3 Tips for Starting a Successful Side Hustle

It’s been reported that 40% of Americans now have a side hustle of some kind, with many more joining them each month. If you’re thinking the side hustle life may be for you, here are a few tips you might want to consider.

Don’t Over-Commit

A side hustle can be a fairly small part of your life, with around half of that 40% mentioned above claiming to spend less than ten hours a week on theirs. This is more possible than it ever was due to the amount of automation that can be used in many online side hustles. Ten hours a week (or less)  is doable, for most people. It’s one to two hours a day, or a full day on your day off, or two half-days on your weekend.

It’s fine to start small, with a tiny investment of both time and money, and see how things go. It’s fine to grow a side hustle organically, without throwing a lot of resources into it up-front. It’s fine if your first few clients are friends, family or neighbors. It’s fine to keep it small, to start with, and keep it simple.

Perhaps because making a website is easy and cheap, these days, many side hustlers make it their first step, but even that isn’t necessary. If you can get your first few clients or sales through word of mouth, whether through social media or in real life, you’ll have some testimonials or reviews to go on that website when you set it up.

Pick the Right Hustle (for you)

There are plenty of people online selling you side hustles. Many of them are pyramid schemes where selling you the idea of the side hustle literally is the side hustle. So you’ll want to ignore the online noise and focus on what will work for you.

I’ve written before about how passion alone isn’t enough when running a business. But combining what you’re passionate about and what you’re good at, as long as that also happens to be something people will pay for, can work well.

When deciding what you’re good at, consider what you do in your personal life, skills you’ve developed at work, and skills you have from past jobs, hobbies and life stages, that you don’t currently use.

When it comes to assessing what people will pay for, think laterally. No matter how useless a skill seems, you learned it for a reason. Maybe just for fun? Perhaps other people also want to learn it just for fun, and will pay you to teach them, either directly or indirectly. For example, if they won’t pay for classes, would they watch a (free but ad-supported) YouTube channel to learn how to do it? Don’t dismiss anything until you’ve thought it through and looked at it from all angles. The opportunities to make money online or offline are many, so take the time to research ideas you think you will enjoy most.

Get Organized

There’s a reason some people are devoting less than ten hours a week to their side hustles. It can be all you need if you’re super organized about how you do things. Depending on your business model that might mean batching your tasks, automating your marketing, or networking with others who can support and promote you.

It will also generally mean practicing good time management, setting up routines and systems, and finding ways to fit tasks around a hundred other commitments. It also often means doing something I refer to as ‘working when you can so you don’t have to when you can’t’.

I heard a TikTok creator commenting recently that ‘drafts are your friends’ (referring to videos she had created and saved as drafts to work on later). It struck me how well that fits for freelance writers too. My draft articles are where I turn when I need to write an article and don’t want to start from scratch. I have a folder full of drafts and often they need very little work to knock them into shape.

Whatever your side hustle, there is probably a metaphorical equivalent to ‘drafts’. Part of being organized is working on stuff when you have the chance so that there’s less to do later when you are under time pressure. For some people, that alone can make the difference between a successful side hustle and one that fails to get off the ground.

Karen Banes is a freelance writer specializing in entrepreneurship, parenting and lifestyle. She writes articles, website content, ebooks and the occasional award winning short story. Her work has appeared in a range of publications both online and off, including The Washington Post, Life Info Magazine, Transitions Abroad, Brave New Traveler, Natural Parenting Group, and Copia Magazine. Learn More About Karen