How to Start a WordPress Side Hustle | EP 676

How to Start a WordPress Side Hustle

1. Get your feet wet building a website (for yourself, for a friend) 01:26
2. Reach out to friends, family, network, and let them know you started a side project building websites  04:38
3. Continously learning WP, sales, marketing 06:39

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of wp the podcast i’m David Blackmon

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:38  David Blackmon:  Today we’ve got another great topic one that is near and dear to my heart because i believe i was born an entrepreneur as is Tim. Tim took it even a step further i think and got his degrees in entrepreneurship which is like you know, epic on a different level. So today we’re going to talk about how to start a WordPress side hustle. So for our listeners who may be wondering what the hell a side hustle is, Tim why don’t you tell them what a side hustle is?

01:11 Tim Strifler:  Absolutely. So a side hustle is when you have some sort of main hustle right? Typically a full-time job, and then hustle main hustle yes and then you start a a side hustle or a side business. Or maybe it starts as just kind of a side project as these things typically go it’s they start as projects before they actually kind of evolve and grow into an actual business. And so a WordPress side hustle typically is creating WordPress websites for clients, and so you you might have a full-time job doing something that you like, or maybe you hate,  but you really aren’t feeling totally fulfilled. And you have passions other places and stuff. And so you’re like you know what i’m going to create a side hustle creating WordPress websites for clients and maybe you want to keep it there or maybe you want it to grow into a full-time hustle as well. You want to be your main hustle, yeah so that’s that’s kind of the definition then we’re going to talk about how to start it.

02:11 David Blackmon: Thank you Tim. One thing i will say is that we have lots of friends who started this way. Tim and i have taught you know in our courses how to do this how to how to turn your side hustle into a main hustle, how to build a WordPress business. So this is something that he and i can probably get long-winded on we’re going to try to keep it as short as possible.  You know and i think the first thing that you know that we’re going to kind of classify i think break it up into three basic categories here and then Tim and i’ll both kind of feed in on what we think,  the best route might be for you to take if you’re considering starting a WordPress side hustle. So first thing that we’re going to recommend is to just you know to get your feet wet build a website for yourself. Go to go out download WordPress get yourself a host you don’t need expensive super hosting to fool around go get yourself some cheap hosting, install WordPress watch go to the university of Youtube and watch a lot of videos. Because there’s a lot of videos and content out there and if you’re a reader there’s blog posts as well but you can go out and just start playing around familiarize yourself with WordPress. And i think if you’re at all technically inclined you’re going to realize oh wow i can use this platform and especially if you use like a page builder which Tim and i are huge advocates of because a lot of the the the coding functionality that you may need to know, just from WordPress raw. You won’t have that experience but with like a page builder they’ve got a lot of stuff built into where you can just drag and drop click buttons and stuff and create with. So uh just yeah do it for yourself do it for a friend watch some youtube videos and it’s a great place to start.

04:09 Tim Strifler: Now chances are if you are in a place where you’re considering starting a WordPress side hustle, then you’ve probably already built a website or two. And that’s kind of what is giving you this idea to turn it into a side hustle. So if that’s the case then thumbs up you’re one third of the way there down our list you can check that off the list that you already have some experience. And so the next thing that we recommend doing is start reaching out to your friends your family your existing network and let them know that you are starting to build the websites on the side and so um you’ll get your first few clients from people that you already know or people that you know know. So you know one degree of separation so it’ll your first clients or your easiest clients are gonna come from someone that already knows you or someone that knows someone else. Right so it’s you know they’ll refer you a close friend will refer you to someone that they know like oh my buddy is is creating websites now like here talk to him and so um or her, i don’t want to be sexist here, and so yeah that that’s kind of for me. At least with my experience is when i when i was creating websites as a side hustle i didn’t reach out to friends intentionally it kind of happened very organically where i someone found out that i built a website for something for myself. So like “hey can you build me a website something”, i did and then someone else found out. So they’re like “hey can you build me a website”, so i did so it was very like non-intentional and so i didn’t do this step here that we’re talking about reaching out to friends and family until I was, like you know, what i’m done working for someone else, i’m gonna work for myself. And i had no clients no recurring revenue nothing but i had experience creating these one-off projects for a handful of friends and stuff. So then i did this step of reaching out to a bunch of people and kind of blasting my own social network saying “hey this is what i’m doing let me know if you need any help”, and i not only got some work right away from that, but like it also trickled in over the course of several years from. That one initial push it planted that seed in people’s heads so when something came up they’re like “oh yeah Tim does websites” they remember from that one time.

06:26 David Blackmon: Absolutely and that’s you know, it’s a very similar story for me you know. I just helping a friend out and found out that i really really enjoyed it. And liked it and um and then built an entire business around it. The last thing that we’re going to recommend when you’re starting the side hustle and stuff is. It’s not necessarily something that you want to do immediately i think getting your feet wet building websites is going to be the most important thing making sure that you build them properly and stuff, for your clients. Is going to be the key, but you know once you’ve kind of got that down and you’re building a few websites one thing that you’re going to want to do, is to con you know continuous learning. Is important because WordPress is a piece of software and it’s a tool that is it’s ever evolving it’s always evolving you know. So there’s changes that come up you know they they change the platform people are innovating the beautiful thing about WordPress is. It’s open source so the entire world has the ability to mess with the code you know and build their own thing and create their own thing from WordPress. Well you don’t want to get stuck in the weeds down those rabbit holes but find a happy medium to where you’re you’re continuously learning more about this thing called WordPress. And um as well as like learn how to you know sales and marketing, you know, digital marketing, what that looks like online social media marketing and stuff. All of this stuff plays into and has a big value to your customers. You know for your side hustle and stuff so those are things that you are going to want to learn but initially you foundation’s the most important you need to get solid with being able to build WordPress websites. And once your foundation is pretty stable then you can branch out into you know some of these other things that are going to add value to your side hustle which will allow you to eject from i’m using Tim’s word main hustle at some point.

08:33  Tim Strifler: Yeah, and on that note uh if you want to streamline your learning process you want to shave you know potentially years off of your education. With starting a WordPress business head on over to wpgears.com David and i have a course we have one uh course and one course on the way so the Divi business expert course it’s been around since 2018. We’ve had hundreds of students go through it almost 1000 now almost a thousand yeah just under a thousand and so.. uh it will teach you that the business side and the sales side of creating a WordPress website and then we have the precursor the prequel coming out soon which is the the beginner course that’s going to teach you the website building process using our our preferred page builder Divi,  so that’s coming out soon too. So if you want to again shave off years of your education process and sh and take the shortcut uh then uh yeah definitely head on over to wpgears.com 

09:27 David Blackmon: And you probably thought “oh my god they chose this episode to be a sales pitch for their stuff”, and we really didn’t,  i didn’t even know Tim was going to mention that,  but i’m glad that you did, because it is applicable. But i can promise you that’s not why we did this yeah it’s not even on our list i just went on that improv here it wasn’t even on our list. So this episode’s a little bit longer than normal but it’s something obviously that Tim and i are super passionate about so much, so that i video recorded it because we may want to share this you know video with with the world as opposed to just us you know talking audio lee to you probably not even words. All right tomorrow we’ve got another great topic how to create a referral program in wordpress. Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

10:21  Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye