Guide To Having Extra Money

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In a time of increasing economic uncertainty, having a side hustle is becoming a necessity: you need something to fall back on in case you lose your job through no fault of your own. 

Moreover, having an additional stream of income can help you build an emergency fund, pay off your mortgage and prepare for retirement without having to compromise your current lifestyle.

That’s why today we want to discuss three ways to make spare money online that don’t require a significant amount of startup capital. Keep your job, work on your side hustle in your spare time and watch your financial situation improve!

Let’s Start With Some Reality Checks…

Reality Check #1: You Probably Won’t Get Rich Overnight

There are a lot of influencers out there who are straight-up lying to their followers about how much money they are making.

When you see someone flaunting their luxurious lifestyle on Instagram, you can probably safely assume that it’s all fake, especially if this “successful” person is still in their 20s, which means that they didn’t have much time to accumulate their supposed wealth.

And when you see people who have legitimately made a ton of money in a short period of time, you will usually find that they have spent at least a decade grinding before becoming an “overnight” success.

This often explains how some people manage to make it big in their 20s: if someone launched their first business at age 14 and has been pursuing entrepreneurship ever since, it means that by age 29 they have been at it for 15 years. 

Finally, luck plays a significant role in entrepreneurial outcomes, though of course the more shots you take, the more likely you are to succeed!

Reality Check #2: You Will Need to Make Sacrifices

If you want to get your side hustle off the ground, you will need to spend at least 20 hours a week on it.

If you work 40 hours a week at your job to pay the bills and then put in another 20 hours in your side hustle, the total workload will be 60 hours a week. 

There are 168 hours in a week. If you are getting 8 hours of sleep, you are left with 112 hours. If you work for 60 hours, you are left with 52 hours.

52 hours might seem like a lot but it really isn’t once you account for all the “life stuff” like commute, shopping for groceries, preparing food, cleaning your apartment, running random errands, etc.

Realistically speaking, you probably won’t have much time left to pursue your interests, engage in hobbies, or enjoy entertainment, especially if you have a spouse, children, and familial responsibilities.

Reality Check #3: It’s Going to Take Longer Than You Think

Even people who reject the “get rich quick” mindset tend to severely underestimate how difficult it is to build a profitable side hustle.

You will have to get good not only at whatever it is that you want to do but also at copywriting, marketing, and sales.

In all likelihood, it will probably take you a few years to get to the point where you are making the equivalent of the minimum wage. This is especially true if you don’t have any previous entrepreneurial experience and need to learn everything from scratch!

Can You Endure Hardship Long Enough to Succeed?

We recommend asking yourself this when you are considering various side hustle ideas: can you see yourself working 20 hours per week on this for at least half a decade on top of your full-time job?

If you aren’t, you probably shouldn’t pursue it to begin with because you will almost certainly give up too early and won’t be able to reap the rewards of your hard work. So why even bother?

Look, the truth is that you can do everything right and still fail. However, if you are willing to put in the time, make sacrifices, and stick with it through all the ups and downs, you’ll give yourself a real shot at success.

Remember, as our friend Alex Hormozi put it, entrepreneurship is not a game of “best man wins”, it’s more of a game of “last man standing”!

Side Hustle Idea #1: Launch an Online Service Business

The most straightforward way to make money online is to start selling a service that can be provided remotely.

Online Service Business Ideas

Here are some ideas:

• Writing – You can write content, landing page copy, sales page copy, email copy, social media copy, and even books and eBooks as a ghostwriter.
• Video editing – You can edit videos for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
• Social media marketing – You can create content schedules, produce and publish content, reply to comments and messages, run promotional campaigns, and drive traffic from social media platforms to your client’s sales funnel.
• Search engine optimization – You can create SEO strategies, do keyword research, produce SEO content, build backlinks, and rank for your target keywords.
• Paid advertising – You can run paid ads on social media, Google Search or Amazon.
• Web development – You can build and maintain web apps for your clients.

You can simply learn the skill that you are the most interested in. There are plenty of resources for that out there!

Start by Working for Free to Get Social Proof

If you are starting from scratch, it’s going to be extremely difficult to land clients without social proof.

Think about it: would you hire someone who has never done the thing that you are hiring them to do before? Probably not.

This introduces a catch-22 problem where in order to get experience, you need to get clients, but in order to get clients, you need to have experience.

Fortunately, this conundrum has an easy solution:

1. Find someone who could benefit from your service but may not be able to afford it (e.g. a small YouTuber).
2. Do the work, send it to them, and let them know that they can use it for free if they want to (e.g. take their most popular long-form video, create a bunch of shorts, and email those shorts to them).
3. If they decide to use your work, ask them for a testimonial. They will probably be happy to give it to you. 

We recommend starting at the bottom of the hierarchy because it’s easier to reach people who don’t have big audiences yet.

For example, a YouTuber with less than 1k subscribers will be much more likely to read your email than a YouTuber with 1M+ subscribers.

The fastest way to get an online service business off the ground is to work for free for 6-12 months to acquire social proof and then use that social proof to get paid clients. 

Also, if you build a roster of “clients” that you do free work for, once you start transitioning into paid work, some of them might end up hiring you!

Use Cold Email to Get Paid Clients

Once you have social proof, the best way to get paid clients is cold email.

Go on Fiverr, find a lead generation expert, and pay them to compile a list of leads that meet your dream customer criteria.

For example, if you are offering video editing services, you can ask the lead generation expert to create a list of YouTubers within your desired subscriber range. Once you have your list, start cold emailing them!

If you want to learn more about getting clients via cold email, we highly recommend reading “The Cold Email Manifesto” by Robert Indries and Alex Berman.

Should You Keep Freelancing or Start an Agency?

You can get to $100,000/year as a freelancer but if you want to make significantly more than that you’ll need to transition to the agency business model.

If you enjoy providing the service and see the business stuff as something that you don’t like but have to do in order to keep the lights on, then it probably makes sense to remain a freelancer.

However, if you would rather delegate the work required to provide the service and focus exclusively on the business stuff, then starting an agency might be a great idea. Just keep in mind that you will have to learn how to hire, train, and manage people.

Going the agency route can enable you to get to the mid-six-figure income range. Also, a successful agency is an asset that can be sold, typically for a 2-5x multiple of its annual net profit!

Side Hustle Idea #2: Start a Dropshipping Business

What is Dropshipping?

Dropshipping is an e-commerce fulfillment method where you don’t hold any inventory yourself.

Here’s how it works:

1. Customers place orders on your website
2. Those orders get forwarded to your supplier
3. Your supplier processes them and ships the products to the customers 

Dropshipping Pros and Cons

There’s a lot of get-rich-quick nonsense floating around regarding dropshipping.

In fact, if you look it up on YouTube, the algorithm will start bombarding you with videos that have Lamborghinis in their thumbnails.

So let’s start by taking a sober look at the pros and cons of dropshipping:

Dropshipping Pros

You can use this fulfillment method to launch an e-commerce business with a low amount of startup capital. It can be a great way to learn the ropes of e-commerce while minimizing financial risk.

Dropshipping Cons

Dropshipping is extremely competitive because the barrier to entry is so low. There might be hundreds of online stores selling the exact same products as you.

Not only that makes it difficult to stand out but it also leads to a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where everyone is trying to offer the lowest possible price.

E-commerce as a business model is already notorious for its low profit margins but with dropshipping the margins tend to be abysmal. We are talking lower than 10% in most cases.

Finally, if you are using dropshipping as your fulfillment method, you don’t have any control over your supply chain but the customers will blame you if something goes wrong.

This can make it difficult to build a trusted e-commerce brand because the risk of reputational damage is so high.

Is Dropshipping Dead?

Various people have been proclaiming dropshipping to be dead for nearly a decade now but we can assure you that it’s still alive and well.

In fact, the whole idea of it being dead doesn’t make sense considering that it’s one of the most popular e-commerce fulfillment methods and the e-commerce industry as a whole continues to grow with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

However, dropshipping is just that: a fulfillment method. If you want to make money with it, you’ll need to build a legitimate e-commerce business, which is going to take a ton of work!

How to Start a Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping gurus will tell you to use product research software, see which products are already selling well, and then start selling them yourself. 

However, we recommend taking a completely different approach:

1. Choose a niche that you can see yourself sticking with for at least half a decade, ideally one that you are already familiar with.
2. Create an online store store and add products to it. You can easily do this with ClickFunnels + Zendrop.
3. Build a cart funnel for the product that you believe is going to sell the best. In addition to that core product, we recommend creating at least one digital cross sell. That will help you increase your average order value (AOV), your customer lifetime value (CLV), and your overall profit margin. 
4. Create a paid advertising campaign designed to promote your core product and start driving traffic to your cart funnel with paid ads.
5. Use A/B testing – also known as split testing – to optimize your sales funnel for conversions. Your first priority should be to get to profitability.

For example, if you are an outdoors enthusiast, you can launch an outdoors gear store, build a cart funnel for a day hiking backpack, and cross sell a day hiking essentials bundle, and a day hiking ebook guide for newbie hikers. 

How to Build a Sustainable Ecommerce Business

If you want to build a sustainable e-commerce business, we recommend following this strategy:

1. Start by dropshipping and get your business off the ground with a cart funnel. 
2. Transition from dropshipping to white label e-commerce where you order generic products directly from the manufacturer, put your own branding on them and handle fulfillment through a third-party logistics (3PL) service. 
3. Transition from white label ecommerce to private label ecommerce where you design your own products instead of selling generic white label ones. 

How to Create a Trusted Ecommerce Brand

Your ultimate goal should be to create a recognizable e-commerce brand that is trusted by your dream customers.

You can do that via social media marketing, video marketing, and email marketing. In fact, one of the best ways to build brand recognition is to launch a weekly niche newsletter designed to provide free value to your target audience.

Of course, you also need to deliver a great customer experience, which can be challenging with dropshipping but will become easier as you gain more control over your supply chain. Do everything you can to maximize customer retention. 

Once you have a private label e-commerce business with a recognizable brand, you can either continue growing it or sell it for 2–5x of its annual net profit!

Side Hustle Idea #3: Build Software Products

What is “Indie Hacking”?

Software businesses have extremely high profit margins, are relatively easy to scale, and can be sold for a life-changing amount of money.

However, the traditional Silicon Valley path of coming up with a product idea, raising venture capital, and then working like a maniac for years on end in hopes of having a lucrative exit isn’t realistic for most people.

Fortunately, you don’t need to do any of that in order to succeed as a software entrepreneur: you can simply start building software products in your free time without taking any outside investments. This is known as “indie hacking”.

While the indie hacker scene hasn’t produced any “unicorns” (billion-dollar startups) and is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future, you can certainly make six or even seven figures a year that way.

For example, the most famous indie hacker is the Dutch entrepreneur Pieter Levels, whose annual revenue across all of his software products is around $2.3M at the time of writing with an overall profit margin of 90%+!

Do You Need to Know How to Code in Order to Become an Indie Hacker?

There have been some indie hacker success stories where people who didn’t know how to code managed to build software products using no-code tools.

However, we recommend taking a few months to learn the basics of web development: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. 

Wait until the next Udemy sale, buy a few reputable web development courses, and check out the first module of each of them to see which teacher’s style resonates the most with you. Then keep that course and refund the rest.

Just be careful not to get stuck in the “tutorial hell” where you keep consuming coding tutorials instead of working on your own projects. Once you complete your Udemy course, start building software products immediately!

How to Find a Winning Product Idea

There’s this common belief that you need to come up with an innovative product idea in order to make money with software.

We would argue that this is misguided: you are much more likely to make money by taking something that has proven demand and then doing it better than the competition.

Look at the popular B2B SaaS apps to see what kind of software companies are already paying for and then create a product like that designed to serve a specific niche.

For example, when Nathan Barry launched his email marketing app ConvertKit more than a decade ago, the email marketing space was dominated by Aweber and MailChimp, which were and still are generic email marketing apps.

Instead of trying to compete with these behemoths directly by creating another generic email marketing app, Barry decided to focus on serving bloggers and then content creators in general.

At the time of writing, ConvertKit is generating more than $42 million in annual recurring revenue, so this approach has worked really well!

Build and Launch 100 Software Products

Successful indie hackers are known for their insane product development speed: they aim to go from the idea to the first sale as quickly as possible, typically taking less than a month to launch (“ship”) their software products.

In case you are wondering how they manage to do that, they are taking the Lean Startup concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) to its absolute extreme.

For example, Nico Jeannen once built an MVP for an AI photo editing app in less than six hours!

The reasoning behind this is that the best way to find a product-market fit as a solopreneur is to keep building products until one of them takes off. 

For example, Pieter Levels built 70+ products in the last decade, Marc Louvion built 23 products in the last few years and Nico Jeannen built 17 products in just one year. 

Of course, there’s survivorship bias here, but there might also be a correlation between how many products someone ships and how likely they are to succeed as an indie hacker. 

If you want to give this a serious shot, consider setting the goal of shipping 100 software products. Sounds crazy but if you ship one product per month that’s going to take less than 9 years. 

You can abandon this goal if one of your products takes off. However, there’s also something to be said for emulating Levels who continued shipping new products even after RemoteOK and NomadList became popular.

If you want to learn more about bootstrapping software products as a solopreneur, we highly recommend reading Levels’ book “Make”!

Follow Gabriel Weinberg’s “50% Rule” to Unlock Explosive Growth

Of course, it’s not enough to just build products, you also need to promote them if you want to get paying customers.

We recommend following the “50% Rule” that was proposed by the DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg in his book “Traction”: spend 50% of your time on product development and the other 50% of your time on customer acquisition.

If that seems excessive, at least commit to doing marketing for one hour per day like Jack Friks, who went from not knowing how to code to build a mobile app with a $4k MRR and a SaaS with 2k MRR in less than a year!

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His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert. 

This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.

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