If you’re looking for the best way to start a side hustle for
beginners on the internet, this blog post will help you immensely to hit the
ground running. The best part is that you can work from home or anywhere in the
world and still succeed by leaps and bounds.
But before you step your foot in the door, you’ve to understand
that the following criteria are necessary for any side hustle business success.
A lot of side hustlers get started with vim and vigor and give up sooner than
they started when they are not earning quick cash in the process as expected.
Making money online from side hustles requires good business
idea, consistency, patience and a desperate target niche to serve. To this end,
you must not take a leap in the dark by starting a side business without
researching a problem in the specific niche market which you’re going to target.
After finding a problem to solve, you’ve to take it a step
further to validate if your target audience will be “willing and able” to pay
for the solution you may recommend. The solution you’re going to proffer could
be your own digital product or an affiliate product where you may earn
affiliate commission from your marketing efforts.
For you to do this successfully, you may have to set up an email marketing campaign where you’ll build an
email list of subscribers, build trust and credibility with your list members
before pointing them to the solution that will help them to solve their problems.
Tip #1:
Avoid Information Overload.
If you want to start a side hustle or any internet business
for that matter, you must be laser focused on what you want to do. A lot of
distractions abound online especially the so-called shining objects syndrome (SOS)
which is all over the place and it will demand your attention and money. You
should always remember that all that glitters is not gold on the web space.
You’ve to go with a side hustle that aligns with your
passion, interest and experience and assiduously work with it until you
succeed. On the World Wide Web, there is surfeit of advertisements for the next
big things that can potently become a bane to your focus and achieving your
business goal.
You’ve to start small and grow big slowly as you learn and
earn in the process. When I was starting a blog with self-hosted WordPress CMS
platform some years back, I didn’t know anything to bank on. But with
determination and consistent practice, I’ve been able to create blogs and make
money online in different niche markets solving problems for my target audience
by regularly publishing high quality content as solutions around my target
subject matter’s problems and pain points.
Tip #2:
Take Consistent Action Towards Your Goal
I want you to know that you’ll surely make mistakes at the
beginning of your side hustle career if you’re a complete beginner or newbie. That’s
quite understandable! What is the most important is your ability to take
consistent action towards your goal by providing valuable information to your
target audience and making money on the internet through any of your preferred
monetization models.
As you may already know, there are several steps to start an
online business successfully which include registering a domain name, buying
web hosting, building a website or creating a blog, optimizing your website for
on-page SEO, creating and publishing content regularly, monetizing your
website, driving targeted traffic to your website, setting up a list building
software, just to name a few.
The above steps are very vital to your internet business success,
and you must have a good grasp of them to excel in the end. So, you’ve to make
sure you implement each of the above steps conscientiously, track your web
activities with requisite online tracking tools and make improvements where
necessary.
With that said, here is the best way to start a side hustle
for beginners without breaking a sweat.
- Identify a skill or product you can provide on the internet.
- Research a target market that needs your skill or product.
- Build an audience around your skill or product.
- Monetize your skill or product.
- Track your progress and scale up.
Step #1:
Identify a Skill or Product You Can Provide
To get started, you’ve to look inward and determine what type
of skill or talent you possess to help others get better or solve their pain
points. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. No! Your goal is to offer
unique perspective into the service you wish to provide or product you hope to create
and sell online.
For example, as a freelance writer for hire, I provide well-researched, high-quality and unique
content for my clients at affordable rates which constantly propel them to give
me more jobs to do. As it were, there are many freelance writers out there on
the internet, but my unique freelance writing services has differentiated me
from the crowd.
Even if you don’t have existing skill or knowledge to bank
on right away, you can learn digital skills of your interest in a matter of
weeks and be able to turn it to a side hustle business in no time. It’s not all
about providing services with the skills you have; you also have the liberty to
create a digital product or app to sell on the internet if you’ve the knowledge
to execute it to a Tee.
Your major task is to identify a skill you have which a
group of people will find valuable online and use it to fill a need or gap in
the marketplace. For example, if you have high negotiation skills, you can
become a highly paid web broker when you bring potential buyer and seller together
to close deals in any niche market.
Step #2:
Research a Target Market that Needs Your Skill
Until you’re able to discover a market for your product or
service, it will be a futile exercise thinking of starting a side hustle
business to make money on the internet. In addition, you need enough of these
people in the marketplace who will need your service or product to make your
time and money investments worthwhile.
You may have to conduct market research using several online
tools available (both free and paid) to uncover potential needs and wants to
attend to. You can also conduct online survey or use questionnaire to elicit
information from your target niche. With a list building system in place, this will
be quite easy for you to achieve.
Also, using the search features available in niche forums
and questions and answers sites, you can easily tamp down and gauge the
popularity of your topic or subject matter before taking a decision to pursue
it as a side hustle.
Keyword research tools should not be excluded when
conducting market research to discover pain points and problems to solve.
Google Keyword Planner is free for Google Ads advertisers and you can start
with it to test the waters.
Step #3:
Build an Audience Around Your Skill or Product
It takes two to tangle in business i.e. you, the seller, and
the buyer. No matter how talented you are in your chosen field or how stellar
your product is, you cannot make money from it if no one is there to pay you
for it.
And the greatest hurdles you’ll face with your target
audience amongst others are trust and credibility. You’ve to work and earn it
with time. You cannot do this overnight because people buy from who they know,
like and trust which can only happen from constant contact, creating rapport,
regular interaction and building relationship with your ideal audience.
This is why building an audience is critical to your side
hustle business success. Having an audience to regularly interact with will create
rapport with them i.e. your readers, followers, fans, leads, clients and
customers. As a matter of fact, trust and relationship will create a level
playing field for both the seller and buyer.
But before that, you must have something going for you to
command their attention and respect such as your charisma, expertise or thought
leadership, negotiation or marketing prowess, patience to answer questions, and
so on. Any target audience worth the salt is not looking to mediocre but an
expert in the industry to lead them in the way.
So, you’ve to do everything within your power to be an
expert on a subject or topic that is of interest to a group of people who are
ready to pay you when you provide a service or deliver the goods to them. If
you’re not sure of your expert status as of now, you can enroll in a course,
buy an ebook on a topic, download a video and learn from there.
The truth is that the be-all and end-all of online marketing
is having a target audience that is willing to listen to what you have to say
and take the requisite action as you’ll direct them to do. To this end, the
best way to start a side hustle for beginners is to:
- Start a blog targeting an ideal audience in a specific niche market,
- Build a list of subscribers who can become a pool of potential customers in the foreseeable future,
- Regularly publish high quality content as solutions to burning questions in your target niche to demonstrate your expertise, and
- Monetize your content in any desirable business models acceptable to your industry or market.
Step #4:
Monetize Your Skill or Product
Now that you have a target audience you can call your own,
it’s time to monetize your skill or product. Let’s assume you own a blog
focusing on personal finance. The next step is for you to consistently publish
high quality content on the blog website on how to pay off debts, save and
invest, and so forth.
As soon as you’re able to hit thousands of views per month, you
can be rest assured that monetizing your blog will be a winner. You can
monetize your blog with:
- Contextual adverts such as Google AdSense, Mediavine, etc,
- Affiliate links related to relevant products and services,
- Sponsored posts,
- Your own digital products such as ebook, video, etc.
- App or software created by you,
- And so on.
Step #5:
Track Your Progress and Scale Up
Making more money on the internet is about smart work and
not necessarily hard work alone. Your goal is to work less and earn more. And
the best way to achieve this is by tracking your progress with online tools,
analyzing it and scaling where possible.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are good places
to start because they are free to set up on your blog or website.
If you are a freelance writer for hire like me, you can
integrate digital marketing services including SEO (search engine optimization)
to your suites of offerings to scale up and boost your income.
Personally, the best way to start a side hustle for beginners is to create a blog and take it up from there. It doesn’t matter if you are providing online business services as a freelancer or creating digital products to sell. It’s from your blog website you can build an audience whom you can promote products and services to from time to time.
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