Hey dudes,

I wasn’t really planning to write this article, but with the explosion of unemployment that we’re dealing with because of COVID-19, I think it’s important for everyone who hasn’t worried about a side hustle before to start thinking about it now.

As we all know, your employer can yank your paycheck for any reason or no reason in most professions – and it’s gotten appalling how frequently and how casually they do it. With your own operation, of course, you have a much better chance of keeping revenue coming in at a steady rate. And everyone needs steady cash flow.

Nowadays, there are plenty of viable business models that a bro working alone can succeed in with minimal startup expenses. This list of online business types is way better researched than what I could put together on short notice, so I’m just giving you the link.

There’s an important aspect of all these businesses that entrepreneurs without marketing experience often overlook, and it isn’t usually talked about. Whatever you’re marketing, bro, you can’t get new customers without three major things:

1. An audience
2. Building trust
3. A solid monetization plan

Every business has the monetization defined, but without the other two, it fails. So I need to introduce you to these core concepts.

Your audience is simply everyone who knows that your business exists. They may have heard of it by word of mouth, clicked on an ad, or they may find your online content very engaging and come back to it often. In other words, the entire spectrum. Most won’t become clients, but that’s the numbers game which is fundamental to all businesses.

Unless you already have a large email list from a related business, building an audience from zero requires either some cash outlay (for online ads), or the willingness to invest a lot of time in creating content that ranks highly in search (SEO). Don’t panic about the cost of online ads; if you plan them sensibly, you can attract a healthy number of good prospects for as low as $150/month. At any rate, you need to keep attracting new audience members continually, because many of your old ones will leave and forget about you.

The other crucial element, trust, is what leads some of your audience to eventually become buyers. Without it, you’re lost. After all, you don’t purchase things from some random person on the Internet, do you?

In the online world, nearly everyone goes about building trust by using emails that they send to potentially interested clients. You’ve signed up for a few of these, dude! The main point is to get the recipients engaged enough, over a short time, to either buy something or at least feel comfortable about buying it. In addition, it helps you communicate your brand and the brand’s values. Typically, the business provides some kind of free gift or info in exchange for getting your email address on this list.

To build such a list yourself, you need an autoresponder email series of your own. In the beginning, you definitely want to use a monthly service instead of buying the software on your own. Of course, you also need to plan out and write the emails, which requires you to be good at copywriting. If you aren’t, find a bro who is, or hire a freelance copy writer; there are plenty of those.

So, a quick summary:

1. Pick a business model and monetize it to your specifics.
2. Build your audience (constantly).
3. Earn your audience’s trust with an email series.
4. Make sales.

Happy bro-preneuring!

Later,
-The Blog Dude