In this blog post on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online, you’ll discover a lot of ideas and steps to achieving your financial goals this year. You can work from home or anywhere in the world as you successfully take your business ideas to the marketplace without spending a fortune.
In this guide, however, I’ll be focusing on online side hustles and not offline. There are offline side hustle business ideas that will require you to get out of the home to perform the jobs or tasks before you get paid. But I love and prefer online side business which I can come home at any time of the day to do without getting too exhausted.
Even if you don’t have any online business idea to work with right away, don’t worry yourself yet! I decided to write and publish this complete side business blog post to help beginners or newbies like you to get started and hit the ground running. I want to assure you that there is nothing complicated about starting an online business. All you need is business common sense of becoming a solution provider in the marketplace.
A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs over complicate business systems to a fault. What you need to succeed as a side hustler is focus, commitment, consistency, patience, time, energy and little money to invest in essential online tools and resources to get things off the ground.
If you follow the steps outlined and discussed shortly to a Tee at the section of starting a side hustle business, you should be able to get your blog website visible on the World Wide Web in a matter of months. As you already know, regular wages or salary is no longer enough to take any worker home and make a living. So, it’s essential you’ve to supplement your income with side business if you want to pay the bills, live your lifestyle, save for the rainy day and build wealth from the ground up without stress.
Some years back, I was holding down a hectic 9-5 day job and I asked myself, “How long will I continue to grind at this job?” With this in mind, I went out of my way to research online business ideas which I can start while working at home at nights and without interfering with my day job.
Surprisingly, I discovered that there are 101 side hustle ideas which any aspiring online entrepreneur can start without breaking the bank. These include affiliate marketing business, ebook writing, domain flipping, website flipping, blogging for money, freelance writing, virtual assistance, brokerage services, just to mention a few.
And let me shock you with this secret information! You can start 2 or more of the above side hustles from one place i.e. by creating a blog of your own. Yes, all you need to get started is to create a blog on a self-hosted WordPress blog and begin to publish high-quality content that your target audience or readers will find relevant and helpful to their needs.
For a whole year with less than $100 business startup costs, you can start a blog and make money from home. Yes, from a single blog, I’ve been able to provide freelance content writing services, promote affiliate products, buy and sell domain names, write and sell ebooks online, and so on.
The good news is that owning and managing a side hustle blog earns you trust and credibility in the marketplace. I’ve entered into several joint ventures (JVs) simply because I maintain a business blog regularly updated with unique content.
The best part is that I get highly targeted inbound marketing leads and prospects that I never sourced for simply because I’ve strong online presence in my target market and I’ve demonstrated above average expertise and authority in the minds of my target audience.
What I am saying is this. If you want to know how to start a side hustle business and thrive on the internet, simply go ahead and create a blog website which you can continue to manage as your business.
Thereafter, develop a regular habit of publishing high impact content on it while targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases. Continue to use your blog as a platform to interact with your focus audience, gain traction, connect with other bloggers and gain insights into the needs and wants of your potential customers.
Starting a blog is quite straight forward if you sign up with a reliable web host that supports WordPress hosting. You don’t need to learn how to code, build website or anything that is techie in nature. Installing WordPress blog on your domain name is a breeze if you follow the on-screen prompts and instructions on how to install WordPress blog on your domain from your web hosting account dashboard.
I use HostGator website hosting services and you can click here to sign up with HostGator and also register a free domain name for the first year. Blogging is my number one side hustle business idea and for good reasons. Creating a blog for your online business serves different purposes. It can double or triple as your ecommerce store, digital office and consulting outfit if you’re an expert in your field.
With that said, let’s go through everything you need to know on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online.
What is a Side Hustle Business?
A side hustle is a business you do on the side outside your regular day job. The basic idea and motivation is to use the profits accruing from your side business to supplement your salary or wages from your 9 to 5 day job. With inflation constantly rising globally, bills are piling up and increasing for homes and families. And to meet up with spending demands of individuals and maintain their lifestyles, you’ve to find ways to augment your weekly or monthly income. It’s become a case of survival of the fittest!
This is why side hustling has become the buzz word on the internet today. Personally, I was able to quit my day job when I discovered that I was making money online more than my regular salary while spending even less time to run and grow my online business.
However, the type of side project you start should depend on a number of factors such as what you enjoy doing, your passion, interest, experience, education, training, and the like. Even if you cannot think of any side hustle idea at the moment, you can learn digital marketing skills in a matter of weeks or months and use it to start an online business successfully.
I’ve discussed with a lot of successful bloggers who started off with nothing fantastic or spectacular but having the end in mind i.e. to add value to the marketplace and get rewarded in return at the end. You don’t have to be an expert at the beginning but you must strive to stand out ultimately with an USP (unique selling proposition). This will be part of your branding strategies.
Tools and Resources You Need to Get Started
Although you can learn how to make money online without spending anything, this will be a long route to ply for you not to get worn out any time soon. You’ve to invest money, time and energy in order to translate your side hustle ideas into minimum valuable product, service or information that people will be willing to pay for.
For instance, when I signed up with HostGator web hosting to create a
blog website, I paid about $86.04 for one year for my website hosting fees. And
because I was willing and able to perform requisite daily tasks to succeed with
my side hustles, I made that money back in less than 90 days of blogging. It's even cheaper now to sign up with HostGator as of writing.
I’ll be releasing my side hustle business playbook soon where I chronicled my entrepreneur journey. You can reach out to me for a complimentary copy of this complete digital marketing guide when it’s ready if you make use of my partnership link above to sign up with HostGator hosting.
Please be aware that you’re not paying extra money for using my link. You’re only supporting me to maintain this content driven blog website to remain free to my readers, subscribers, fans, followers and others who find it helpful..
In the online marketing guide, I outlined and explained how to make $1,000 per month online and above as a side hustler. You’ll love the power of sacrifice, generosity and tenacity in making money on the internet.
With that said, here is the list of online business tools and resources which you’ve to invest in to become successful.
- Domain name registration. I register most of my domain names with NameCheap.com.
- Web hosting services. I subscribed to HostGator website hosting and you can sign up from this link.
- Free WordPress blog website. It’s free to install and set up if you make use of reliable web hosting company that supports WordPress hosting.
- ESP (email service provider). ESP will provide you with email marketing software, autoresponder and marketing automation to build an email list of subscribers from scratch. GetResponse email marketing software is a good place to start from because they offer 30-day free trial for you to test the waters.
- Constant content to feed your blog for stickiness. If you want to attract, nurture and retain your target audience, you need to write blog posts and regularly publish them while targeting profitable long tail keyword phrases. You can write SEO articles and blog posts yourself if you don’t want to hire freelance writer.
- Analytics to measure data such as knowing the sources of your website visitors. The free Google Analytics and Google Search Console will suffice for a start.
Steps to Start a Side Hustle Business and Make Money
The steps below are what I always follow as a ritual to build any side gig which I’ve researched and I’m convinced that it will earn money online for me as quickly as possible.
- Choose a side business idea
- Research market viability for (i) above
- Get a domain name and web hosting
- Create a WordPress blog on your domain
- Create content and publish
- Monetize your blog
- Promote your blog
- Measure, review and analyze
- Make money online
I’ll discuss the above 9 steps on how to start a side hustle business successfully and you can start implementing the tasks involved almost immediately. As for me, I see the side hustle business beyond making money to pay the bills or live the life of my dreams. I take it as a religion. It takes faith and sacrifice to get the expected results.
Step #1: Choose a Side Business Idea
If you ask me, there are so many side hustles you can do to make money from home. But you’ve to settle for a profitable idea to start with. Broadly, you can create your own digital product and sell it online, provide freelance digital services and get paid or simply start a blog and make money blogging by recommending affiliate products to your website visitors and earning affiliate commissions in the process.
There are no hard and fast rules for you to choose a particular side hustle idea to start with. What is important is to align your choice with your passion, hobby, interest, knowledge, experience, education, training, etc. This will help you to get keyed up and flow for the long haul when creating content to publish on your blog and/or doing guest posting or content marketing.
For instance, I’m thinking of starting a personal finance blog in no distant future because I’ve a strong interest in this niche market. Besides, I’m an accountant by education, profession and training. So, I should be able to easily read up on this topic so that I can meet up with my goal of becoming a successful personal finance expert.
I’m brooding over this niche because I’ve worked as a financial advisor and business consultant at some point in time in my working career. This is how to start a side hustle business idea which you can relate with at a personal level. The best thing you can do now is to take a pen and paper and take inventory of the side hustles that appeal to you.
Obviously, you’ll prune this list down to a sizeable number when you conduct market viability test on each of them. If it’s not going to be profitable in your wildest imagination, there is to point dissipating your time, energy and money to get started in the first place.
After going through step 2 of this side hustle business guide which I’ll explain shortly, you should be able to decide for yourself the type of side business idea that will be good and profitable for you in the long run. But I strongly recommend that you create a blog to get started and learn the ropes.
It will give you a sense of direction and an edge as you learn, grow and progress in your target niche market. The worst case scenario that could happen is to end up monetizing your blog with Google Adsense which will still be able to pay the bills and then some.
To sum up this section on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online, you can:
- Create digital product or service and sell it for profit if you’re an expert on something.
- Provide freelance business services and get paid e.g. website design, graphic design, content writing, etc.
- Write product reviews as a digital publisher and include affiliate links in your content to useful products, services, apps and software which you are affiliated to.
- Provide other essential web services based on your creativity or digital skills such as domain flipping, brokerage services, website flipping, and so on.
Step #2: Research Market Viability for Your Side Hustle Idea
Although your primary goal of starting an online business is to make money and get comfortable, it certainly goes far beyond that. Even if you’re doing this for the money, you should always find ways to add value to people’s lives by solving their pain points with the right solutions.
The first point of call is to go to where your target market congregate and take the market pulse. What are their challenges, pain points, problems, etc? Will they be “willing and able” to pay for the solution if provided? Are there desperate buyers in this market? How is the demography like? Is it an evergreen market or a passing fad?
What about the market size? Can you spot market gaps you can easily fill up which existing products did not address? Is there sufficient information you can research and glean to create high quality and unique content? What types of search queries are available to work with?
You should be able to distinguish between informational and transactional search terms in this regard. Is there list building opportunity so that you can make passive income online sooner or later while growing your side hustle? There is whole gamut of market viability and profitability tests you’ve to conduct in order to be sure whether to step your feet at the door.
Finally, for you to achieve this goal, you’ve to juxtapose the total costs of providing solutions to solve problems for your target audience with the income accruable to you. This will help you to evaluate the profitability or otherwise of your side gig efforts. So, if a market is not viable, it doesn’t make sense to dissipate your time, energy and money to remain in that business.
This is why researching market viability or profitability is critical to your success. And you can use a number of tools and apps to do this exercise including Google Keyword Planner, questions and answers sites like Quora.com, AnswerThePublic.com, BuzzSumo.com, Semrush.com, Ahrefs.com, etc.
Step #3: Get a Domain Name and Web Hosting
This is the section where you’ve to invest little money to start your own business online. You must register a domain name and buy web hosting for you to be able to build a website or create a blog. A domain name is your internet business address. It’s the URL that will take your target audience to your website, landing page, lead magnet page, and so forth.
It costs about $10 per year to register and/or renew a domain name and you don’t have exclusive right to a domain if you fail to renew it. In other words, you can lose a valuable domain name to cyber squatters or domain flippers if you negligently forget to renew your domain name.
For example, as the owner of this side hustle blog, I can lose it outright if I omit to renew it after the grace period expires and it is finally deleted from the registry. My advice for aspiring online entrepreneurs who perceive that their domain names are valuable should keep on renewing it even if they cannot continue to maintain the website or blog associated with it.
If you’re heavily involved in domain flipping business like me, you’ll understand why holding on to a domain name without allowing it to drop is important and profitable.
You can buy domain name from Namecheap from this link. They are cheap and reliable domain registrar to sign up with. Depending on the type of side business you hope to start, you can register brandable domain, keyword domain, exact match domain (EMD), product domain, services domain, to name a few.
On a personal level, I like to separate my domain name registrar from my web host in order to allow me manage my portfolio of domain names as a domainer.
As for your website hosting, you can sign up with HostGator.com from this link. HostGator web hosting is reliable, cheap and they have excellent customer support services to wit. If you’ve successfully used the link above to sign up, you can reach out to me from here and request for my premium blogging guide gratis.
A domain name and web hosting services are what you need to build your website for free. Self-hosted WordPress blog can be customized to build a website or create a blog.
Step #4: Create a WordPress Blog on Your Domain
With content management system (CMS) platform like WordPress.org, you don’t need to be tech savvy to build a simple website or build a blog to start a side hustle business anymore. I’ve built pockets of niche websites and blogs over time without knowing how to code, HTML and CSS.
If you download my blogging for money ebook, you’ll discover the secrets of how to make money blogging online. From your hosting account dashboard, you can locate Softaculous app which makes it easy to install WordPress blog on your domain.
But you’ve to customize and optimize your blog for on-page SEO (search engine optimization) in order to prime it and make it search engine friendly. If you want a unique look and feel of your blog, you can browse ThemeForest marketplace to download and install premium WordPress theme that will complement your side business goals.
For added website functionalities, you can install and activate specific plugins related to website load speed, security, optimization, backup, content gating, etc.
Beyond this, you can install Google Analytics and integrate Google Search Console so that you can have data and metrics to review and improve upon as your side hustle business starts growing by leaps and bounds.
In addition, you should not forget to create pages that are essential to your website such as about me, contact me, resources, sitemap, and the like. You can configure some of these pages to show up at the navigation menu at the top right corner of your blog.
Step #5: Create Content and Publish
The currency of the web is content. Believe it or not, the World Wide Web is driven by content. It is only natural that you should be prepared to write your first blog post and publish as soon as you’ve finished with on-page SEO of your blog website.
Content can be in the form of blog posts, SEO articles, videos, infographics, audio, podcast, webinar, PDF ebook, email marketing messages, just name it. And as a digital marketing expert, you should see content marketing as the major channel of driving free targeted traffic to your website.
In one of my subsequent blog articles, I’ll discuss in detail how to create high quality content like this text post on how to start a side hustle business and thrive online. I’ll encourage you to bookmark this side business blog for easy access in the future.
Step #6: Monetize Your Blog
It’s important to remember the common phrase that says “first things first”. For you to be able to monetize your blog, you’ve to publish enough content that will not put off your readers. I know the motivation behind starting a side hustle is to make money in the first place.
There are many ways to monetize your website including but not limited to affiliate product links, selling your own digital products, providing freelance services, accepting sponsored posts, selling advert spaces, integrating Google Adsense codes, and a host of other blog monetization methods.
You’ve to select a method that works well with your blog content.
Step #7: Promote Your Blog
Yes, this is the section that will make or mar your side hustle business. It is wishful thinking to have the notion that the world will beat a path to your doorstep (or blog website) if you create a blog without promoting it.
There are broadly two (2) ways to promote your website i.e. free methods and paid methods. The best free ways of generating targeted traffic include search engine optimization, content marketing, list building, guest posting, free ebook distribution, and so on.
Step #8: Measure, Review and Analyze
At this stage, you’ve come a long way. Kudos! But as it were, not everything you’ve been doing will be spot on. You’ve to analyze variances between your expected results and actual results from your analytics and adjust where necessary for improvements.
For example, if you discover that how-to blog posts bring in more website traffic than listicles, you may want to focus more on writing content about how to do things.
The paid advertising methods you should consider will include PPC (pay per click) and banner adverts.
Step #9: Make Money Online
This is the final step as a side hustler. It’s now time for you to start smiling to the bank after all the time, efforts and money invested to make your side business stand out from the crowd. If you’ve followed and implemented everything I’ve discussed in this blog article on how to start a side hustle and thrive online, you should not find a hard time making money.
All you’ve to do is to sit back, relax and enjoy your money or take a vacation. And if you’re a digital nomad like me you’ll be traveling the world over as a location independent entrepreneur.
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