If you have a side hustle that you love, but that pesky full-time job just seems to get in the way of growing your business to the point that you can walk into your boss’s office and and quit your job, you need a way to scale your earning potential beyond trading your time for money.
Burnout is a real risk for entrepreneurs, especially when all your extra time is spent doing tedious business tasks that don’t fuel your soul. So if you can’t afford help right now, your website can step in and do some of the heavy lifting for you!
Your website is so much more than a blog or a place for people to learn more about you… when leveraged correctly, your website can help you grow your audience and turn your expertise and experience into income. Read on to learn how to turn your website into your best employee!
Turn live video into blog posts – automatically
If you’re anything like me, it can take you a few hours to write a quality blog post, but delivering the same information and value on video takes a fraction of the time, not to mention how much faster your audience gets to know, like and trust you when they see you on video.
But if you’re just going live on Facebook and your videos are getting lost down the news feed, you’re missing a huge opportunity to grow your blog with Facebook Live!
If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins that automatically publish your Facebook Live videos to your blog, so you’re not only connecting with your Facebook followers, you’re also creating fresh new content for your blog – and saving yourself TONS of time.
Become an ambassador for someone else’s product
Creating your own products and services takes a lot of time. Whether you’re doing 1:1 consulting, hosting group programs or creating online courses, it can take weeks, even months to market, sell and service those programs.
What if you could earn money by promoting someone else’s hard work? That’s what affiliate marketing can do for you – if you do it right.
Chances are there’s a product or service that you love, that’s aligned with your business, that has an affiliate program. Sign up for the program, get your unique link and start creating awesome, actionable, SEO optimized content for your website around that product or service and you’ll not only build your audience, you’ll make some money while doing it.
Make good use of your email marketing service
If you’ve got an opt-in on your website to join your newsletter and you’re just sending out a weekly update, you’re missing a huge opportunity to monetize your audience.
The entire goal of your website and blog should be to get people onto your email list, and the best way to do that is to give them something actionable, that solves a problem for free, and have email opt-in opportunities strategically placed throughout your website to maximize opt-ins.
People may not remember to visit your website every day, but they do check their email every day, and that’s where you have the best chance of building a relationship with your target audience. If you set up an email autoresponder series that slowly introduces your subscriber to you and how you can help them, and provide value, your emails are doing all the selling for you while you’re at work.
Batch create your content and schedule it to autopost
Consistent content creation is key to growing an engaged audience that’s interested in buying what you have to sell, and consistency is what most side hustlers struggle with the most because of their limited time and lack of control over their schedule.
The antidote is to spend one weekend writing four blog posts, then load them up into your website and schedule them to autopost at a certain date and time. It might take you the same amount of time, but you’re much more efficient when you do it all in one batch.
RSS is your BFF
Your RSS feed is a way for other websites to pull content off of your website and publish it. You can set up an RSS feed with your email autoresponder service to send an email to your newsletter list any time you publish new content to your blog.
You can also integrate your RSS feed with a social media scheduling service to automatically post your latest blog posts to your social media accounts.
Combine RSS with batch creation of blog posts, turn Facebook Lives into blog posts, and let your website do the heavy lifting to email it to your list and push it out on social.
If you have a full time job, a family, or just want to have more control over your time and income potential than you have now, it’s worth spending some time up front to set these systems up to automate all the tedious parts of running an online business.
Not only does it free up your time, it allows you to scale your income because you can reach more people. The bigger your audience, the bigger your opportunities for generating additional streams of revenue through things like online courses and affiliate marketing. And who doesn’t love additional streams of revenue? So set aside a weekend and put your website to work!
Shannon Mattern is a side-hustler and WordPress expert who blogs over at www.wp-bff.com. She teaches bloggers, online business owners and entrepreneurs how to build their website, build their audience and turn their expertise into income. You can sign up for her Free 5 Day Website Challenge today and learn how to build your website and your audience with WordPress.