By now, you’ve gotten rid of all the excuses for not starting a business, you have all the signs that you’re ready to start your own business, and, if you’re a millennial, you know what to keep in mind when starting a business. You’re in the side hustle start-up phase! You’re ready to turn your idea into a business! Congratulations. It takes guts just to get to this level, but now that you’re here, we want to make your life a little easier.
When it comes to money, the CGS Team follows two principles: save more money and make more money. You can only save so much money, but the amount of money you can make is infinite. Starting your own side hustle is a great opportunity for your income to grow. It may start slow, but you’re planting seeds for a fruitful future. With that being said, the CGS Team is sharing 5 necessary and helpful tools to utilize when starting your side hustle.
The best tools for starting your side hustle are…
#1 Asana
If you’re starting a side hustle, you likely already have a primary or full-time job. That means you will need to master time management and properly plan your weeks. The best way to do so is with a calendar and/or project planning tool. Asana is that tool.
Whether you are working by yourself or with a team, Asana lets you create tasks, add important dates to your calendar, and track the progress of projects throughout your start-up period (and beyond). Asana is great for keeping tabs on what needs to get done and measuring your progress. Organization will take you a long way, so start with Asana.
#2 Canva
Whether you have an online or face-to-face side hustle, you need a solid brand. You need to think through your colors, your fonts, and your logo. Canva can help. Canva lets you create graphics, images, flyers, postcards, posters, and much more. Their easy-to-use design studio lets you save your company colors and fonts for all future designs.
#3 WordPress
Any and every side hustle needs a website. WordPress is a plugin that makes creating websites extremely easy. Once you set up your hosting and domain name, installing WordPress will be your next task. Does that sound like a foreign language to you? Read the How to Start a Money-Making Blog article for a detailed run through of setting up a website (or blog) for your side hustle.
#4 MailChimp
Since you will have a website for your side hustle, you will need an email service provider to keep tabs on potential leads. Mailchimp is wonderful for those just starting out on their online lead-generating journey.
It allows you to add subscription forms to your website, send emails to your list at once, and organize your contacts. You can also set up automated emails, but that’s down the line. You don’t want to wait on collecting emails, as doing so could result in a loss of potential customers.
#5 Google Analytics
Once your website and social media accounts are set up for your side hustle, you will want to start tracking who’s coming to your website, where they are coming from, and what they are looking at. Google Analytics will allow you to see all of this information and more. Obviously, it doesn’t say exactly “who” is on your site, but it does show you where the person is from, what age bracket they fall in, and what they looked at.
All of this is useful information for targeting your message. You can see what pages on your website are looked at the most, giving you the chance to optimize those pages for more sales. You can also see where a majority of your website traffic is coming from.
You will see if people search you on Google, if they are coming from Instagram, or if there are other websites linking to yours. Again, this is all great information to allow you to focus on where to share your content.
Related: 5 Go-To Websites for Starting a Business
The great thing about all of the tools listed above is that they are all free, or at least all offer some form of a free version! You don’t have to spend big bucks to get valuable information to make your side hustle a success, you just need know the right tools! Have you started your side hustle or are you still working out the kinks? If you have already started your side business, are you using any of the tools above? Do you have any tools you can recommend to others? We want to hear about your resources, tips and experiences, so post a reply comment below!
1 thought on “5 Necessary Tools for Starting Your Side Hustle”
wow! I have never heard of that time management tool. I’ll def be using it from now on, thanks!!