My name’s Mark Williams-Cook and I’m director of Candour, a digital agency. Before I was running agencies I was working from home earning a passive income that started as a ‘side hustle’ from my day job. I want to give you quick tips and tools for how to get started earning some extra income and having a bit of fun along the way.
Where to start when choosing a side hustle
The best advice for a picking side hustle is choosing something you’re already passionate about. By definition, a side hustle is going to eat into your free time, so if you’re not interested in what you’re doing, you’re going to burn out quickly.
In my experience, it’s rare for someone just to sit down and come up with an idea for a side hustle, however, if they’re centred around your existing interests the ideas will come to you — if you’re open to them. It’s a bit like finding love!
How do you stay open for these opportunities? For my hobbies and interests, I kept a note of anytime I struggled to find a specific bit information in Google about it or I couldn’t do a thing I wanted to do — this is your gap! If you’re searching and struggling to find this information, you can guarantee others are too, at any point Google is serving over 60,000 searches per second!
Idea generation
When you want to get into the nitty gritty of exploring a topic, you need to find out what questions people are asking, when they’re asking them and how often. Luckily, there’s loads of tools that can help you with this!
Free tools for idea generation:
Answerthepublic.com – Will give you automatically mine ‘Google Suggest’ queries of common searches. It’s a great way to get a broad view of a topic and where peoples’ general interest is.
AlsoAsked.com – Enter a topic into this tool and it will give you all of the results from Google’s “People Also Asked” boxes and will allow you to explore the common questions users are answering. This is an excellent way to start planning out what your content should look like.
Keywordseverywhere.com – This is a brilliant Chrome plugin, with a very small cost. It will overlay the amount of monthly searches that happen for anything you type into Google, really handy when trying to work out where traffic might be.
Google Trends – A free tool from Google to allow you to see comparatively how searches compare to each other in terms of volume and when those searches are happening. You’ll also get an idea of which markets are growing fast and which are shrinking.
Budgeting for a side hustle
If you’re just starting out, it’s absolutely best to keep your investment low and if possible, just your time and the tools you need. The key to a good side hustle is making money and a dollar saved is always more than a dollar earned after tax!
A couple of ways you can get going:
Google Adsense will allow you to earn money from your site by automatically placing content relevant ads on it. You’ll be paid on a per-click basis (don’t even think about clicking on your own ads) and it’s absolutely free to join. You’d need a lot of traffic to make a living off Google Adsense, but it’s quick, easy, free to join and a way to monetise any traffic while you’re building towards bigger things.
Affiliate schemes are one of the lowest-risk ways to test your niche. This mean signing up to schemes where you pass leads to suppliers that will sell the product/service and give you a cut. There are affiliate networks such as Rakuten where you can pick from a range of merchants or some companies like Amazon run their own affiliate schemes directly.
Marketing a side hustle
I’ve always had a lot of success with SEO and getting traffic naturally through search engines. It will take dedication and patience, but it’s traffic you can get long-term, with only the cost of your time.
Make content that gets links
If you’re at the stage where you’ve chosen your niche, you’ve used your keyword tools to decide the terms you’re going after, you just need to make some content…. But what to do? How do you get coverage and attention?
- Inspiration from feeds: If you want to invest a little money in some tools, Buzzsumo can show you on a daily basis what content is popular and how often it is being shared. This can be a great source of inspiration to tie in your content to current trends, news and memes.
- Same content, displayed better: It’s hard to be unique with content, but it isn’t just about words, it’s about experience. For example, take some dry information from Wikipedia about construction dates of various buildings and you can build a beautiful timeline of London history — the result is a much richer experience for people looking for that information. This means more attention, more shares, more links and better rankings for your side hustle.
- Use your own or others data: Coming up with unique research, data or opinion is a great way to get attention. One of the easiest ways to do this is with surveys. If you have a community you’re part of, a list of customers or contacts, you’ve got a great place to start building interesting content. Remember, it’s the experience of the content, not just the content itself that counts. Spend some time, look at how others have visualised surveys and data. Completely stuck on where to start? Here’s 100 places you can get data from!
Getting technical
Having some technical web knowledge will definitely give you the edge on your side hustle. You’ve probably seen the ‘instant answers’ Google sometimes provides with featured snippets before. Did you know it’s possible to optimise for these? One of the easiest ways to get fast traction is to make sure you site is employing schema correctly. This basically means labelling data for search engines to make it easier for them to understand and most of the time, benefitting from it with your website getting increased visibility.
Consistency
Good things take time. This is why it’s important to keep your overheads low. When I’ve mentored people with their side hustles, the number one reason I see them fail is they simply don’t follow through with the consistently and attention that it takes to get results.
Before you set out, plan how much time per week you are prepared to spend on the project, calendar it in — and stick to it!
First things last… The domain name
Finding a good domain name is hard! It gets even harder when you find out that the Twitter handle you wanted to match the domain name is gone too! I use https://www.namecheckr.com/ whenever I’m looking to pick a new domain. This neat tool will automatically check for the domain and associated social profile and tell you what’s free. It’s a great time-saver for what is of course, the hardest part of the side hustle — finding a name that isn’t taken!
