Side Hustle Weekly Update: Starting at $0

At the end of last week, I found out that I will not be starting my full-time job until January 2021. While this was disappointing news, it spurred me to start more seriously working on my various side hustles for the time being. I am hoping that at least one will gain enough traction to keep me busy in the next six months, and perhaps could be something I continue to do on the side for the long-term.

I decided to start keeping a weekly journal here so that I have a record of my progress that I can look back on. I also hope this will help anyone that may be in my same position and wants to see a realistic view of what one can expect when starting a side hustle from scratch.

There are three things that I am focusing on right now. The first is this blog and my Instagram page for Two Cents with Julia. Next, I’ve started taking freelance jobs for creating PowerPoint presentations. Lastly, I’ve begun a college coaching/mentorship business with my Mom.

I’ll go through each one and talk about what I did for each this week!

Two Cents Totals:

Weekly Income: $0

Billable Hours: 0

Hourly Rate: N/A

Two Cents with Julia: Blog and Instagram

While this is definitely the project I enjoy working on the most, it is also the hardest to make money on. With that being said, I am in it for the long haul, not just short-term gain like the other two.

Since starting my blog, I have been able to build up to around 250 sessions and 650 pageviews per month. I have also gained 240 followers on Instagram. While this is a great starting point, it is nowhere near as much traffic as I would need to maintain in order to make money off of ads or affiliate marketing. Therefore, I have kept this blog ad-free and intend to do that for the foreseeable future.

This week, I made considerable progress developing my first freebie and product. I am in the middle of creating a zero-based budget spreadsheet complete with all the bells and whistles like automatically updating graphs and charts. I hope to start selling this product sometime in August. Along with launching that product, I plan to launch a freebie (TBA)! I spent most of Monday and sometime last night working on these two things.

I also spent around five hours this week creating content like this blog post and Instagram posts. This is in addition to the 1-2 hours each day that I spend engaging with my Instagram community.

Freelance PowerPoint Design

I’ve posted about how I got started doing this type of work about a month ago. I have to admit, it’s been slow trying to get a second job. I really lucked out with the first one!

I am slated to begin the follow-on project with my first client on Monday, so I hope that once I finish that one, the client will leave a good review that will help to boost my profile and help me to get more jobs.

I spent a few hours this week applying to about 5 new jobs on Upwork. So far, I haven’t heard anything back.

College Coaching

This next project was a bit unexpected and spontaneous. My mom and I were driving, and I mentioned to her a bit off-hand how I thought that we would be a great team for offering college coaching and mentoring services. I didn’t expect much to come from it, but we both got pretty excited at the idea and decided to make the jump.

I spent a good amount of Monday and Tuesday creating a business plan (competitor research, pricing, product development) and designing all the marketing materials. We went live with our Facebook page and first couple promotional posts on Tuesday. Although we’ve gotten a great supportive response from family and friends, we have not obtained a client, yet.

I’m fairly sure that if this service is to gain traction, it will have to be through word of mouth. I’m hopeful that finding our first client will organically lead to more clients after that because it seems like Facebook marketing is really hard.

A small related win is that my aunt asked me to tutor my cousin in the ACT. Although it’s not directly related to the service that I hope to eventually offer, it will give me great experience working with the same age group! I’ll also be able to brush up on ACT topics/strategy.