The Kick Off For Online Consulting

This episode kicks off a new season focused on how to launch your online consulting side hustle.  The weekly episodes will walk you through making a plan, creating marketing materials, landing a customer, and then repeat business.  Time to get started.

Set Your Online Consulting Goals

Any good business starts with a vision.  You need to take this step even with your side hustle.  Consider your goals, maybe even a vision statement for your side hustle.  Your intentions may be to learn more skills, earn some extra income, or tackle a broader range of projects.  All of these are reasonable goals and will help you decide what customers are the best fit for you.  Customers do not just choose you.  Your goals should always be in the mix of whether you are a good fit for a project. Do not be afraid to be time and money focused.  If your goals are to make another $500 per month, then include that in your planning.  Your "why" can be anything you desire.  Therefore, be true to yourself during this step.  You will be happier for it in the long run.

Plan Your Approach

There are many ways to find work and offer services in this market.  Consider what will work best for you.  Your offering can be maintenance or staff augmentation coding, software product creation, technical assessment, or other areas.  Much like your goals, the approach you desire will profoundly impact the customers that are the best for your online consulting work.

Define Your Target Market

Your goals and approach will have a lot to do with the projects and work that is best suited for you.  However, you will also need to determine the target market you want to address.  Your situation may be perfect to help start-ups or small companies; it may be better with mid-sized companies.  Alternatively, your work may be best in an industry like shipping, banking, healthcare, or other niches.

Level of Effort

Finally, consider how much work you want to do.  Your daily schedule will often be a starting point for the time available to your side hustle.  However, your drive may help you target a substantial level of effort.  The measure of your energy will often be hours available.  Thus, a plan for ten hours of work per week would be a good target.  On the other hand, you might have days off you can use for online consulting.  In that case, you can target those days per week. Add up the time available to get a weekly or monthly availability.  This will be important when applying for projects.  For this week, go ahead and create a brief document of your side hustle business plan to get yourself started.