Digital marketing can absolutely make for a great side hustle. In this article, we’re going to dig into five reasons why digital marketing makes for a great side hustle. And then I’m going to give you three ideas with real-world examples of people that are actually making money from their digital marketing skills.
In this growth marketing case study, we’re going to dig into how Venngage was able to 100X their organic monthly traffic from 5K to 500K in just five years. By the end of this article, you’re going to have four clear strategies that you can think about deploying for your own website or business.
5 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Makes for a Great Side Hustle
- Digital marketing is incredibly flexible. You can do it from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection.
- Digital marketing is super impactful. When you get digital marketing right it’s a leveraged form of marketing. What this means is that sometimes you can just do something once in digital marketing and reap the rewards over and over again, as it continues to generate leads for you.
- Digital marketing makes for a great side hustle because it can pretty much be done for any industry. You don’t really have to worry about competition because everyone’s trying to go digital these days. So whether that means that you are providing digital marketing services for wedding photographers trying to book more clients, or maybe for plumbers or whatever it is, you will find a market and a niche that you can cater your digital marketing skills to.You can even swim even more upstream. And what I mean by that is you can look for startups that just got venture-backed funding that haven’t yet created their full-time digital marketing teams. You can consult for these startups and because they’re going to have big budgets to spend since they just raised a ton of funding that can be a great way for you to make some extra money as well.
- Digital marketing is constantly changing. This can be really exciting because even though the fundamentals might stay the same, there are going to be things that change over time and that need refinement and adaptation. For example, there might be particular trends in one year, as opposed to another. Like last year working from home was a big one. And aside from just trends, there are always new tools and skillsets that are becoming required or expected of from digital marketers. The reason why this is great is because it’s intellectually stimulating. So this means that you won’t get tired once you master PPC, because you can then learn content strategy or some other digital marketing skill.
- Digital marketing makes for a great side hustle because it can be super confusing. This is something that you can leverage to your advantage because once you understand the fundamentals, you can start to explain that in layman’s terms to somebody else and then provide services or products and things like that to help them out with their digital marketing.
Now that we’ve gone over five reasons why digital marketing makes for a great side hustle, let’s dig into three easy ideas of real-world examples of how you might leverage your digital marketing into creating extra money for yourself.
Idea 1: Creating informational websites for your passions
Do you have a hobby you love? And then you can make an informational website to monetize your hobby. This is something that so many people have done in the world and they’ve done really well with it. It can be a great way for you to fund that hobby that you really enjoy as well.
Say, for example, you love crocheting. You can just search crochet hobby site on Google and you’d find a person that’s probably been able to monetize their love for crochet into something that makes them money as well. As you can see on this website. This is a creator that creates free patterns for people and then she has affiliate links to different yarn shops and things like that for when people want to buy supplies related to the patterns that she posts.
Aside from just these affiliate programs, you could also make money by just posting these patterns on Etsy or on Ravelry for more people to discover. Posting on any of these sorts of marketplaces would require some foundational SEO skills in order for your listing to be successful.
Let’s take a look at another real-world example of this. BrewCabin is a passion hobby project of Matt G who also runs Swim University because he’s super well versed with creating informational content and also affiliate sites, he makes BrewCabin to be a place in which there are educational guides on how to brew beer better.
Within these posts, he will provide information about the best products for certain things, and then have affiliate program links set up so that he’ll make money when he refers a purchase to a site like Amazon. Aside from just affiliate programs, he’s also created a course that he sells for $97 in case people want to level up their all grain brewing process.
I was able to find a post in which in 2020, he shared that he had 439 thousands of visitors in the entire year. So if you just make an assumption that he’s converting 0.001% of his traffic at $97, you would see that he’s generating 42.5K from this online course. That combined with the 10.7K from affiliate marketing, total is 53.2K, which is more than the average salary in the United States.
Idea 2: Create productized digital marketing services for content experts.
Everyone wants to go digital, but not every single person is good at it.
So an easy way for us to leverage our digital marketing skills is to think about how we might be able to help out content experts in getting their distribution to become wider. To do this, all you would need to do is find a niche and then get to know the content creators in this particular niche. As a suggestion, I would recommend that you first start out with the space that you know generally well, and then start building rapport with a few of these content experts.
If you need tips on how to build rapport, check out my past article on that topic. From here, it’s all about hustling and getting some awesome reviews from your clients. Once you have those reviews in place, you can then start to think about how to productize your service over time. Once you productize your service, you’re able to then hire or delegate a team to help you in whatever it is that you’re helping people with.
I know that might’ve sounded a little abstract, so here’s a real-world example of how people are actually doing this. This is a company called Podreacher, and what they do is they convert podcasts into SEO formatted blog posts in order to expand the distribution of podcast creators. When we dig deeper into their pricing section, we would see that they are charging $270 for a single blog post of up to 29 minutes.
And even when we look at their monthly plans, they’re charging $600 a month as a retainer. I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s a little expensive. And so that is your opportunity. If you can find a way to build a process in which you can provide the same level of service and then be half the cost. I’m sure you could find some sort of podcast creators that also would find it valuable. And seeing as this service has been around for a few years, you know that they’re making money already.
There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel when it comes to leveraging digital marketing as a side hustle. This service by Podreacher is a great example of what it means to sell pickaxes to gold miners, which was a lesson we recently went over in our review of five takeaways from How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital by Nathan Latka.
Idea 3: Be a content marketing strategist or to offer some consulting
Do you know what it takes to make really awesome content? Or maybe you’re really good at keyword research now that you’ve watched my SEMRush tutorial video on how to do that. Whatever the case may be, you can use these skills into opportunities for you to make some extra money.
Over the last year, I’ve had a handful of coaching opportunities just from viewers on YouTube that wanted me to have a one-on-one session with them and walking them through their SEMRush results and how they could improve their digital presence.
There’s no reason why you can’t do this for yourself as well. In fact, another productized way that you can do this is by offering video SEO audits for different businesses. That leads us to our real-life example here, which is from detailed.com. Last year for $40, detailed.com would provide you with a 10 minute video audit of your site.
This was a great way for business owners to figure out quickly what might be wrong with their site without having to spend a ton of money for a consultant that might be billing them on the hourly. This effort by detailed.com was incredibly effective as they generate over six figures in revenue. And the reason why is just because people like personalized feedback, you can obviously make a course in which you teach someone how to do an SEO audit, but sometimes people just want the personalized attention.
Big takeaways
There are two things that I want you to remember from today’s article:
- The first one is that digital marketing makes for a great flexible side hustle.
- The second thing is to make sure that if you are going to make digital marketing your side hustle, that you find things that actually interest and excite you.
If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how you might leverage your digital marketing skills into a side hustle.