- Hey, I'm Emma, and I'm our local outreach manager
over at GoDaddy Social.
Today we're gonna talk about how
to turn your hobby into a side hustle.
I'm super excited to be joined
with my co-host Justin Nealey, what's up Justin?
- What's up?
Seems like everybody these days has some type
of side hustle, this is the side hustle economy, right?
- Wait, what's your side hustle?
- I just hustle.
(laughter)
- Fair, same, oh my gosh we're doing the same thing.
So, what's kind of the big challenge
that someone reaches, they're like
"Yeah I wanna turn this into a side hustle."
What's one of the first things
that halts them from getting there?
- I think the biggest thing is figuring out
what their side hustle's going to be about
because we have a lot of different things we do.
Some people like to just eat pizza all day,
some people like....what was your Twitter handle again?
- @EmmaWantsPizza, I look forward to your follow.
- First step is drilling down "What do I actually want
to be known for, what do I actually wanna do?"
- When I think of something I'm passionate about,
I just wanna give it all of my time.
I don't want it to be a side hustle,
I wanna give 110%, so how do you balance that?
- I think the biggest thing is to start small, right?
We can't just go full-force on it.
Some of us can't afford to take that full leap
and just become a full-fledged entrepreneur.
- Good point.
That's why we have that side hustle.
It's that great source of income
to basically test the waters and figure things out
before we can make that leap and see
if it's a viable option. - Totally.
- Cause we got bills, right?
- Can you really make money with this?
Is that something that people get hung up on
or do you think people get distracted
with side hustles that are just full passion projects
in hopes that they'll make money one day?
I mean, where does that come in?
- I think it's both.
You can either spend a lot of money
towards your side hustle and not take it anywhere,
or you can make it something lucrative.
- So another thing that comes to mind,
besides, of course, making money with a side hustle
is time, resources, what do you have advice about that?
- So, that's tough, right?
The biggest thing is you have to prioritize
what's important and set aside time
so you can actually work on your side hustle
or not let your side hustle control your entire life.
Cause I know that I've been there.
I freelanced for a while in the past.
It caused me to just burn out,
which is pretty common
- I imagine, yeah. in the side hustle world.
- It challenges your balance every day.
- 100%, so the biggest thing you need to do
is prioritize what you need to accomplish
and set aside specific times of when you're gonna do things,
cause you still have to have a life,
you still have to eat that pizza.
- So what would you say for me, if I had a side hustle
and you were gonna give me some advice
about time management and planning ahead?
How would I do that?
- So, you can basically take your content calendar
to real life, so on Tuesdays you're gonna work
on social media for three hours.
And then on Friday, you're gonna do whatever.
You can really just piece that out, but start small.
You don't wanna overwhelm yourself,
and you don't wanna burn out cause
if you go too full-force into this,
you'll end up just not liking what you love to do
and we don't want that to happen.
- How do you decide which platform to use?
- First and foremost, you have to have a website.
That's basically the first place that people are gonna go
to make sure that you're legitimate.
And then two, go to social, make sure you're out there,
promoting your products, telling people what you do,
following people in your niche, having those conversations.
And I would still do a little bit
of in-person, in real life, right?
And have those connections and go to local meetups
or go to networking events and find people
that are in your, potentially your area, your niche,
and build up those connections.
- I love that, I call that local love.
- All right.
- Like if you're the juice bar in Silverlake,
follow the yoga studio next door.
There's a lot of overlap and similarities
between their target audience.
- Right, and then once you get everyone
to whatever platform you end up choosing,
your website, social, in real life, that local love, right?
You gotta get paid!
There's a lot of cool platforms out there
that make it super easy to get paid.
- Like what? - We all know Square, right?
The little thing that just, the dongle
that gets put in your phone and you swipe the credit card
right there. - I am so grateful
for Square when I go to the farmer's market.
- And then we have PayPal and Stripe
for online processing, so lots of easy integrations
like WordPress or just any type of website builder
that we have, that you can easily set up and get paid.
Or Venmo, if it's a local transaction--
- Ugh, I love Venmo.
I love Venmo, the random conversations people have.
I see lots of tacos in--
- That's how I pay my landlord.
- In your feed.
- That's how I keep my friends happy.
- That's it. - Splittin' those bills.
What do you do when it comes to protecting yourself
and the policies that go along with that?
- Right, and this is something that you might have
to go and get advice from a lawyer with.
Because you wanna make sure that you're protected.
You'll probably wanna file some sort of LLC
or register your business in some way.
There's a couple different variations.
But do that first and foremost.
On your website, if you have one,
terms of service is a must, same with a privacy policy,
especially with some of the GDPR stuff
that I won't go into in this episode.
And then, check out, there's a lot of generators out there
for web design contracts, for example,
or just random service contracts you can use,
and protect yourself and your audience.
- Okay, so this probably won't come
as a surprise that I'm gonna ask this,
but how will you promote this side hustle?
You know I'm a little biased, social media!
- You've got your love.
- Got my love for the social media,
but how are you gonna promote it?
- The biggest piece of advice that I can give
is have some sort of lead generator
on your website because leads turn into customers.
And that lead generator could be an eBook,
it could be a video series, it could be some
of your blog content, it could be coaching,
could be whatever you want it to be.
Just that free piece of advice or free content
that you can give your audience, that then turns into leads,
and you continue that conversation with them.
- Oh, absolutely.
- Right, and now with social media,
what are your top three social media platforms?
If I was to run a side hustle, what do you want me on?
- All right, that's easy.
Instagram for yours, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
That's gonna help you to reach a variety of demographics
which, last we spoke, that was your side hustle,
it wasn't specific to an age group.
Also, they work better together.
So think about this too, and this is
what's really cool about your side hustle
is you have a variety of angles to go.
You could post something that's educational today,
but also, besides educational,
you could just post things that are just entertaining.
Also some great ways to engage on social media
to spread more word-of-mouth to promote your business.
Ask questions that your target audience would wanna answer.
And so you're mixing up the types of posts that you're doing
and as a result, you're getting that real word-of-mouth.
- And like you say, you don't wanna go
on there and just sell, sell, sell.
You wanna go on there and tell, tell, tell.
- Yeah. - Right.
It can't be all about you and say
"Hey, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this!"
Cause no one wants to actually follow that
and be a part of that, they're just gonna
scroll past you or unfollow you.
- How do I know that what I'm doing,
the promotions I'm putting together,
the time I'm investing, it's getting me
a return on investment, for my side hustle?
- And that's tough.
What a lot of people get hung up on are subscribers
and like counts, which it's somewhat important.
What's more important are your sales, right?
Are you making an impact, and are they buying
from your service or product that you have
for your side hustle?
So, there's lots of different tools out there
that could potentially, they track a lot of that.
QuickBooks for your sales or online bookkeeping.
Facebook has a lot of really great tracking
software, so you can see your engagement,
you can see how many people viewed your post,
viewed your video, liked it, shared it--
- Clicked on the post.
- Same thing with Instagram, you can see
how many people viewed it, liked it, commented--
- Engagement rate. - Right.
So wherever, whatever platform you're using,
there's something to track that visibility
or with your website itself, you can use Google Analytics
to see how people are coming to your site.
- Good point.
- How often they're coming to your site,
how they're staying on there, are they just bouncing?
That's called a bounce rate, they literally
just bounced, they're out.
- But what about paid promotions?
- This is the part where a lot of people end up
spending a lot more into the personal side hustle
than it actually pays them. - I bet.
- It's really easy today to start putting
$5 a day, $10 a day, and at the end of the month
you're like "Where did my money go?!
This is supposed to make me money!"
So, what I would say to that is start small.
Start with a couple dollars here and there,
and kind of figure out what's getting you the traffic,
what's actually converting to sales,
and once you find something that works, expand on that.
There's no one size fits all when it comes
to paid advertising-- - I believe that.
- But I can say, going back to what we said earlier
is making it about how you help your audience
and how you can really help them grow.
- All right, that's a wrap!
Justin, thank you so much for being here.
- Thank you for having me.
- And for all of you listening in,
be sure to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already.
More videos and fun and laugh and learn sessions to come.