Side Hustle: Create It Once, Promote, And Sell It Forever

Looking for a side hustle? Here’s your challenge: time.

Most side hustles take time, and energy. If you have a full-time job, you’re exhausted when you get home. Do you want to meet freelance writing deadlines after midnight? Or, if you’re an early bird, at 4 AM?

I side-hustled freelancing for magazines at 4 AM for years. At the time, I mostly loved it. However, in addition to meeting my deadlines, I side-hustled novels and nonfiction, by developing book partials and queries. This was way before Kindle ebooks and self-publishing.

Although everything took more time in those days because communication relied on faxes and postal mail, the competition was much less. Even then, I knew the value of create it once.

“Time is money” is a truism, because it’s true.

Today, you have endless opportunities to create an amazing side hustle. If you’re a freelance writer on the side, look for ways you can create something once, and keep selling it.

The perfect side hustle: create it once, and done (more or less)

Today, the creator economy is a thing. Did you know that there are 50 million independent creators?

Creators get started by building their creations as a side hustle. However, if you’re looking for ways to develop “passive income”, that’s mostly a myth. You’ll need to promote what you create.

This means:

• Creating advertising to promote your self-published books. Amazon and other advertising venues help you to start advertising, but it’s not set-and-forget. You need to keep an eye on it, so that you don’t spend more than you intend.
• Promoting other products you sell too. Every new advertising venue, whether it’s content marketing, web advertising, Facebook advertising, or something else, takes time and money.

However, promoting your creations takes less time than it takes to trade hours for dollars, as you do when you sell your services.

Create once: choose a side hustle you enjoy

Be aware that you’re not restricted to digital products when you join the creator economy.

Your side hustle creation can be a physical product. A friend who’s a stationery nerd loves Tomoe River paper. She developed a side hustle sourcing and selling this thin, smooth paper, which is perfect for planners and fountain pens.

Her small venture expanded quickly, so she ended up selling it, because she has a young family. “It became too much,” she said. “Our entire family was involved. When the buyer made me an offer, I accepted at once.”

Think about something you could create and sell today.

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