With the stresses and demands of modern life, most working-aged people are perfectly happy to sustain and manage just one full-time job and while there isn’t anything inherently wrong with having just one arrow in your professional quiver, it can leave you open to being at the whims of the unexpected. What would happen if your best-laid plans went awry? One moment you’re gainfully employed, the next the company you work for has gone bankrupt and you’re wondering where it all went wrong, as you try to keep the wolves away from the door and do your best to chart a course back to a full-time income
There’s also the prospect of creative stagnation. Even if you enjoy and excel at what you do to an extent that you don’t need to worry about being fired or made redundant, do you really want to do the same thing over and over again for years to come? A lack of variety and new challenges can eventually sour you on something that you originally loved, and leave you feeling unfulfilled in your working life.
Enter the side hustle. Thanks to the internet, more and more people are now making their hobbies, interests and innovative business ideas pay off. By setting up a business in your free time, it is possible to pick up some extra cash and alleviate the daily grind. This may sound like a lot of work and effort, but by using WordPress as your primary platform, it doesn’t need to be. Here’s how you can WordPress to get moving in the right direction:
1. Create your own inexpensive website
In many cases (perhaps most), if you are setting up a side hustle, you will not have huge sums of money with which to hire professional web designers to build the site. Simply finding the time to work on your new site can be challenging enough with all the existing commitments most people can have. It can be easy to either spend lots or create debts of many thousands when attempting to launch a dream project, but with up to 96% of businesses failing within 10 years, it is worth cutting your cloth appropriately.
As WordPress is a free platform, you can keep the costs to a minimum by only paying for the hosting and any paid plugins or themes you deem necessary. Where many other easy site-builders are free initially, they eventually start charging a monthly fee. With WordPress you don’t need to worry about unexpected costs.
2. It’s a great base for dropshipping
Although it has been around for a while, dropshipping is an incredibly popular (and thus very competitive) side hustle. This type of side business is still a viable option for entrepreneurs – holding a place among the best side hustle ideas. The idea is a very straightforward one: instead of creating or buying products, stocking them, selling them and shipping them out (or making them available for collection), you list items from third-party suppliers and let them handle any resulting sales.
Where does your profit come from you may ask? It comes from the markup you place on those products. You find something sold at a particular price and then list it on your site at an increased price. You can think of the price increase as either a curation charge or maybe a finder’s fee. WordPress is a great platform for setting up a dropshipping site. Just set up the free WooCommerce plugin, then connect it to one or more of various dropshipping services.
3. Always keeping mobile in mind
For quite some time now, default WordPress themes have looked and worked excellently on mobile devices, with the breadth of free themes available online providing website owners with nearly-boundless options. This is vitally important when you’re trying to establish a website based business, as mobile customers made up 58% of all website site visits in 2018.
Couple this with the massive selection of monetization plugins for WordPress that go beyond just dropshipping (selling digital resources, accepting gifts and donations, book consultations, etc.); you have all the necessary ingredients for reaching and profiting from a potentially huge audience. Given that there are still numerous websites that look decidedly clunky on smartphones, this isn’t something to be taken lightly.
4. A supportive community
Starting completely from scratch isn’t the easiest way to go when building a side hustle business. Taking your destiny into your own hands and starting a project that’s wholly your own may sound romantic, but it isn’t practical. There are so many things that can go wrong during the startup process that you can easily fail before you have even got going if you are not careful.
Due to the general difficulties involved in launching a new side hustle, it is always a good idea to seek out an entrepreneurial community that can help you get through the tough times. WordPress has a vast and helpful community of entrepreneurial types spread throughout the world. If you make an effort to be part of it, you’ll find that there’s a huge amount of great advice on offer for free, covering both website development issues and general entrepreneurial roadblocks.
5. Scalability and flexibility
One of the significant advantages of using WordPress for your side hustle is its scalability and flexibility. As your side business grows, your website can easily grow with it. WordPress offers a range of plugins and themes that can add new features and functionalities to your site without needing to start from scratch or invest heavily in development.
For example, if you start with a simple blog or portfolio site, you can later expand it to include an online store, membership area, or even a booking system. This flexibility ensures that your WordPress site can adapt to your changing business needs and goals, making it a sustainable option for the long term. Additionally, WordPress’s SEO capabilities can help improve your site’s visibility, attracting more traffic and potential customers as your side hustle gains momentum.
