When you’re starting up a business on the side — and especially when you’re spending the majority of your time working, or attending your University classes — it can be tempting to do things in a low-effort, amateurish sort of a way, rather than focusing on some core essentials and getting them down properly.
While a side hustle is something you do on the side, you should always think about it more as a part-time business, than as a quick money-making scheme.
One of the ways in which you can and should treat your side hustle with the required degree of respect to differentiate it from “quick game done to try and score beer money” is to work on improving how professional your business looks, in a hurry.
Here are some tips for doing that.
Get a professional looking and functional website up-and-running ASAP
Your side-hustle may well be an entirely web-based endeavor in any case, such as affiliate marketing, or it might be something more rooted in the physical world, where the website serves primarily as a landing page where prospective clients or customers can find out more about you.
In any case, you will be judged directly by how professional your website looks and how well it operates.
Network monitoring tools can help you to keep everything running smoothly with your side hustle, but when it comes to the design of your website itself, you should hire a professional unless you have the skills to create a compelling site.
Add professional head shots of yourself and whatever else it takes to make your site look serious and in no way amateurish.
Get yourself a good suit and sort out your personal presentation
A major part of your overall professional image is going to be your personal image, partly because you should be including photos of yourself on your website, LinkedIn, etc., and also partly because it may well be necessary for you to meet with people in person from time to time, and attend networking functions in order to market yourself.
Get yourself a good suit for such occasions, and attend to your personal grooming and presentation, so that you match the acceptable standards of the industry in question.
If you’re trying to break into fintech, for example, turning up with a 4-foot tall pink mohawk is probably not going to endear you to people in the way you’d like.
Collect testimonials and work samples at the speed of light
Testimonials and work samples are proof of your professional credentials, for anyone who cares to look.
When you have testimonials from past clients on full display on your website, describing you in a positive light, you pre-qualify yourself to all future prospects and help to relieve them of the fear that you might be an amateur trying their luck.
Even if you have to do your first assignment free, in exchange for a portfolio piece and a testimonial, do what it takes to get some testimonials up on your site as soon as possible.
These testimonials should include photos of the people who gave them, names, job titles, and links to their company websites. Otherwise, people will likely just assume you made them up.
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