More than half (54%) of Americans say they’ve started a side hustle to supplement their primary source of income in the last 12 months, according to a survey from MarketWatch Guides.

Although there’s no shortage of potential opportunities — side hustles can span teaching online to cleaning barbecues, creating digital products and so much more — one doesn’t necessarily have the same earning power as the next.

Related: 10 of the Most Profitable Side Hustles You Can Start With Little or No Money

Choosing a side hustle is one crucial piece of the puzzle — but where you decide to start it is another that might make or break your success.

So where in the U.S. do side hustlers have the greatest earning potential?

The team at SideHustles.com conducted a study to find out, analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Community Survey to determine which states and cities have the highest percentage of residents earning self-employment income and their average earnings.

Households in North Dakota, New Jersey and Connecticut earn the most from self-employment income, at $60,221, $55,748 and $55,192, per the data from SideHustle.com.

Lake Charles, Louisiana, has the highest average self-employment earnings at $179,080 per household, followed by San Tan Valley, Arizona ($141,459) and Upland, California ($130,291), the analysis found.

Related: The Top 10 U.S. Cities for Starting a Side Hustle, According to Statistics

Read on to see the top five cities and states where people earn the most, on average, from self-employment income, according to the study:

Top five cities where self-employed earn the most

1. Lake Charles, Louisiana: $179,080
2. San Tan Valley, Arizona: $141,459
3. Upland, California: $130,291
4. Newton, Massachusetts: $118,527
5. Bethesda, Maryland: $110,573

Related: This 20-Year-Old Student Started a Side Hustle With $400 — and It Earned $150,000 Over the Summer

Top five states where self-employed earn the most

1. North Dakota: $60,221
2. New Jersey: $55,748
3. Connecticut: $55,192
4. Massachusetts: $54,712
5. California: $53,639

Despite the fanfare that often accompanies acquisitions, the reality is that about 80% fail to achieve their desired objectives.

After all, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Inadequate due diligence. Overvaluation. Poor integration planning and execution. A failure to retain employees from the new company.

And yet, businesses spend more than $2 trillion on acquisitions annually. Why? It’s often unrealistic for a company to build all that’s needed to reach its strategic goals fast enough to remain competitive. An acquisition, however, presents an opportunity to quickly expand a business’s ecosystem, tapping into new relationships, distribution channels, products and innovations.

I lead an entertainment technology company — composed of iconic brands like TiVo and DTS — that has grown our ecosystem through 15 acquisitions in the last decade alone. What has the experience taught me?

The success of an acquisition is about more than the nuts and bolts of the deal itself; you’re not just buying a technology, product or service to tack onto your company offerings. You’re also gaining institutional knowledge and bringing thought leaders on board who could help steer your business.

I believe one of the most critical aspects of an acquisition’s success is too often overlooked: the people. Here’s what I’ve learned about how they can be the difference-makers in the lead-up to and aftermath of a deal.

Related: 5 Reasons Small Businesses Should Consider Mergers and Acquisitions

The “why” has to include the “who”

Sure, pre-deal due diligence involves evaluating the potential profits and risks of an acquisition. But it also requires searching for leaders, along with the systems and cultures they’ve developed, that are likely to contribute to your company’s growth.

In dynamic industries like tech, companies often need to pivot to remain competitive. That means it’s essential to ask this question when evaluating incoming leaders: Whose strategic thinking, leadership skills and decision-making style do you want on your side, even if you end up shifting them to new areas in the future?

We learned the importance of this consideration from an early acquisition. The technology we’d bought eventually became outdated, but that CEO has remained an instrumental member of our leadership suite for more than a decade, and an acquired team under his leadership has transitioned to form the foundation of one the most exciting arms of our business: our connected car platform.

Once you’ve found a company with the resources and people that will likely benefit your business and conditions enable sensible valuations, developing an integration plan before the deal closes is imperative.

We accomplish this by identifying change champions — committed leaders who are strong communicators, open to feedback, adaptable, resilient and collaborative — from both companies to rally our people. Then, we create detailed checklists for the first year or more, often including thousands of line items from assigning desks to implementing training events, all to move us swiftly toward our goals of a fully integrated team and business asset.

Related: How Leaders Can Build Acquisition-Ready Companies

Use it as an opportunity to reimagine culture

Many people see an acquisition as an opportunity to innovate — adding and evolving products and developing strategies for new markets. One thing they often overlook, though, is the chance to innovate company culture. Specifically, to pick and choose the best of both of what the companies are doing to establish a new normal.

Often, the default assumption is that the acquiring company’s culture will remain dominant. But that can sometimes be a mistake.

Many times, bringing two companies together and fusing their resources and operations creates an entirely new company — one that may benefit from a cultural change.

For example, following a merger, we realized our previous corporate values no longer accurately reflected the new company. So we reset them. It wasn’t always easy: It took a long-term project involving employee input throughout. It also required objectivity at the leadership level to stay open to new ways of working and communicating. However, the initiative resulted in a set of values that more meaningfully illustrated our evolved mission and culture and set us on a path toward greater success.

Related: How to Create a High-Performance Organization Through a Successful Merger

Move as quickly and transparently as possible

A deal closing can feel like crossing the finish line for those overseeing it. But when you look over your shoulder, you see that most employees are just lining up at the start. The real marathon begins after the closing: It takes steady work to get the rest of the company across the finish line to reap the anticipated gains of the deal.

We’ve found that approaching this integration process with a focus on urgency, sensitivity and transparency is key to retaining as many employees as possible, along with the crucial institutional knowledge and skills they hold.

This means we work fast to communicate our plan openly and honestly. For instance, within 45 days of a recent acquisition, we got leaders physically in front of 80% of the team. This approach aims to mitigate uncertainty by laying out plans and providing clarity on roles and opportunities. Research shows that transparency can engender trust, so when the answer to a question is, “We don’t know yet,” leaders should prioritize being upfront about that.

We also expressed empathy. Acknowledging that it’s natural to feel anxious about uncertainty and change is important to build morale during a time of transition.

About a third of employees from an acquired company tend to leave within the first year due to uncertainty or culture clashes. But time and time again, we’ve seen that a deliberate process has helped to improve on this trend. While it’s not always possible for all employees to stay on, voluntary turnover within a year of our last two acquisitions was just 15%.

Defining success

There are many ways to define a successful acquisition: meeting financial goals, expanding relationships or staking a hold in new markets. We’ve seen this firsthand. For example, strategic acquisitions have allowed our business to significantly amplify our global footprint of streaming devices and open up new monetization opportunities.

While these elements are critically important, we view success even more broadly. It also means our team feels they’re continuously working toward a worthy goal. And viewing people as vital to the success of an acquisition has helped us to assemble a team prepared and motivated to do just that: deliver innovative, extraordinary experiences to our customers.

Five years from now, 94% of marketers think that links will continue to be a ranking factor in Google algorithms.

However, many companies offering link-building services engage in questionable practices, such as selling links from manipulated or low-quality websites. These links can not only fail to provide value but may also harm the website receiving them. Therefore, it’s essential to exercise caution when hiring an external partner for link building.

So, here are a few key tips to help SaaS businesses get the maximum from their link-building efforts.

Related: 10 Powerful Link-Building Tactics for Boosting Your Website’s SEO

1. Take metrics with a grain of salt

It’s crucial to approach metrics with skepticism. Website owners often inflate numbers like Domain Rating (DR). You might see a DR of 70, but in reality, the website holds little to no authority in Google’s eyes. Of course, that’s not always the case. In reality, Domain Rating correlates with higher rankings

While metrics can be useful, especially when sorting through large lists of websites, don’t rely on them alone. Always look deeper into the site’s real quality.

2. Organic traffic for real keywords is key

Pay attention to the keywords a website ranks for. Ideally, the site you’re getting backlinks from should have organic traffic, which shows Google values it. More importantly, the traffic should come from relevant, industry-specific keywords. Some sites may rank for irrelevant terms like “celebrity news” despite being in a completely different niche — or worse, they may use fake traffic. Always ensure the keywords are a good fit for your business.

3. Get links from real businesses

The best way to determine if a website is worth getting a backlink from is to see if it’s a real business. Many sites exist solely to sell links and are often just link farms. Focus on acquiring links from legitimate businesses, as these are the ones that offer the most value.

4. Use internal links

Let’s face it — quality link building is hard. And if you find it hard to get backlinks to your service or landing pages, start by linking to your blog posts instead. Then, use internal linking across your site to ensure link equity flows throughout your pages. Without proper internal linking, you won’t fully benefit from the backlinks you’re building.

Related: Top 8 Backlink Strategies to Boost Your Traffic

5. Prioritize links to target pages

When building backlinks, your main focus should be on your money-making pages. Links to these pages are critical. If you’re working with an agency, ensure they are targeting specific commercial pages. Even if you’re only getting a couple of links per page per month, if they’re targeted, it’s highly effective.

6. Optimize anchors

Anchor text optimization is essential. From my experience, optimized anchor texts perform very well. If you’re hiring an agency, send them a list of preferred anchor texts along with your target pages, so they can focus on both elements.

7. Focus on do-follow links

There’s ongoing debate about the impact of no-follow links on rankings. While no-follow links have some influence, it’s hard to quantify. Based on my observations, they seem to be about 30-50% as effective as do-follow links. In a LinkedIn poll I conducted, 43% of participants believed no-follow links were 25% or less effective than do-follow. However, keep in mind that many respondents may not have had enough experience, so their opinions are just that — opinions.

8. Get listed on the top of listicle posts

There are countless “comparison” and “alternatives” pages for popular tools, generating significant search volumes. For instance, searches like “Canva alternatives” are common. If your product is in a competitive niche, you want to be featured as the number one option on these pages created by bloggers and websites. Not only will you gain valuable backlinks, but you’ll also get more clicks and recommendations as the top alternative, greatly boosting your link-building efforts.

This also creates a snowball effect. Future writers and bloggers working on alternatives for that specific tool will often reference existing lists. When they see your product featured prominently, they’re more likely to include it in their own lists, further amplifying your exposure and link-building efforts.

9. Outsource to the right company

According to some research, 56% of SaaS marketing departments utilize a combination of in-house and outsourced staff to reach their marketing objectives.

When selecting a company, make sure they specialize in link building for SaaS and deliver high-quality work, as word of mouth and testimonials can be very effective indicators of their reliability.

Related: How to Shake Up a Stale Link Building Strategy

In summary, while links remain vital for SEO, it’s crucial to prioritize quality over quantity. Focus on securing high-quality backlinks that directly target your key pages, using optimized anchor texts to make a meaningful impact. Your link-building strategy should align with your overall branding strategy to maximize effectiveness. By being selective and strategic in your approach, you can build a robust link profile that genuinely enhances your SaaS business’s online presence.