More than 40 million Americans have a side hustle.
Everyone seems to be looking for that extra stream of income. It gives you a sense of freedom. Away from your day job, you can be your own boss, work on something you’re passionate about and make extra income.
However, creating that business takes time.
You must be strategic in running your e-commerce business; otherwise, you’ll give up along the way. Growing an online business is not a walk in the park. Things become complicated when you’re trying to balance it on top of your day time job.
However, it’s not yet time to give up on your business dream. If you know how to run your e-commerce business, you’ll get good results in part-time hours.
In fact, you can run a successful e-commerce business while still working on your full-time job.
Here’s how.
Be Smart
If you want to be successful, you’ve to act like it.
You have to treat your e-commerce business as if it’s your money minting ATM. Have a clear strategic plan, establish timelines, set goals – and stick to them.
The strategic plan entails how you’ll source and shop your products, ways to promote your products, increase conversion, and pricing so that you get a profit.
You can find easy to custom e-commerce strategic/business plan online. A well thought out plan gives you a sense of direction and how to get there. It eliminates guesswork, increases efficiency during your part-time hours.
You’ve to adopt a sustainable business model, considering you have a day job. Dropshipping is your most appropriate model – it is the least hands-on form of e-commerce. With dropshipping, you only act as a middle man between the customer and the supplier.
Automate
Your e-commerce business can’t stop running while you’re away at your day job. You’ve to be there for your customers. Otherwise, you risk losing them.
How do you achieve this? Use automation tools to get things going while you’re away. Automation takes over some routine tasks that need to be done for business success. Moreover, it can work in the background to provide customer support, promote and process a sale, and monitor shoppers while you’re still working at your full-time job.
Tools that can help you in your sales and marketing efforts are critical. Think of something that can help you schedule your social media posts across all platforms, send emails, and provide customer service support.
For instance, you can use automizy to send out email blasts to many people at one time. You can even send a specific message depending on your user and their actions. For example, you can send an automated welcome message every time you have a new lead.
You can also schedule an automated post-purchase follow-up email. It confirms whether the customer received their purchase and shows that you care.
Social commerce is important if you want to grow your business. You have to engage your followers and potential customers on social media platforms. A tool like spout social can help you schedule media posts in advance.
Another important tool to use is chatbots. When your customer wants to make a purchase, they need to know the description and may ask one or two questions. This can’t wait till you get off from your day job. Otherwise, they’ll pull out their credit card and buy from your competitor. Chatbots will help you solve this problem.
Have an Engaging Blog
You cannot achieve your marketing goals if you don’t connect with your audience. You must come up with ways to market your e-commerce business. One of the best ways is to write informative content that targets your audience.
Get a blog writing service here to help you with engaging content that will help you generate more leads and increase your conversion rate. Content is King. You’ve to increase your online presence and connect with potential customers.
Outsource Some Tasks
It’s impossible to do everything on your own. You’ll burnout at some point. Handling everything on your own will leave you stressed and your business will suffer. Learn to outsource some work.
Here are some things that you may find difficult to do. If you can’t write a sales copy, outsource it. If you don’t have the skills to take quality product images or create product videos, outsource it.
While outsourcing some of these tasks may be costly, it can bring in higher returns. Quality content, images, and videos attract more customers and converts well.
Wrapping Up
You can run your side hustle while still working at your full-time job. You don’t have to hand in your resignation letter (for now).
To achieve this balance, you’ve to be intentional and strategic. You can achieve business growth if you follow these tips. Have a clear strategy, use automation tools, get engaging content from reliable blogging service, and outsource what you can’t do.
