Decktopus Content Team
With the influence of social media, being an influencer can now make you money by only creating good content. More and more teenagers want to become content creators in the future because it seems like a fun and relaxed way of living. But it’s not that easy to become an influencer just like that. Being an influencer means being a community manager and community building is a slow process with a lot of effort and time.
You have to invest your time and money into it since social media platforms have now become advertising platforms. So what are the easiest and fastest ways to create a side hustle business in 2023? Here goes the list!
What is a side hustle business?
A side hustle business is a business you make money without leaving your main job but spending your time with the time that is left from your main job. For example, let’s say you are a business analyst who is working in a VC portfolio but there is plenty of time you have in the evenings. As well as being a business analyst you enjoy creating designs for mugs, t-shirts or even a digital planner. Here it is! You are qualified enough to start a print-on-demand shop. Maybe you enjoy creating sales funnels, which makes you a perfect landing page designer.
Why not start dropshipping?or make money through paid surveys? How about consulting? Do you have enough experience in SEO, FB Ads, and many more? You can start your consulting business. Maybe you are a person people come to learn about specific things. It could be landing page design, copywriting, editing youtube videos, and many more. You can create an online course and start making money out of it. Does any of these examples sound manageable for you? People make six-figure out of it these days. You just need to plan your next side hustle and see how it goes.
How much can you make with a side hustle?
The short answer is YES! Side hustles are profitable enough that in recent years more and more people are quitting their main jobs to focus on their highly profitable side hustles and scale their business.
On average you can make around $2000/month turning into $5000/month. The secret is to start and spend time with it. We have to say that when you start your blog, the earnings don’t come in the next morning. You have to spend nights and all the extra time you have to make your first sale. It’s like building a start-up. You have to validate that the thing you are selling is in the interest of others.
Also, you have to make sure that you are making the right advertisement so that the right people are hearing your business. Do not forget that without having the money, it’s really hard to create awareness for your services. Because there are millions of other people starting in your niche and their side hustle at the same time, and most of the time there are others that already have an audience.
Always keep in mind that people don’t wake up one day deciding to purchase your products. If you play the right moves you can create a great side income, turning into your main income one day… Who knows?
How much money do you need to build a side hustle business?
The answer to this question is a little bit tricky since there are a lot of different types of businesses around. If you craft your products, compared to a print-on-demand shop, you have to make a larger capital investment. But let’s talk about some basics you need to start any business.
Things you need to start a side hustle business
#1 Domain
This one is controversial. Because some people start with an offered domain like xxx.wordpress.com, xxx.wix.com, etc. They decide to keep things minimal and invest in the business after earning some money out of it. It’s not a bad strategy after all. This way you guarantee to not losing money to something that is not selling. One of the biggest mistakes people make about side hustles are they are investing so much money upfront to discover that their products are not of interest to others. But it is a fact that spending money in a consistent domain rather than an xxx32.blogprovider.com is more secure.
When it comes to spending money behaviors everyone will soon discover that it’s all about trusting the brand. Think about it, you might watch a movie from an illegal site with a weird domain, but have you ever purchased anything? Even it’s for $5? You haven’t so this is a decision to make. Our suggestion is to validate the niche before purchasing or even creating a store. But how can you validate the market without selling anything? The secret sauce is… By community.
#2 Community
You know the number one thing people miss when they start their business? The community or the audience, you name it. It’s 100% easier to sell to an existing audience rather than using paid advertising. Because building a strong and engaged community comes with trust and interest. You know the audience’s interest, behaviors and you can always test what they like and ask them what they spend money on, and you will get an answer.
At this point we hear a lot of people asking about, “I don’t have a community, I have to build from scratch and it will take so much time until it gets there.”. We hear you, but let us remind you that it’s never early or too late to build a community. Even if you want to start now or start your side hustle business next year, you should start to build an audience.
There is no optimal time for this. If your side hustle fails, you will have a community on your hand that will help you to build another thing. The hack here is to start anyway. Do not take yourself down too early. The simplest but the most important trick we can give here is to work on every social channel and observe.
#3 Choose your main communication channel
It’s tricky when it comes to community. However, it’s a fact that some channels work better for some services than others. For example, if you are building a print-on-demand store, an Etsy store, an Amazon store, or just a t-shirt business the channel that will probably work better for you will be TikTok and Instagram rather than Twitter. But it might also shock you to see the support you get from Reddit for example.
For this reason, we recommend for you exist on every platform and always show up once a week. You never know who is watching from which channel.
Another important thing in social media for side hustle businesses is that people often don’t give enough credit to social media. Because social media platforms let you come front when you have real content. For this reason, you should always make sure that you have a content strategy. And if you don’t know what a content strategy is, you should start to learn about it now.
But basically, a content strategy is the strategy you have should craft to approach to right people, make those people do the moves you want. For example, increasing the like number of a post is not enough as a strategy. This works for you on explore pages. But maybe the only thing you want is to attract people to come to your webpage and you think they will be convinced to buy from you.
You need to choose the right CTAs and many more. To learn more about a content strategy you can check one of our latest blogs or use the content strategy template we have.
#4 Niche
A niche is very important especially if you a starting a fresh new side hustle business. It’s okay to have more than one niche if you have a large brand with structured brand awareness but selling to more than one niche is dangerous for new businesses. Why? Because most of the time the main effort is to find the right people, attract them into our profile, shop, and sell them anything.
Try to remember, when was the last time you clicked on a profile to get yoga pants and saw a notebook? Never. When you are a starter make sure that every effort and message you have to deliver, includes one single message. “We sell products about X.” or even better “We sell X about X”. We get it, it can be tricky to find a niche, but luckily we have a guide for you. Here are the 8 Niche Areas that people show more interest in this year! Take a look.
One of them can be your niche, and whatever you are building, it can be a great idea to build things around this niche. These niches are researched by our marketing team to help you to build profitable businesses that sell in this year particularly.
The Complete List of Tools You Need to Start Your Side Hustle Business in 2023
It’s very hard to decide which tools to use in the early stages of starting anything. Because a lot of the time, online tools and services are a little pricey because they are not developed for people who are not making money yet. For this reason, we crafted a list for people that are starting their side hustles, from home, while these tools can help you with your other jobs too. Let’s discover the list!
#1 Decktopus
This tool is by far the number one tool on the list since it lets you make more than one thing at once. We hear you saying, how a presentation tool help me to make money online? I’m not looking for investors to pitch. Do not approach tools by their only one feature. As a fresh starter business owner, you should learn the secret ways to make the most out of every tool you have so that you maximize the efficiency of your investment.
What is Decktopus?
For the ones that haven’t heard of Decktopus before, Decktopus is a presentation and document creation tool that lets its users convert people from their presentation-sized documents. It has analytics, form, and brand kit features that enable users to create engaging content by a call to action, collect leads with forms, showcase their products with image slides and collect payments with hyperlinks, fully personalize their content that will match their brand.
Create a Sliding Landing Page
Finding a domain for your business by far the cheapest and easiest thing you can do to start an online business. You can even find domains for $1 these days. But creating a webpage from scratch? Hold on, tiger. Creating and designing a new webpage and making the perfect landing page is one of the most experience needed jobs these days and there are a lot of tools that are both code and code-based. But there is a solution for this on Decktopus. Check their community landing page for example.
They have created a presentation with slide layouts, added hyperlinks like buttons, added forms to collect leads, and connected this presentation that can be PDF into a domain. It’s by far the maximum thing you can get from a presentation file. Do you want to learn how to craft one for yourself? Their one of the best value presentation is that you can create one of these for your business in 15 minutes. Let’s break it into small pieces to show how easy it is.
1- Create an account on Decktopus
2- Create a presentation from scratch or start with a template
3- Pick your brand theme to use suggested and pre-prepared designs
4- Create your slides
5- Place links
6- Connect into your domain
That’s it! Your landing page is ready in simple 6 steps without having to code, spending money, or spending hours.
Create a brand kit
Sometimes if you are a small business dummy it’s very common not to have consistent content that is reflecting your brand. But hey, it’s very hard to create a brand kit from scratch if you are not a professional. The main idea behind Decktopus is that people spend so much time with a design that they are forgetting what matters the most, the content. For this reason, they worked with talented designers and uploaded brand themes, fonts, and color palettes. You can always choose from their library without having any copyright issues. Make sure to use these in all of your content so that every post, document, and information about your brand be consistent.
Create a product showcase
Decktopus offers a lot of different slide layouts in their user-friendly interface which lets users create different and creative slides. For example, by using the image list layout one can create a product listing and direct people to the payment page by using hyperlinks. Also rather than catalog people can create a sliding store with more detailed product information such as image+bullet list layout. Here’s one of the samples.
Create digital content to sell
These days, e-books, workbooks, and other digital content are on hype because more and more people are searching for condensed real-life experiences rather than long articles. Since NFT is exploding as a trend, now selling digital content and digital documents is now a thing people can make money as a side hustle business. Guess what? Decktopus is a perfect tool to create a digital workbook or simply a document to share knowledge.
You can create your content on Decktopus and create a payment plan to sell on different platforms such as Etsy, Teespring, Printify, etc.
#2 Canva
Canva is also another tool used by many creators. Since Canva has a free plan and a great library of different templates of different types of documents users can create Instagram posts, brochures to download and post on various social media platforms. This tool is very handy because like Decktopus one can adjust the styling according to the style guide and adjust documents easily with a user-friendly interface.
Everyone can now create beautiful posts designed by talented designers because a lot of designers now create on Canva and sell their designs to Canva to make a living. You should check canva for your new side hustle because it doesn’t require any payment yet!
#3 Buffer
Buffer is a perfect tool to reduce the time you spend on social media. It let you schedule your social media posts and captions on various platforms. You can think of it all in one place to plan your content in bulk and never look back while it automatically pushes your content for you.
#4 Stripe
Stipe is one of the easiest to integrate and use payment platforms on the internet. To make money online you should give people a chance to pay online. Stripe is the perfect platform for that. Check out their landing page to learn about the full detail. One can create payment plans and single payment links and automate everything in one platform
What are some side hustle business ideas that are profitable?
#1 Print on Demand Services
Print on demand is the by far easiest, and fun thing to do. There are various platforms for you to open a shop and sell your products easily. Generally, people start with simple quotes of t-shirts rather than cool designs and illustrations and it works! More and more people are making money with print-on-demand services. You can also call it a t-shirt business but it’s not a side hustle to be underestimated. Tools like Kittl's T-shirt design maker make it effortless for both professionals and beginners to create stunning T-shirt designs and get started with print-on-demand business.
Since people are making huge money out of it, print-on-demand services are developing and making the whole process very smooth. Some print-on-demand companies are Teespring, Printify, Shopify, Printful, and many more… Print on demand stores generally does not only have t-shirts. They also print, mugs, tumblers, house apparel, digital contents, phone cases, and many more. Make sure to check this option before starting anything because it sure is profitable once you start selling.
#2 Virtual Assistants
The term virtual assistant started on appearing in search results in recent years because the world economy has digitalized and every business has become reachable from any place of the world. Because of the time differences and the cost of opening new headquarters in new countries and new timezones, now people are hiring virtual assistants to do things for a specific country. Of course, they do not come with a full experience like a regional manager but it sure is logical to make things managed by virtual assistants such as content planning, management, or simple management of anything. It’s one of the great ways to monetize skills in any area.
Working from home might be new for some people and might be a bit time-straining if you can't balance your work and life but you can use tools like hours worked calculator that can guide you specially when you are still starting.
#3 Freelance Writing
Sometimes rather than starting a blog and working on creating an audience people prefer writing for platforms that are searching for writers but have no budget of hiring one. If you think that you are talented in writing long articles with value, have time to do so, and are enjoying writing things you should start thinking about writing freelance because it can make you around $1-$10k a month!
#4 Start a coaching business
Online coaching businesses are in the hype, especially during COVID. People are reaching our other people’s experience and point of views for their business and if you have the experience and skill in a specific niche it’s a perfect opportunity to share your knowledge and help others grow as well. Earning the potential of online coaching businesses are $20-$60k a month!
#5 Online Courses
Online courses are now a thing because people are ready to kill to learn more and be better at things since there is a large competition in literally every area. Even if you already a student or a retired person you can always learn new skills and sell your skills as well. Let’s say you are 20 and you created a viral TikTok. You can create a course sharing the steps for viral content and people will buy it because it has value.