5 Steps to Beat Side Hustle Bustle

Are you like many, chasing the dream of true financial freedom life? Well, one of the best options for achieving this goal to beat side hustle.

According to Amol Chavan, a side hustle “is the work a person is more passionate about than a day job and can be done in addition to one’s full-time job for supplemental income. Side hustles means, the work a person is passionate about and doing as a part of gaining some supplemental income.”

One of the most common misconceptions about side hustles is that it’ll be an easy ride. Let me start off this post by telling you that they are not some quick win or for anyone with ‘shiny object syndrome’. Side hustles pose a legitimate business opportunity for anyone who is willing to put in the time, be patient, and is truly dedicated to their goal.

If you want to win at this game then looking at the common mistakes and the reasons people often fail is as good a place to start as the reasons why they succeed and so this will be the focus of today’s post.

For each mistake or common failure, we’ll first identify what is it and why it’s important, followed by how to recognize if you’re a culprit of making it and how to overcome the challenge if you are.

No more messing around, let’s get into this.

5 Steps to Beat Side Hustle

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Mistake #1: Unrealistic Expectations About Time it Takes To Make It Big!

With the advent of social media influencers and related brand partnerships, there’s been an explosion of newcomers arriving onto the side hustle scene trying and take advantage of the potential earnings on offer. With this rush, there’s been a similar eruption in the blogging world, with many people choosing to start their own blogs as a means for communicating with audiences and earning a side income.

In my opinion, many of these accounts and sites place too much emphasis on paid partnerships. What’s the old saying? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!

One of the most common replies we get when discussing side hustles with creators is that they’ve given them a go before and not seen measurable results.

The next question we always ask is “how many campaigns did you try?”

You can imagine where I’m going with this, the answer is always far too few for them to have given side hustles a fair chance to work.

The truth is, and any full time side hustler will tell you this, that this kind of work takes time to start to really bring a decent bang for your buck. To test this logic, look at case studies from the top-earning bloggers and gurus out there. Their stories are all the same, trial and error are what drove them to the financial freedom and success they live with today.

Take Dean Holland for example, in his book The Iceberg Effect he begins by telling his story about how many times he failed, how he found himself in £47,000 worth of debt before he even made so much as a sale. Of course, this example is a little extreme and I certainly don’t recommend you follow in his footsteps; however, it highlights the point being made here: side hustles are not a get rich quick scheme but can work wonders for those dedicated enough to persevere.

Take some time to consider these questions and try to evaluate whether you fall under these categories because if you do, you haven’t given this monumentally lucrative option a fair whack.

• How many side hustle campaigns have you run on your channel? Is it just one or two?
• Did you try out a load of different campaigns to see which ones resonate with your audience?
• Did you expect or even hope a little that you’d see £1000s worth of sales on your first try?

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Mistake #2: Becoming Demotivated By Large Amount of Upfront Work Required

The honest fact about making it on your own in the world of business is that you’re going to have to put in a lot of work before you start to see measurable results.

Side hustles are no exception, that is what real meaning of side hustle.. The best part, you outsource side hustle work to freelancers via the World’s largest freelancing palform Fiverr.

In order for you to get your audience to part with their hard-earned cash, you need to persuade them that whatever product or service you’re promoting will sufficiently provide a solution to the problem they’re facing.

Take a second to think back over the times where you’ve been convinced to part with your cash by content online. Did it take just one content piece? Was the content simply shouting the benefits at you and not taking the time to consider your personal case?

The answer to these is probably no.

Let’s ask another question…

Do you think it’s easy for a brand to grow to a point where they make £1000s a month in sales?

If you believe the answer is yes and have achieved it then kudos to you; however, for most of us in this world we don’t have the magical power of mind control or the knowledge and experience of the top marketing and sales experts.

To get back to the point, for you to succeed in the side hustle domain you first need to know a thing or two about marketing and sales, which you really aren’t going to learn from just one or two campaigns.

What else do you need to succeed at side hustling?

Your offer or content pieces that are going to convince readers of your proposed solution to their problem. As mentioned earlier, this isn’t going to work as a one-off, ingenuine promotion or a quick piece you can bang out in ten minutes.

For the people out there who’ve learned this lesson already, or for those raising hands in their minds saying “that’s me” as I ask some of these questions, do not fear! There’s a simple lesson to be learned here; side hustles require a lot of upfront work and therefore, pose the risk of wasted time if they fail.

If you know this and hold it in your mind as you go, along with case studies of those who’ve achieved wild success in this field, you’ll be one step ahead of so many who fall at the first hurdle by becoming demotivated at the prospect of doing a lot of work upfront.

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Mistake #3: Overlooking Power of A/B Testing

Not carrying out sufficient A/B testing for every element of your offer is yet another product of underestimating the amount of work that goes into a successful side hustle campaign.

A/B testing is when you try out different variants for various aspects of your offer. Examples may include: the title, the color, size, and text on your call to action, the primary communication medium used, or the order of your points; basically, anything that affects the user experience of your promotional piece.

The point of this is to marginally improve your conversions by monitoring which variants work best. By paying close attention to this and continually testing different ideas you’ll slowly progress towards building an outrageously profitable campaign.

By neglecting this strategy, you vastly reduce your chances of making it big in the side hustle game. To use an example, Stephen Duneier personifies the power of making marginal improvements towards your goal.

On an incredibly inspirational Ted Talk, he reveals the secret to his feats as an entrepreneur, Guinness world record holder, and overall fiend when it comes to succeeding in all walks of life, to be the use of making marginal adjustments to his life during the later stages of his high school career.

Using the example of Novak Djokovic, he illustrates this point by analyzing how the world-class tennis player made it from the bottom of international tennis rankings all the way to number one in just a few short years. Arguing that his success was not owed to one single tactic or play but to the dedication he had to make marginal improvements to his technique; by trying and testing every single different option available to him in all aspects of the game to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Stephen posits that the way Djokovic achieved his goal can be put to use by anyone from any walk of life.

If you’ve fallen prey to being demotivated by the seemingly endless number of tweaks and adjustments you’ll be making when conducting A/B testing just think of Djokovic when he was ranked 680^th in the world or of Stephen who started out as a well below average student and today is the founder of award-winning hedge funds and over-achiever in so many areas of life.

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Mistake #4: Not Updating Old Winners

If you’ve managed to set up a side hustle campaign that’s bringing you some decent earnings then it’s vitally important you keep the offer up to date.

Many people think that if an offer is working now, then it’ll work the same in a year’s time. Unfortunately, this may be a slightly rose-tinted view, as in the dynamic world we live in today things change fast. Opinions change, values change, things go in and out of fashion and that affects what people buy!

Many side hustles are a form of passive income, meaning it can continue you earn your income even while you’re doing other activities and not working on it at all. This is one of the greatest benefits of this kind of earnings as it can generate income months or even years after you first posted it.

So, monitor all your campaigns, old and new, and if you see the conversions of one drop dramatically it may require updating or changing to fit with the times.

Mistake #5: Trying To Become Winner By Yourself

This last point is slightly different from the others and, really, can be applied to any walk of life.

The point is this: anyone trying to achieve success in a particular area of life should look to those who have already achieved their goal, pay close attention to how they managed it, then do their best to learn what they can from the other’s methods and apply them to their own life.

This phenomenon crops up all over the place, however, I’ll share my favorite instance of it.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) one of the core principles is modelling. This states that in order to succeed with a goal you should find those already excelling and study the path they took to get them there. This is not plagiarism or being a “copycat”, but analyzing their triumphs and doing your best to implement them in your own life.

The recurring mistake made by so many is born from trying to reach goals by figuring everything out for yourself, without any help from others. The truth is it’s no more noble or respectable to reach your goal alone than it is to achieve it with the help of others. Business is not the time to let your ego run the show, it’s the time to make logical and practical actions backed up by proven systems.

If you want to succeed at a side hustle or two then go out there, find a mentor and study their successes, and failures. The further you delve into how they got to where they are, the more you’ll unearth about what worked versus what didn’t and be able to start applying their winning tactics to your own campaigns.

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Closing Thoughts

In today’s post, we’ve taken a deep dive into the common mistakes made by people when it comes to side hustles, how to identify these in your own promotions, and some tips on how to overcome them if you’ve been tripped up by any before.

If you’d like to keep reading on this subject or learn about the side hustle called affiliate marketing, then I recommend checking out these 5 things to consider before kicking off an affiliate campaign to skyrocket your earnings.

If you take away one thing from these Steps to Beat Side Hustle then remember that if something is hard it doesn’t mean you should give up, but instead, you should persevere where others have not.

“In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity” – Albert Einstein

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This post written by guest author: Green Lantern, is a Co-founder of Kinsume, the world’s first eco-affiliate marketplace, and Author of the Exploratree Marketing Blog. Kinsume’s ethos is there’s always a win-win, which is why they’ve given their marketing platform and blog tree planting initiatives. Learn more about them and their story on their blog.

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