How do you even go about developing a side gig. I've thought about a lot of options but it's hard to know where to start
Well you avoid analysis paralysis and some day just take the plunge. You'll fail the first few times
🙂
I personally went into med school knowing that my stable medicine job will be my source of financing for something bigger.
Here is a brief summary of how I started a side gig recently - it's one way to start I guess
🙂
My 3rd LLC came into existence 10 days ago. I was off for 6 days and had plenty of time and was bored out of my mind. In these last 10 days I created an LLC, bought and customized two ecommerce webstores - one of whom was cash flow positive. Purchase made at flippa.com. Found myself a SEO and social media expert on the other side of the world for dirt cheap to work for me at roughly $3.33/hr to start on SEO work and organic search rankings. One store is basically fully automated, customer puts in an order, order automatically goes from my website and is forwarded to my wholesaler's website. I can have credit in the wholesaler account, so things will just automatically ship out by the wholesale dropshipper while I sleep. I basically just set up a google adwords campaign for the products that will be sold on that website. I have done a few google campaigns back in the day in college when I used to hustle
😉 And then ofcourse the long term SEO play for organic traffic. I'm not making money on this right now, infact the adwords campagin had 600-700 clicks for $100 with 0 conversions. Normally websites should have a 2-3% conversion rate for google, especially since you're getting users looking for a certain product. I figured the product data pages needs to be improved, which I kind of already knew, so I paused the cash burn on google for now and focused on website 2. The product data page improvement is a $1300 cash burn which imports a improved catalog of 14000 products from above wholesaler with more information, images etc. Right now current website has the 14000 products, with one image, and bare minimum descriptions which is likely the reason for 0 conversions despite 600-700 unique visitors in a few days. Anyway, so website 1 is currently paused.
Website two isn't as beautifully automated as website 1. This one was the cash flow positive store. In 10 days basically I set up 120 products on the store, set up a Fb ad campaign, facebook page, facebook product catalog, re-designed things that I didn't like about the website. The SEO dude is working on both websites. The website is about 90% automated. Customer buys something -> Order goes to my store -> I have to do exactly 3 clicks to process the order -> Order goes to dropshipper for fulfillment -> I have to update tracking with 1 click after a couple of days. Like I said, this website was profitable. The person whom I bought this store from, spent $960 on FB ads and generated $4600 in sales. $2600 was cost of product purchases through dropshipper. and roughly $1500 was profit on the store in 2 months. My thought process when I bought the store was to ramp up the Fb advertisement slowly. FB campaign is set up, I just plan on starting it day after tomorrow. Today I have to do a couple of test runs to make sure everything is running smoothly before burning $$$ on FB ads. Hoping to get conversions *Fingers crossed*.
In all, I've burned $2200 so far in the last 10 days, considerably less than one shift, and I have two very well designed and optimized webstores, extremely professional looking - $100 hosting (4 yrs); $1800 2 websites ($1000 website 1, $800 website 2); $100 google ads, $100 Wyoming LLC, and then miscellaneous small items.
If anyone is curious, I can let you guys know how the FB campaign goes for website 2
😛 If 1 dollar of marketing leads to anything more than 2 dollars of sales, then I'm profitable. I guess I'll find out tomorrow onwards.
Grand plan is to hire someone for $2-3/hr eventually to do the customer service email responses, and to do the 3 clicks to process the order from my website to the dropshipper while the SEO/marketing dude takes over FB page posts and marketing. A guy doing marketing and social media for 10 years can probably do it better than me, it's a plus that he only costs $3.33/hr. Once someone takes over those two tasks, I'll basically go into a complete oversight/managerial role in my free time rather than dealing with the day to day crap. And then eventually if/when profits come in, I plan to use that money to increase my FB ad marketing budget - A part of me is really curious what will happen if my 20 dollar a day marketing budget goes to $1000 per day.