Building Up A Side-Hustle
I remember hearing that most millionaires have seven different streams of income. I can’t remember who told me or what the streams were. But the sentence has stuck with me throughout the past few years and probably been a critical player in a lot of my life choices.
Building up a freelance portfolio has always been a passion of mine- with the hopes of building it into a fully-fledged PR company. But you can’t just jump into a successful career; it takes careful planning, devotion, and time, which is why I’ve gone into freelancing with a ‘baby steps’ mentality.
If you go full-throttle and invest In business cards and online ads to promote your services, there is no promise you’ll get the big payout straight away. In the past year alone, I’ve encountered countless people start their own business as a VA or attempt freelancing to push out the boredom of lockdown with no REAL success. Even a few selective people were trolled for ‘scamming’ their followers into starting an unsuccessful business.
Taking it slowly, building up a portfolio and an endless list of experience is a vital investment if you want to be taken seriously in the industry and not another person who learnt lead-gen strategies off TikTok.
By the way, I think TikTok is an excellent platform for education as well as the odd laugh. But that doesn’t mean your skillset can come exclusively from binging VA influencers. You need to take time to learn in your capacity, not just leach tips off others.
Thus far, my career as a freelancer has been a bumpy one, as expected clients come in waves and peaks. Over time you learn ways to ‘Tim Ferris’ your processes and automate things, you learn weird life lessons and you 100% know the red flags of a lousy client.
Now I’m at a point where I have fewer clients on my hands; I’m ready to focus on the admin side. You may have noticed some minor changes in the content on my Instagram and my website. I’ve been posting more about marketing and social media news on my Instagram this year and engaging my followers in conversations about the industry I love. But I’ve also been trying to redevelop my site and optimise it for potential clients wanting to look and learn. The main change is the publication of all my client case studies on their very own page.
Redeveloping my site into something new might take a while, it might not even lead to tremendous results. But like all things in life, if I want it to work, I’ll put the time and effort into making it something great. If people want to make a success of their side-hustles truly, they shouldn’t care if they have to take time learning before people come through the door. If you like it, you’re willing to learn more about it; then you can cultivate the organic growth that genuinely makes it a side hustle, not a hobby.
My point is, you’re going to be seeing a sprinkle of change here and there over the coming months. I’m writing more about my clients and developing a public portfolio mainly because I want to start shouting about my past clients (I never really look back on the people I’ve worked with and the achievements I had), but if people come and think “Hey this girl is pretty cool” and want to set up an exploration call. Then I’m down for that.