If you’re among the ranks of the 1 in 5 Britons who have launched their own side hustle since the first lockdown in March 2020, then you may be wondering how you can take your venture to the next level.
Developing and managing a home-based business full-time comes with a set of unique challenges and setbacks that you may have to face if you want to grow. That being said, with the right attitude, careful preparation, and some hard work, there’s no reason why your side hustle can’t become your main enterprise.
Read on to discover how you can slowly but surely build up your side hustle and turn it into a profitable business that will hopefully bring you greater financial security and a healthy work/life balance.
→ 1. Find Your Specialty
If you’re currently selling a mish-mash of products or services as your side hustle, you might want to think about honing in on your most popular offerings and optimising their sales. This is likely to be a more effective use of your time and energy than taking a more broad-brush approach and trying to appeal to too many different tastes at once.
After all, if you think about it, it’s much easier and more manageable to focus on how to promote, market, and sell just one or two items. It will be less overwhelming, for one thing, and you will probably find it easier to find unique and attention-grabbing promotional tactics. Particularly in the early months, when you may still have your day job taking up a lot of your working hours, it’s important to find ways to manage your time and resources as effectively as you can.
Gradually, over time, you can then begin to expand on your best-selling products and branch out your inventory to include some complementary products or services that will capitalise on your successes so far.
→ 2. Build Your Online Presence
The Internet offers home-based side hustles and small businesses the perfect platform on which to build up their brand identity and promote their products. As a result, if you don’t currently have your own website or business-focused social media accounts then it’s definitely time to set them up!
Boosting your online presence costs little or no money, but it gives you invaluable tools with which to engage with customers, advertise, and draw attention to your hustle’s USPs.
You don’t even need to have a great deal of technical know-how to set up a website these days. There are plenty of companies out there that will help you build and design your own site, using handy templates, so you can have your brand-new webpage up and running in no time.
→ 3. Reward Existing Customers For Their Loyalty
A great way to grow your business is by developing a strong consumer base with plenty of repeat business so that, if you ever struggle with getting new customers, you will still have enough sales to get you through the rough patch.
To help you gain those loyal customers, you might want to think about offering a reward scheme of some kind. Offering incentives is a wonderful way to show your appreciation for your customers, and it will make them more likely to keep coming back. They may even spread the word about your special perks, which could help you acquire a host of new patrons, into the bargain.
Wondering what kind of loyalty scheme to organise? There are so many different options to consider, so it’s really down to what will work best for you and your business (not to mention your budget). Some possible ideas include offering free items or services with every tenth purchase, providing a free gift on birthdays, and giving customers who sign up to your loyalty program exclusive access to new products when they arrive.
→ 4. Focus On Productivity And Organisation
When it comes to developing a small side hustle into a thriving business, it’s not enough to have plenty of passion, enthusiasm, and some stand-out products. You also need to have the organisational skills and discipline to make sure that everything goes according to plan and that there are no costly errors.
For one thing, you’ll need to make sure you keep on top of all your ‘admin’. This means keeping all of your order forms, invoices, marketing materials, and other important documents carefully catalogued, and safely stored. Of course, you will most likely be dealing with online documents, which will relieve you of the significant faff involved with having to sort and stow away a plethora of physical files. However, virtual document management while much more convenient – has its own obstacles to consider.
For example, the more documents you amass, the trickier it can be to save them on your hard drive, as you can quickly use up all of the available space on your work laptop.
One helpful tool you can use to make your documents easier to store – especially if many of them are bulky PDFs – is to use a PDF compressor like the one you will find at Smallpdf. With their help you can quickly and easily compress PDF files down to an easily manageable size, reducing them by up to 99%. This will free up so much extra space on your hard drive, and will also make it much more convenient to edit and share documents with anyone who might need access to them.
For any files that you don’t need in the immediate future, you can also consider cloud storage, or you can save those files onto a flash drive or SD card and stash it away for safekeeping until they’re required.
→ 5. Take Advantage Of Freelance Talent
Once your side hustle begins to evolve into more of a full-time project, you will probably want to think about outsourcing some of the tasks involved. You can’t wear too many hats without getting overworked, and there is a sizeable talent pool of freelancers out there, just waiting to be offered a role. So, what are you waiting for? Once you have the funds available to pay for some freelance professionals to give you a helping hand, start reaching out for assistance.
You can hire freelance copywriters to take over some of the content writing for your website and blog, find a freelance graphic designer to jazz up your branding, and take on a freelance photographer to take professional snaps of your products.
Just be aware, when hiring freelancers, that there are certain legalities involved, and everything will need to be above board. This means drawing up a contract and agreeing, in writing, everything from deadlines and workload to their rate of pay. Having everything officially signed and sealed will ensure your legal protection should anything go wrong at any point.
→ 6. Don’t Forget To Have Plenty Of Me-Time
Finally, to give your side hustle a good chance of making it to the big leagues, it’s important that you think about yourself too! Having a healthy work/life balance is crucial, not only for your business’s productivity but for your own well-being. After all, when you run your own business from home, the buck stops with you, and if you’re not in a good state then you won’t be able to give 110% during working hours.
In other words, it’s important to make sure you switch off once the working day is done and focus on relaxing, eating well, getting enough rest, and enjoying quality time with your loved ones. A happy and healthy business owner has the best chance of succeeding in building up a thriving enterprise over time.
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