Side hustles are magical: they give us the financial flexibility to explore our passions, the drive to succeed in them, and the necessary skills and experience to lead more meaningful lives.

In this guide, I’ll show you 9 ways to grow your side hustle into a successful business. If you’re just starting out, it can be incredibly difficult to figure out what exactly you should focus on.

If you’re earning an income on the side, you’re much closer to a real business than you can imagine.

Most new businesses you come across nowadays start as side hustles.

The growth of the internet has made it possible and easy to have a side hustle business while still keeping your full-time job.

Having a side hustle means you have a business on the side while still working your full-time job, which will, later on, become big enough to be your new full-time priority.

Whether you’re just looking to supplement your income or building a business that will enable you to quit your day job and focus on your passion full-time, having a side hustle can be a fun and productive way to spend your free hours and make some money doing what you love.

There are ways you can grow your side hustle into a full-time, income-producing business.

All it takes is to identify and scale out the proper activities that help you achieve the most significant results.

Here are the nine essential tips for growing your side hustle into a successful business.

9 Tips To Grow Your Side Hustle Into A Successful Business

1. Efficiently Manage Your Time:

This might sound pretty basic. However, how well are you managing your time?

The truth is that many of us waste lots of our time. And by doing this, you have less of it remaining on things like growing your side hustle.

The hard part is being truthful with yourself and jotting down how you spend your time.

If you’re curious about where all the time is going, start logging in to your daily activities.

Divide them into 15 minutes or 30 minutes intervals and employ the quadrant time management system.

Based on the following four quadrants of the time management system, categorize each of the types of activities that you did during their specific intervals.

Quadrant 1: Essential and urgent tasks that have to be handled immediately

Quadrant 2: Essential but not urgent activities related to your long-term goals (like growing your side)

Quadrant 3: Not essential but urgent activities that interrupt your time

Quadrant 4: Not essential and not urgent activities that waste your time (for instance, endlessly surfing the internet or binge-watching television)

For the whole day, in each time interval, you choose to track, place the corresponding quadrant number and circle it.

Do an audit by the end of the day. This will help you know how much time is spent in each quadrant.

How much time you waste in quadrant 4, and how much time you devoted to quadrant 2.

At the end of it all, you might be shocked by the results. Knowing where your time is going is essential if you’re serious about growing your side hustle.

2. Follow the Pareto Principle:

The Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, states that 80% of the results we achieve come from 20% of the effort we put in.

When we relate this to your side hustle, it means that only a fraction of your efforts is deriving the most significant results.

The main aim here is to identify those efforts if you intend to grow.

The ideal way to grow your side hustle idea is to abide by this rule.

By monitoring your time, you can better manage it. However, you need to pay attention to details when monitoring your efforts.

Knowing this might be a challenge; however, the sky is your starting point once you do.

3. Create a Strategic Plan:

Before you leave your day job, you need to have a strategic plan for how your side hustle will run once you decide to go full-time.

Use the first hour of every morning to plan. With a notebook and pen in hand, brainstorm about your business, do this the old-fashioned way.

Ignore your phone and laptop for the hour and mute all other distractions.

Jot down your mission, goals, values, and vision. Also, write down everything you plan to do that will take you from your current situation towards your goals.

Now, take out what you’ve written down in your strategic plan and use it to map out the first 90-days with all the necessary details of how you’re going to achieve your goals.

4. Automate Everything Possible:

There is software for systematizing almost every part of your business.

Your aim should be to free up as much time as possible to work on revenue-driving activities with the highest return on investment for the limited amount of free time you have outside of your full-time job.

Invest in these apps that will allow you to automate everything you can.

For instance, you can automate social media posting with Trello and send invoices with an invoice generator.

You can also use Gmail’s canned responses to prevent you from typing out repetitive emails, etc.

5. Generate Leads:

The quickest way to grow your side hustle into a successful business is by generating more leads that increase your cash flow.

Search for and leverage opportunities that allow you to write about your business in a way that will help potential customers learn more about your unique business proposition.

If you haven’t done this, consider starting a blog that focuses on your target audience and using it to build your email list from your blog’s visitors.

By building your email list, you get to advertise your latest product or service without paying a dime since you already have an engaged list of people who love what you offer.

6. Model Other Businesses:

As the saying goes, successful people leave clues.

By surfing through a business in a similar industry as yours and buying everything they produce, you get to see all the down-sells and up-sells, headlines, emails, and copy throughout the process.

You can then use this information to model what’s working. If they write five paragraphs under a title, write five paragraphs as well.

If they made two one-time offers, make two one-time offers too. And so on.

By doing this, you can grow any side hustle regardless of the industry you’re in.

Go to Facebook and like all the groups and pages associated with your interest so that advertisers can begin to target you.

Next is to look for ads with hundreds of thousands or millions of views related to what you’re producing.

Then hack their sales funnel. You can also use a tool like Similar Web to view all their ads and where their traffic is coming from.

7. Use Email Marketing Efficiently:

The nature of your side hustle doesn’t matter; if you’re not building your email list, then you’re wasting your time.

You can’t expect to grow your efforts of making money online from anywhere in the world if you’re not sending out emails.

Are you afraid to send out emails? Well, that’s okay. You’ll get used to it.

However, this single task will generate more money than all the other combined tasks to grow your side hustle business.

So, improve your email marketing skills, create a lead magnet that provides value, and tell your story.

Interact with your audience, and they will interact with you too.

Remember that people don’t buy products from businesses they don’t know or trust. They only patronize the brands they are well familiar with.

If you get your audience to fall in love with you or your journey, they will purchase whatever you’re selling, no matter the price.

8. Leverage Freelance Talent:

Outsourcing some of your work to freelance talent is among the best ways you can achieve more each day.

You can set aside a monthly budget for hiring virtual assistants and freelancers from popular freelance websites to handle the tedious tasks.

These websites also grant you access to freelancers that can handle just about anything outside of your expertise.

Pinpoint the aspects of your business that you must handle, and work towards seeking freelancers who will take care of everything else.

9. Master Your Schedule:

If you want to grow your side hustle business, you need to control your schedule.

And this doesn’t mean you need to occupy every hour of every day; it simply means you need to know when you’re working and when you’re free.

You need to adhere to deadlines and ensure you are not lazing around to get essential things done in your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What business can I start as a side hustle?

• Online teaching
• Become an online freelance writer
• Become a social media manager
• Manage Facebook ads for small businesses
• Become a freelancer in any career of your choice
• Create an online course

2. What is a good side hustle to make money?

• Selling your handcrafted products
• Selling services as a freelancer
• Selling digital information products
• A drop-shipping business
• Creating and selling your designs
• Starting an affiliate marketing business
• Teaching an online course

3. Are side hustles worth it?

Having a side hustle can be a fantastic way to increase your income.

Side hustles can provide a passive income from their regular full-time job for many individuals.

But not all side hustles pay well, and not all opportunities work well for everybody.

Watch 12 Side Hustle Turned Main Hustle

Conclusion

Time is among the most valuable assets for most part-time entrepreneurs.

Every second, every minute, and every hour counts so much that you need to know how to manage your time and ensure you are very productive effectively.

An excellent way to work smarter is to automate repetitive activities with dedicated software to avoid basic human touchpoints in your business.

Originally posted 2022-02-25 23:16:29.