, knowing too much about the pest control industry is the number one supplier of food for bugs and rodents are restaurants.
They go to the trash.
That's why there's rodent traps all around restaurants because that trash and the food waste.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, well, the rodents went, hey, no, there's no restaurants.
So where do they get?
They came to your house looking for food.
And, you know, my wife, there's a bug in here.
Get him out of here.
Yeah.
So they were getting people to searching.
They found them because of the marketing we had done.
They're calling them.
They had more work than they knew what to do with.
Their problem was fine, you know, was hiring people.
It's time.
It still hasn't died, but it backed off a little bit.
And networking came back after COVID.
But now with the eye, the writing of the.
content is simplified. The voicing of in the owner's voice is simplified. Even AI can now write the jingle.
Yeah. I use Suno. There's several of them out there. I sing, but I don't like it writing it for me. I will write my own melody.
Yeah. And I know the prompts to give it to get the results I want. Yeah. And I give the jingle away free. I don't charge 2000 anymore. If you'll sign up for my monthly program, the jingle is included for life and for free even if you cancel after the first month.
no long time occurred. So I hadn't had any resistance on that.
Is that the playbook is to run the jingle on YouTube ads?
Like that's the playbook for all of them or you do the other stuff with the jingle?
Well, you can put it on radio if you wanted to if you have a radio budget.
But it's, yes, the YouTube ads, but YouTube, about a year and a half ago or whenever it was,
said we want the RSS feed of your podcast.
So the jingle is running in the podcast that's in the RSS feed.
Because most of these small businesses, I can look at their YouTube.
YouTube channels.
Yeah.
Their headers are wrong.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a thousand mistakes they don't know they're making.
I don't know if you've ever heard of a good friend of mine who's a guy named Daryl Eves.
Darrell.
Yeah, he's the YouTube guy.
I'm the number one internet audio guy in the world, have been for 20 years ago.
Wow.
But anyway, that's where I got in with these guys and learned where Michael prep a pizza
learned about.
Yeah.
So the final thing is that getting customers in the local business area requires networking.
Yeah.
I sold all of the pest control people that I worked with.
They'd listened to our podcast.
The only advertiser on our podcast was our services, our coaching, our events, our book.
I mean, we had all kinds of paths of income and jingles.
And so the podcast was a steady flow of customers.
I didn't need local customers or care for them because I wanted to work two days a month
and go after the music business.
So I noticed all these things with pest control.
I want to prove that it works in my backyard.
So my wife loves junk.
She, we got more, they call it collectibles, I call it junk.
She loves to price it.
She loves to find it at goodwill and sell it, you know, for a profit.
That's her passion in her retirement.
And she started buying local honey from a beekeeper and putting in her junk store.
And people started buying.
So she has a retail store?
She has a retail booth in a venue.
Yeah.
There's, they're all over the place that you.
You can rent a room.
She had a room.
And it's stock full of clothes and junk and belts and she sells a lot of jewelry.
But the thing that was unique to her was this, I said, why are you buying local honey?
Oh, it's good for allergies.
There's a whole laundry list of whether it's true or not.
They believe it's true.
That's what matters.
They believe it's true.
And local honey.
Well, thousands of people search local Nashville honey.
So I said, I'm going to build a business for my wife.
And I'm going to buy that URL.
So now when you go to Google anywhere in the world or even in YouTube and you put in local Nashville honey.
So that domain name was available?
Yes.
Wow.
And it's just a one-page website.
She doesn't want to do e-commerce.
She wants people to come into the store because then they see her junk.
We quadrupled her local her honey sales.
Wow.
And she doesn't even have to make the honey.
No, she just buys it from the, she doesn't even go get it.
He delivers it.
So anyway.
So this, we did all the things that I do for local businesses, I did for Susan.
So I post a blog post, created her a jingle.
Tuna.
A taste of Middle Tennessee, your guide to our local honey varietals.
Hey there, Susan Stewart here from local Nashville.
I like it.
She does nothing, and she's had the biggest honey months ever since.
Wow.
So now I had a local business I could go to networking.
Well, who in Nashville have you worked with?
You know, well, my biggest clients in Perth, Australia, but now I have local
Nashville honey. And I want to tell this story real quick because it's the same principle. Last May,
I'm a big-time pontoon boater. A pontoon boat to me is a living room with a motor and sunsets on the
lake are just magic to me. And in fact, most of my creativity comes out in the middle of the lake.
So there was a young man who I was out riding on his boat with his dog last May and he's a pontoon
boat captain. Nashville is the top bachelor, bachelor's, I can't ever say the word.
Bachelorette party destination.
Yeah.
So they're searching what to do in Nashville.
Yeah.
So I found out the number one search term was party boat rental.
Hmm.
And he was working for another company that sadly was closing down because of a divorce in May.
And his whole season got wiped out.
I said, Jason, congratulations.
I said, let me do some research here.
And I found out.
So this is kind of what I do with clients.
His term was Nashville party boat rental.
That domain name was available.
Party, boat, boat rental.
We implemented my strategies of all the things.
We created a simple website with one call to action.
Book your boat.
We said in traffic here, and there are one tap away from booking our boats.
And we went from zero to probably, it's going to be 80 grand this summer.
Holy cow.
Yeah.
From that new website?
Well, that's a one-page website.
Right.
You know, it's, and we're doing it with, last year we did,
40 what we call charters with organic traffic.
I finally convinced him to spend $250 a month on advertising.
But Jason, I sampled his voice.
And, of course, he flipped out over ChatGPT.
You know, he wrote enough articles to last me for quite some time.
But, you know, it's all about the keywords that people search when they're coming to Nashville.
So this was the jingle.
Now you run that on Skipald.
In 2026, the Nashville Skyline isn't just made of...
steel and glass.
It's built on the star power of country music's biggest.
Now, do you go so far as to tell YouTube show this to 25 to 40-year-old women?
Or do you let Google's algorithm feel?
I let the algorithm do it.
Yeah.
So you don't target the person by interest or anything, just geography?
Just geography.
Okay.
We know the cities that come here, and so we only advertise a 20-mile radius in those
major cities.
Okay.
And we're not, you know, we get a lot more traffic.
We spent more money.
But, you know, he's booked every weekend.
Yeah.
So it's a success and it's growing.
So now I had two Nashville businesses and I said, okay, this year, for the first time of my life,
everything that I have been doing that took my skill set can be done by AI.
And it's scalable.
It's never been scalable before, but it is scalable.
So what is the disconnect of getting new customers?
Well, I was calling myself last year the local big three.
There's three things a local business owner needs to do.
And quite honestly, nobody.
believe me. They just go, he's just trying to sell me something. So I said, what is it that I am
selling as a solution to a small business owner like National Party boat, like local National
Honey, like West Texas Pest Patrol? What am I selling? A local internet presence. In fact,
if you Google local internet presence, my picture pops up. Of course it does. Why? Because nobody's
looking for that. Yeah. They don't know it's important. So the job of networking is doing one-to-ones
with business owners and showing them that this is important and why you need to focus on making converting a web page,
doing all these strategies that other digital, I don't see other digital.
Digital agencies should be referral partners to me.
But for whatever reason, they're not.
So I don't care.
But what I'm doing is I got involved.
We have in Nashville, we have a networking group called Connect Nashville,
20,000 members in the Facebook page, one Google review.
So what I wanted to see, could I train others to sell to small businesses like I do?
And my partner in the pest control podcast had a nephew in Tampa.
His name's Ted Yates.
And about a year ago, I spent two Zoom calls with him and showed him when I did.
And now he has, it isn't a side hustle.
He's got a full-time business from networking in his network.
In fact, his networking group is one of our podcast coaches.
Oh, cool.
So because I'm scalable now with AI, the jingle can be done in AI, the content can be created
in AI, it can be, it can outsource.
I have a team in the Philippines that I could just train to do it.
So I'll take on as many customers as I can get.
But the disconnect is the person who's willing to regularly go to a networking meeting and say
the things over and over that creates one-to-ones.
Yeah.
And every time I've done a one-to-one, in fact, I've got a text.
just this morning.
We need to do business.
I need your help.
My God, you blew me away.
I learned so much.
I had no idea.
These are the feedback.
So I know it's real.
And the opportunity for your audience is if you learn to use these tools and learn.
So look at these principles.
Suno, 11 labs, chat, GBT, your flavor of it.
YouTube ads.
Managing those things.
They're not hard.
It's something.
In fact, I've got training online.
that I'll give people.
Yeah.
You know, I don't expect or want money from that.
But there are baby boomers out there, especially,
who don't want to be Walmart greeters.
Half the Uber drivers in Nashville are baby boomers.
I'm retired.
We want to go take a cruise,
so I'm going to go out and make three grand
so we have cruise money.
Yeah.
You know, because I can shut it off, go do the cruise,
and then if I want to make another three grand, I can come back.
So Uber is a side hustle.
Yeah.
The baby boomers,
the only other,
side hustle was Walmart greeter.
You know, I look at people my age and older, you know, standing on their feet all day at fast food.
Right.
You know, this is something that's fun that all you have to know how to do is go out there and get the attention of the decision maker of a business.
Reoccurring income is what the side hustle you want.
Yeah.
You sell it once and as long as they stay, you get paid.
I'm curious about the jingles.
What is the optimal length for a jingle?
15 seconds.
Okay.
The YouTube ad or not?
Because you want it to be able to say the SERP terms in the first five seconds.
They can't get up to the skip button fast enough.
So they're going to hear eight seconds.
So if you say the SERP term and the positioning statement, you know, whatever business you are.
Business ideas and deep dives.
Okay.
Side hustles, so they'll change your life.
Learning business opportunities you didn't know exist.
I've actually tested this.
And the phrase that resonates the most is,
Listen, get rich.
Okay.
Then you go.
That's what you're saying.
The Kerner Office podcast, listen, get rich.
Boom.
There you go.
Right.
If that played on every one of your costs podcasts.
Yeah.
You know, and I would put Google or search, search your SERP terms.
Yeah.
And if that precedes every time somebody hears you, how did you get into this side hustle, Mike?
Well, shoot.
I listen to.
Yeah, yeah.
It puts it to the top of them.
And with Suno, like, let's say I wanted to do hyperlocal.
I could say, you know, Provo, Utah.
It's Connecticut, New York.
Kissimmee, Florida, and I could just swap out the prompt and make a jingle for each market.
If you wanted to.
Just to make it extra effective for those people.
This is a podcast for people in Kissimme.
Absolutely.
You know?
But before, that'd be $2,000 a pop.
You're wasting that skippable opportunity.
Right.
Trying to sell or educate.
Because, well, the stats are, we've had people as much as 60% watch.
But you're going to get somewhere between 30, you know, 70% skiff.
thing you're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So front load it with something that will teach your local market or your worldwide market for that.
Yeah.
The national party boat rental is U.S. only.
We're not targeting other countries.
But you could.
You know, it's all about traffic and conversion.
It's all about doing whatever you can to help people remember how to find you and when they find you.
It amazes me how many small business websites don't have tapped a call on the bottom of their website.
Yeah.
You know, they expect people to know how to hit the, you know, ask a baby boomer, what's a hamburger menu?
Well, that's probably an in and out, isn't it?
We get an in and out at Nashville, so we're all excited.
We got water butter, too.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
It's Texas guys.
But they don't know what any of this stuff is.
That's not their business.
They sell tires.
They sell paint jobs.
They sell fixing the roof, whatever.
Yeah.
So networking is so important, dumbing it down to where they understand it.
And I believe, well, I've already done the math.
300 customers is a million dollar business.
And every bit of it can be outsourced.
Yeah.
Now, if you're willing to work 40-hour weeks,
you could keep all the money yourself or outsource it and get a team that does it.
Yeah.
Well, I've got another interview coming in 20 minutes.
So is there anything you'd like to leave us with that you'd forgotten to mention?
You know, no matter what's your age,
whether you're a young person like some of the people you had on there in their 20s,
you're a millennial like my son who fell in love with making a pizza dough.
recipe that I said, who in the hell is going to do that?
Yeah.
And, well, a lot of people are doing it.
A lot of people are buying his dough.
But he, he understand the traffic and conversion situation.
But my generation, baby boomers, we've got a lot of wisdom.
We've got all of knowledge.
We've been through a lot of decades of marketing.
And direct response marketing is always more better results than image marketing.
Yeah.
And I'm not a, I'm not that I'm not a, not a proponent of something.
social media.
But the challenge is social media is what's called in a walled garden.
It doesn't live forever.
But YouTube content, podcast content, blogs content, live forever, get indexed in Google
and generate traffic to your website that can be converted into buyers.
So how does that affect baby boomers?
Well, it's a great side hustle to go out and talk to business owners and make a difference
in the business.
And if you do enough of it, you can double your...
investment income. Just to give your perspective, and I don't know if you know this, what's the figure
to make 50 grand a year with investments, a safe investment that'll make $50,000 in retirement?
A million bucks?
Yeah. Well, financial planner, who's a good friend of mine, a million and a half.
Less than 4% of the world has a million and a half in the bank.
Yeah.
So sadly, and to me, $50,000 at that time wouldn't pay my house payment for the year.
So the reality is, baby boomers should have side hustles that they enjoy.
that they're not climbing on roofs or up in the attics.
Yeah.
They're not out in the heat.
Networking and talking to a business owner and making a difference in their business
and getting re-encuring income is a heck of a side hustle for anybody.
But especially us retirees who don't want to live on fixed income.
Yeah.
You know, if I want to just sit at home, watch TV and do nothing, I could do that.
But I don't, I want to get on an airplane and meet Chris Corner.
I want to.
Amen.
I want to play concerts.
I'm playing in Deadwood South.
Dakota next week. Oh, cool. I'm in a band called the box tops. Okay. Google them. All right.
But here's where I want people to go, and this will be the final thing I say. Google local
internet presence.com or local internet. And there is a website there, and all my website says,
if you want to grow your business, you're going to grow your local internet presence.
Yeah. And I know how to do it. I've done it hundreds of times. And when you grow your local
internet presence and you fix the other part of the equation, you make sure that conversion is right.
then you make money.
And if you're not in it to make money, then enjoy your hobby.
Yeah.
Man, there's an opportunity everywhere.
Yeah.
Amen.
Amen.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you.
Hey, guys.
If you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance
to take your AirPods out.
You're still mulling the lawn.
You're still driving.
What have you.
If you're still here with me,
I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify,
Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
It would mean a lot.
If you want to go the extra mile,
share this episode with a friend.
that might have an interest in starting a business, it would mean a ton.
Hope you have the best day of your life today.
