Being creative is not only fun, it can also be very profitable if you know how to angle it.
There are more and more of us every year turning our creative skills and talents into a profitable side hustle. (In case you’re new to the term, a side hustle can be defined as “a piece of work or a job that you get paid for doing in addition to doing your main job”)
Some people will, of course, be able to go even farther and use their creativity to build their entire income and yearly salary but for some, a side hustle in addition to their main job is just enough for right now. Maybe the rest can come later down the line.
If you want a little extra money right now and you want to use your creative talents to do it, here are a couple of pieces of our best advice and how to do it.
Do your research before you start
Before you do anything at all in setting up a side hustle, you need to do your research, and do it thoroughly. You need to research the current market you are getting into – What are people selling or offering right now? What platforms are they using? How much do they charge?
You’ll need to know what’s out there and what’s the 411 before you dive in so that you don’t waste a lot of time making mistakes that could have been easily avoided.
Things like pricing, product descriptions, and appropriate platform use are really integral parts of side hustling online, so it’s important to get in right and stay within the status quo.
Limit the money you put in
If you want to profit from your side hustle, you need to make sure that your profit margins are founded in reality. If you are making clothing or selling artwork, are you charging enough to cover the cost of your supplies and shipping costs? You need to find ways to limit the money that you put into your hustle so that profit is still a real possibility.
Of course, you will always need to put some money, or at least time and effort, into your creative side hustling, but it needs to be limited so that this is actually a worthwhile gig for you.
Set yourself boundaries and time limits
To make money from your side hustle, you have to establish that it is just a side hustle right now and not your main job. As such, you can’t lose valuable working time elsewhere and again negatively impact your profit margins.
It’s very easy when you start a side project to end up spending far too much of your time doing it and ending up feeling quite consumed by it. If you want this to be a long-term project that serves you well, you will need to set boundaries and time limits right from the start.
Side hustles can be amazing and they can bring us so much, it’s just about doing things in the right way so that we can reap these benefits.
What’s your side hustle going to be?
