The Step By Step Guide To Automating Your Side-Hustle Business

Launching your own side hustle business can be incredibly stressful and time consuming, especially if you already have a full time job. Building a product, finding customers, answering support tickets and handling logistics can be a lot of work.

However, you can make this journey less painful if you find smart ways to automate your various tasks. While automating does not completely remove you from the process, it sets you up on the path to scaling up your business to higher revenues over the long term.

Here are a few actionable tips to helping you automate your side hustle.

Automate Marketing

Regardless of whether you are just starting out, or are an established business, marketing is one activity that consumes a lot of man hours. This is because business owners need to constantly evaluate the performance of their existing campaigns, identify new trends and patterns among consumers and devise new strategies to reach them.

But while your marketing message may change from time to time, the channels largely stay constant. For example, mailing lists have not fallen out of favor in over twenty years. Similarly, while social media platforms have risen and fallen, the need to engage with an audience through these mediums have remained for over a decade. Check out how large organizations like Amazon automate their marketing and replicate them for your own business. With third party tools, this is a lot easier than you think.

Reinvest Your Profits

By definition, side hustles are businesses that you carry out in your spare time. As such, spending only a few hours a day would mean that growing such businesses organically could take a really long time. It is hence a good idea to reinvest all the profits from your hustle back into the business - either as advertising spend or in building your product. If you are in an industry like real estate, you may not be able to reinvest your profits in small chunks. In such cases, it is highly recommended that you learn the basics of wealth management and invest in a diversified portfolio of assets. This way, your wealth multiplies faster than were it to grow organically. This enables you to reach your critical mass much faster and reinvest in newer properties.

Invest in Managed Services

There are a number of third party tools a business needs to run smoothly. This includes web hosting, content management systems, advertising networks, and so on. Learning to use these tools and handling them on day-to-day basis can be a lot of work. You may however look at service providers who offer managed services. Essentially, these organizations take care of the process for you so that you do not have to invest in handling these tools yourself.

For example, pick a web hosting provider who offers managed services. This way, you do not have to handle technical issues that come up from time to time. While managed hosting services do cost a tad more than unmanaged services, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Similar to hosting, you may also hire agencies who can handle your advertising or development so that you do not have shoulder these responsibilities for your side hustle.

Automate Customer Support

Side hustling projects like running an eCommerce store require business owners to have dedicated channels of communication for customer support. While a number of such businesses today only offer email support, this can be incredibly frustrating for customers who prefer picking a phone over typing out an email.

Invest in a virtual phone system that can make this process smooth for your customers. Such tools allow businesses to attend to customer calls with the help of an auto-attendant that can interact with customers and either capture their message in a voicemail or dial one of many extensions.

In addition to this, customer support also serves as the feedback loop that may be funneled back into the system for your future product and business strategy. It is a good idea to integrate your customer support system online survey software that can help seek customer feedback on problem resolution. The feedback garnered from such surveys can be used to drive the development of new features or operation strategies.

Do you have a side hustle? What are your tricks to automating it? Share it with us in the comments.