You Can’t Be Lazy in Business
Start your side hustle with the intention of being the very best at whatever you do. Why aim for mediocrity? When your side hustle relates to something you are naturally interested in, it’s far easier to stay motivated. Consider your passions when choosing your side hustle.
Build your income streams one at a time. Complete tasks backward to “trick” your brain, eliminating the potential for procrastination. Consider rewarding yourself when you complete tasks throughout the day. Take time to figure out your “why” behind starting your side hustle. This will be your long-term source of motivation.
Dress Yourself (and Your Business) for Success
Represent yourself and your business as professionally as possible. This, in turn, has an impact on how others perceive you and your business. Dressing well can help you feel more confident and motivated. The “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality is a financial trap. It becomes a game that nobody wins.
Improve your skills with free information found online, such as YouTube videos. A consistent fitness routine is a great precursor to starting your own side hustle, as it teaches you the concept of discipline.
Combat your bad habits early on. If your personal life is cluttered and disorganized, your business will be too. Take the time to establish a solid routine and schedule before adding a side hustle to the mix.
Be Prepared to Sacrifice
Recognize that building a successful side hustle involves turning down other short-term moneymaking opportunities. Become a “no” person. Be very careful about how you spend both your time and your money; these are your resources for success.
In most cases, the further you delay gratification, the better the outcome will be. Risk and reward are almost always proportional. You can’t have a massive upside without taking on the proportional risk or downside.
Starting a side hustle with the goal of making money is a bad strategy. Instead, focus on providing value to others. Money is simply a by-product of value being provided. The right relationships can help you pursue your dreams and build your business. Focus on the relationships that lift you up, not the ones that bring you down. Eliminate as many distractions from your life as possible. You cannot afford to waste time.
Follow the Golden Rule
Follow the Golden Rule: treat others the way you would like to be treated. The Golden Rule allows you to put yourself in the shoes of the people you are helping. Always value repeat business over an immediate sale—delayed gratification over instant gratification. Instead of simply offering information about a product or service, teach your customer how to use it. In return, you are likely to be rewarded with referrals and repeat business.
Following the Golden Rule will build trust with your customers. That trust will, in turn, generate revenue. We all make recommendations to people in our lives about different products and services. Affiliate marketing allows you to get paid for making recommendations. Don’t become detached from the real people you are helping and interacting with online. It’s easy to forget this and become caught up in the numbers.
Stick to focusing on the positives, not the negatives. Negative campaigning, or spreading information to tarnish someone’s image, opens the door for others to do the same to you.
Frugality 101
Think about money as a fuel source that needs to be conserved. Instead of spending all your money by using it as a medium of exchange, save and invest. Steer clear of “lifestyle inflation,” which is spending more money on your wants as your income increases.
Reduce high-cost spending categories such as your transportation and housing by driving a reliable older vehicle and living with family, if possible. If you are currently working at a job, avoid spending money while on the clock. Bring or make your own coffee and lunches.
Try to schedule all your calls and meetings during the same time of day. This allows you to avoid the interruptions throughout the day. Leisure time is important to de-stress. However, just like with the rest of your routine, this needs to be scheduled and not open-ended. Spend a week tracking how you spend your time in a notebook. You will be surprised by what you find.
Pick a Good Hustle
The key to long-term success with a side hustle is finding out how to make money through one of your passions. Create a written plan to follow. This doesn’t have to be a formal business plan, but it does have to be in writing, not just in your head.
Short-term intensity is not the goal. Instead, ask yourself what you could realistically see yourself doing every week for the next decade of your life. Digital skills are in high demand. If you don’t have one now, you can learn one using free online resources. One of the easiest side hustles to start is gig work through sites like Upwork and Fiverr.
While competition is an important consideration, don’t avoid a niche just because it is competitive. As long as you can meet or exceed the quality bar, you have a chance of breaking through. There are tons of sites and apps that make it easy to launch a side hustle, including Airbnb. Offering tours of your local area as an Airbnb experience is an easy way to start bringing in some extra money on the side.
Get Your First 100 Fans
You need to spread the word about your venture, and the best way to do this is through social media. The side hustle starter pack is a website and an Instagram page. Consider documenting your side hustle journey through short vertical videos. You can post the same content to multiple platforms, allowing you to maximize reach and exposure.
Before asking people to support you, try to provide value to them in some way. The best way to do this is by simply teaching people interesting things about what you do. The same exponential growth associated with compounding financial returns applies to audience growth on social media. The more content you post, the more content you have out there to potentially gain you new followers.
Sharing your story with your audience is a great way to build an emotional connection. However, you need to keep it concise. Consider writing out what you plan on saying first, then reducing it to as few words as possible. Make sure there is demand or an audience before creating content. This can be accomplished through basic research of online search terms. Don’t underestimate grassroots marketing. Remember, your potential followers are real people walking around in the world today.
From Side Hustle to Main Hustle
Scaling is the process of turning a smaller operation into a larger one. This is often the point where your side hustle becomes a full-blown business. During the time of scaling, you will likely find yourself testing out new MVPs. When you find one or a few that work, see if you can replicate the results on a larger scale.
Not all successful strategies will scale, because the phenomenon that led to success could be completely random. You probably won’t have a “big break.” Instead, long-term consistency and correct adaptation will lead to somewhat predictable results.
The decision to pursue a side hustle full-time should be strictly based on finances. You don’t have to scale your business. A bigger side hustle operation isn’t always better than a small one. Your business needs multiple income streams, like the three legs on a stool. Without them, you are unstable.