Connect with us

MARKETING

How to Turn a Side-Hustle Into a Real and Viable Business

Published

on

In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, a fascinating shift was underway. Each year, an ever-growing portion of the workforce was counting on freelance work for some or all of their income. It was a phenomenon that many industry observers referred to as the rise of the gig economy.

By 2020, there were 64.8 million freelance workers in the US alone. And experts predicted that a full 50.9% of the US workforce would be freelancing by 2028. Then the pandemic changed everything. Suddenly, millions of workers with full-time jobs found themselves out of work and exploring their options.

Their predicament sent the freelance boom into hyper-drive. But it also changed the nature of the decisions workers faced. Before the pandemic, most workers were content to use their freelance work to augment the income from their full-time job. But now, a growing portion of the workforce is looking for ways to turn their freelance work into full-time businesses of their own.

The scope of the change is staggering. In 2021, approximately 380 out of every 100,000 US adults became entrepreneurs each month. That’s the highest percentage of new entrepreneurship in 25 years and more people are joining them every day.

But the fact is, it’s not easy to turn a side hustle into a full-time business of your own. Starting a business requires funding. And it also requires multidisciplinary expertise that most people simply don’t have.

Advertisement

There is some good news, however. It’s that there are lots of resources available to help new entrepreneurs to find their way and make the most of whatever budget they do have.

This is one of those resources.

To help those looking to make the transition from gig worker to full-time entrepreneur, here’s a guide to launching a one-person business on a shoestring budget. We’ll cover where it’s safe to cut corners, where it isn’t, and how to market your new business without a massive budget. If you’re ready, let’s dive in.

Step 1: Begin Your Journey With Incorporation

If you’re planning to turn your side hustle into a business, you must recognize one simple fact early on. It’s that people will only take your new business as seriously as you do. So, it’s not enough to dream up a name and start promoting it all over town. You have to turn your new business into a real, tangible legal entity.

That means you’re going to have to decide on a business structure and incorporate your new business. But there are several options you can pick to do so. Unless you have a lawyer in the family—and if you do, you’ll want to stay on their good side—you must begin by researching your available incorporation options.

Ideally, you’ll want to choose the best fit that provides you with the right mix of liability protection, tax benefits, and flexibility. For example, if you’re planning to stay as a one-person show for the foreseeable future, an LLC might suffice. But if you’ve got larger aspirations, an S or C corporation could be a better fit.

Advertisement

Be aware though, that depending on where you live, you’ll need to pay a fee to register your business. In some places, you’ll also pay an annual fee to continue operating—but the fees are typically small and the benefits are worth the cost. And this is an area where you don’t have to splurge.

You can cut some corners here by handling the necessary filings yourself. You don’t have to hire anyone to do it for you. It’s not anywhere near as difficult as you might think.


Why Email Marketing Matters for Monetization with Alex Cattoni VIDEO

Step 2: Build an Online Presence

Once you’ve got yourself a bona fide business, the next step is to create an online presence for it. Besides doing quality work, this is the step that could determine how far your business will ultimately go. Fortunately—creating a robust online presence for your business isn’t anywhere near as hard or as costly as it used to be.

Step one is to secure a domain name and build a website. Depending on the nature of your work, you might need to devote some significant efforts to do so. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, you need your business’s website to show clients how fantastic your work is. If you’re trying to build an eCommerce brand, you’ll need a site with a built-in shopping cart system, payment processing, and drop shipping integrations.

The good news here is that most solo businesses can turn to any of the multitudes of low-cost website builders to get a high-quality website up and running. Most won’t cost more than $20 per month and come with everything you need to get started.

Beyond a website, the other components of your business’s online presence will consist of social media accounts, which shouldn’t cost a thing.

Advertisement

Step 3: Identify Your Target Market

1652911609 18 How to Turn a Side Hustle Into a Real and Viable

You may have noticed by now that the steps we’ve covered so far aren’t very challenging — nor are they particularly costly. But your next steps will require you to spend a bit more money. That’s because they’ll involve marketing your business to potential new customers to keep your bottom line healthy. And although there are ways to contain some of those costs—which we’ll discuss—some spending will be inevitable.

Before you move on, though, you’re going to need to figure out who you need to target to avoid wasting what little upfront marketing budget you have to commit to the effort. To identify your target market, you should begin by creating a profile of the clients you had as a part-time freelancer. You’ll want to identify what they have in common, as well as what services they needed most often.

The idea is to try and define what your ideal customer looks like so you can find more prospects that fit their description.

And if you’ve had a diverse set of clients up to this point, don’t fret. You can use their individual profiles to create multiple target audiences. In some ways, you may be better off that way. It’ll make it much easier for you to employ market segmentation in your later marketing efforts.

At this stage, however, you should focus on identifying the customer profile that represents the largest targetable audience — so you won’t run out of potential customers as you’re getting off the ground.

Step 4: Devise and Execute a Startup Marketing Strategy

With your online presence all set up and your target audience identified, the next thing you’ll have to do is get to work attracting potential customers. And that means devising an appropriate marketing strategy and executing it to perfection.

how much you’ll need to spend will depend on your particular skill set and willingness to get in the trenches and work. But it’s just fine to start off with a limited marketing budget. In fact, some marketing experts see that as a natural place to start.

Advertisement

When starting on a limited budget, the one thing everyone has is ‘time’. We all have the same 24 hours. So use this time to your advantage and build your product, brand, or service.

When starting any business, you need a consistent flow of customers!

To attain them, you need to work hard to drive potential customers to your website. When money is limited, you need to make use of writing website content so it ranks on Google and drives traffic. You do this by building relationships with other website owners who can recommend your website and business.

As your customer base grows and you become busy, ‘time’ then becomes a problem. But now, you have ‘money’. With this regular flow of money, you can start outsourcing your digital marketing to an expert and grow your online business even more by using Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, email marketing, SEO etc. Using experts in their field allows you to stay focused on what matters most to you…your business!

John Cammidge, Google Ads specialist from the UK.

Even when you reach the point where it makes sense to outsource some of your marketing workloads, there will always be a place for you to contribute to your own cause. You might, for example, contribute a regular blog column to your website and social channels. Doing that helps to keep you connected to your customers. You might also use your specific skills to create an online course that will function as a traffic magnet on your website in perpetuity.

Step 5: Make Your Early Customers Your Raison d’Être

1652911609 411 How to Turn a Side Hustle Into a Real and Viable

At this point, all that’s left to do is to keep working on your marketing efforts and wait for them to bear fruit. But when they start to—in the form of new customers calling on your business—you’re going to need to pivot fast.

To put things simply, you need to make your initial customers the center of your world. 

Advertisement

That’s because keeping your first batch of new customers happy is the secret to making your business’s early growth sustainable. In short—you need to prioritize customer retention in the earliest stages of your business if you want to build the kind of financial wherewithal you’ll need to be more selective later on.

And the best part of reaching this stage is that it means you’ve successfully turned your side hustle into a real and viable business. At this point, your new company is no longer theoretical. It’s real and it’s—hopefully—paying your bills.

From there, the sky’s the limit.

Your new business will take you as far as you’re willing to go. And you’ll never have to return to anyone else’s payroll again. Before you know it, you’ll be the one cutting paychecks to others.

But that’s a topic for an entirely different article—which you’re welcome to write now that you’ve got the requisite business experience.


Why Email Marketing Matters for Monetization with Alex Cattoni VIDEO

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

Published

on

A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

Advertisement

Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

Advertisement

Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

Advertisement

“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

Advertisement

Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

Advertisement

Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

Published

on

Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

Published

on

How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

(more…)

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS