You don’t have to start a side hustle right now.
You don’t have to do anything ever.
It’s your life, after all.
The way I look at side hustles is the same way I look at the process of self-improvement period. There are consequences, both positive and negative, for doing both.
Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of starting a side hustle.
Pros:
- Multiple streams of income provide flexibility and safety. Morals and ethics aside, having one source of income is the most compromising situation you can put yourself in.
- Starting a side-hustle, over a gradual period of time, can help you replace your current job. A job is a third of your life, so this is an important area to consider whether you decide to or not.
- Once to build one side hustle, you can build others, which creates a self-reinforcement feedback loop that gives you more skills, money, and opportunities all at the same time.
Cons:
- You can burn yourself out. I’ve seen so many creators start strong only to crash and burn — like comets in the sky. This is what happens to most people, actually. You watch a few too many Gary Vee videos, get pumped up, try to work crazy hours on your side hustle, don’t make six-figures in six-months, then get butt hurt and quit.
- You can harm your relationships by becoming a workaholic. I know this from experience. I spent time working on my writing at the expense of spending time with my family and definitely paid a price for it.
- If you burn out too many times, you can ultimately give up altogether, leaving yourself in that compromising position permanently.
In short, the right way to build a side hustle is slowly and gradually, on the side, in a way that doesn’t interfere with your life a ton.
To improve your chances of success, avoid these three huge mistakes at all costs.
The Delusional Attitude That Kills Future Profits
Here are some of the problems with trying to start a side hustle, whether you want to be a creator, provide a service, or sell a product.
- Nobody knows who you are.
- Nobody cares about your project
- You don’t know how to attract attention the right way
So when you start out, you’re at this point of absolute zero and nothingness. Here’s what most people do.
They throw their stuff out there in this self-centered way expecting people to magically come find it and engage with it just because they created it.
If you want to be successful, you need to learn how to siphon attention and package your offering the right way.
Examples:
- If you want to build an audience for your writing, you must find websites that have an established audience already, instead of just throwing your posts onto a blog and crossing your fingers. This means using websites like Medium and the publications within the website itself.
- If you want to sell products in e-commerce, you must figure out where your ideal customers are hanging out and put your products in front of them. This could mean running ads or using SEO to put your products in front of people who are already searching for them.
- For service providers, you’ll often have to do outreach and pitch your services to people you don’t know, e.g, cold messaging on LinkedIn. You can also use methods like SEO and ads to send traffic to a website that houses a portfolio of your work.
Examples for how to package your offering are:
- For writers, learning how to package your writing in compelling headlines and simply becoming a better writer make a huge difference
- For e-commerce, learning copywriting to create compelling product descriptions, taking great product images, and having an easy to navigate website help
- If you’re providing a service, you have to learn how to pitch them properly. Honestly, just taking the time to investigate who you’re actually pitching to beforehand makes a huge difference. Most pitches are so bad that simply doing that puts you ahead of the back.
Clearly, this is a condensed synopsis of skills and strategies that take a lot of time to learn.
In short, avoid this mistake of just throwing your brand out there into the abyss and hoping something happens combined with having low self-awareness which causes you to think people should engage with your business simply because you started it.
Most simply don’t have the patience to figure this stuff out, which leads to the second crucial mistake.
What You Must Know to Avoid Quitting Early
Saying you don’t give your side hustle enough time doesn’t suffice as an explanation.
Most people who start side hustles fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the process itself.
What do I mean?
You must understand this concept. Burn it into your brain.
80 percent of the progress happens in the first 20 percent of the journey.
It may take you a few years to turn your side hustle into a full-time business, but the first 90 days, six months, and year matter most. Why?
- Tech issues – Just mastering the tech side of side hustling frustrates most people into quitting. But once you learn the basics, you don’t need to know much more and you can even outsource parts of your projects.
- Micro skills – Take blogging. Blogging requires skills within skills – headlines, subheadings, intros, closes, persuasive writing techniques, pitching ideas, aesthetics/formatting etc. You don’t just get to side down and write. But, again, master the basics and you’re good to go – like chords on a guitar.
- Landscape and jargon – You just need time to get familiar with the landscape. All these little jargon words “lead-magnet” “offer” “conversion rate” “algorithm” blah blah blah. You’ll get overwhelmed by it all and end it up ‘marketing tactical hell’ if you try to understand it all up-front.
The best advice I can give you?
Focus on the core elements you need to get started and nothing else. For writers, I’d say nothing more than blogging skills themselves and having an email list. That’s it. For e-commerce, product research, sourcing manufacturers, creating initial product lines, testing offers and trying to sell something. For service providers, it’s getting good at the skill you’re providing, having a basic website or portfolio to show off those skills, and learning how to pitch and land customers.
Save all the extra stuff for later – social media marketing, advanced SEO, long optimized conversion funnels, all that nonsense.
Just focus on committing a repeated series of similar actions over the timeframes I mentioned.
Avoid the Mindset That Keeps People Broke and Frustrated in the First Place
“When you are young, work to learn, not to earn.” — Robert Kiyosaki
You can’t use an employee’s mindset when you’re building a side hustle.
You’ve been taught equal pay for equal effort – x dollars per hour or salary.
With side hustles and business, you make little to no money on the front end and a bunch on the back end.
Don’t be shortsighted. I see it happen all the time.
A colleague of mine wrote a blog post about her income on Medium. A reader commented on how her average dollar amount per post wasn’t much. It wasn’t, at the time. But she was learning the skills to earn more in the future. She emailed me recently saying she made $8,000 in January. Now she gets more money for the same level of effort because her skills have improved and her platform is larger.
See how that works?
I have a YouTube channel that has earned me a whopping $30. For me, YouTube is a platform that will help me create an entire business back-end that will make me hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I have to make my bones on YouTube for little to no money, first, to get there.
Stop thinking linearly and start thinking exponentially.
You build wealth with exponential growth, leverage:
- Most profiles on platforms start small, but reach a tipping point where the large your audience grows, the faster it continues to grow.
- Once you develop a high level of skill at a service, you can 2x, 3x, even 10x your original rates.
- Once you build a well-oiled product platform, backed by marketing channels that sell for you constantly, e.g, SEO, optimized ads, funnels, etc, you make money while you sleep.
Passive income does happen, but backed by a bunch of upfront work and creating systems that multiply your efforts.
After this point, you can scale even more.
You can hire people.
You can take profits and invest them in passive vehicles like stocks and real estate.
Hell, you can even buy other existing businesses.
Most importantly, once you learn the skills of business, no one can take them away from you. Also, the more streams of revenue you have, the less losing any individual one will harm you.
Then, you can grow and grow and grow.
All these mistakes stem from a lack of patience.
For those of you looking into these work from home tactics because of extra free time or even if you find yourself unemployed right now, don’t look for your side hustle to become your savior, right now.
Start, learn, and get momentum.
The crazy thing? All of these skills, especially making money online skills, are extremely learnable.
I believe most people could eventually grow to six-figures, but most people don’t have the patience to do it nor will they listen to directions and follow simple steps.
Behind all the fancy messages and Facebook ads with Lamborghinis, there’s a deep level of substance to this game. You could grow your income and save your soul in the process. I’ve done it and I know many other regular people who have too.
Our secret? We got started, never stopped, iterated, and had the humility to follow directions and take feedback along the way. That’s it.
Nothing cute required. The steps to success are all there right in front of you.
Take them. Slowly.