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The Rise of the Side Gig Economy:

How to Get in on the Action and Increase Your Earning Potential

Words Miwa da Silva

Miwa da Silva challenges the mindset of settling for your salary by providing insight on a new way of thinking about your earning potential. Here are some ways on how to increase how much you earn!

Imagine if you could increase your income without switching careers or getting that raise you’ve been praying for. What if you could give yourself your own raise during your spare time? What if anyone could hatch a plan to build a second (or third or fourth) stream of income to supplement their full-time work? What if the answer to your financial problems can’t come from your boss, but only from your action? 

That is the power of having a side hustle, being able to take charge of your earning potential instead of relying on an agreed cap on what you are “allowed” to earn. I wanted to take some time to share proven steps on how I was able to scale a booming side hustle around the demands of a full-time job. 

If I was to pick 3 things which are important to focus on when growing your business, it will be these:

• Client attraction 

• Leveraging your unique voice 

• Learning how to sell

Unfortunately, these are things that we don’t get taught in business school which is a shame because these are absolutely crucial to grow your business and not a lot of people know that. I always tell my clients that nailing these three things are more important than setting up a website or creating a fancy logo. 

Let’s dive right in: 

When it comes to client attraction – it is important for business owners to know that the riches are in the Niches, and it may be tempting to try and serve everybody but you are more likely to accelerate through the growth stages faster if you focus on serving a specific group of people.  Leveraging your smallest viable audience is not only more cost effective - it is also more fun and it also gives you tunnel vision, clarity and focus on what you should be doing. It is easier to serve a hundred people who love you than 1 million people who “kind of like you.” 

A trick to determine what your niche is to figure out what specific group of a certain target market you enjoy working with and are able to get results for. For example – my target market is female corporate climbers, but my niche is helping female corporate climbers skyrocket their side hustle income using lean marketing and sales strategies. 

When it comes to leveraging your unique voice online it is ALL about rhythm and flow and not all content is created equal. There are four ways to build and connect organically with your ideal clients in a way that builds the ‘know like’ and ‘trust’ factor and in the only world the best way to leverage your unique voice is through content. 

Here are four ways to connect with your target audience in a way that warms them up to prepare them to trust you enough to pay you.

Storytelling: Tugs at the brain and inspires action. 

• People want to know why you do what you do. This adds layers of transparency, authenticity, and vulnerability to your brand that’s the kind of thing that builds trust and trust sells. 

Social proofing

• Stop telling people you are the expert – show them. Show them testimonials, and if you don’t have that yet display your knowledge in your content, show behind the scenes of what you get up which helps you be a better business owner. 

• Don’t be afraid to give free value – 80% of my clients actually booked my services after I had given specific targeted value for free.  

Belief shifting 

• Your prospect will not pull out the card to pay you unless you guide them from limiting belief to empowering beliefs – start busting common myths related to your industry/what your prospect is trying to achieve. 

Here are some myths that I am going to bust for you as a business owner:

• Most people say they want to wait until they are sure of exactly what they want to do before they work with clients – the truth is, you will not know what you love to do until you start working with clients. I started my business focusing on career coaching for women in financial services because I was good at it and had a ton of experience. However, along the way I discovered what sets my soul on fire is helping people launch, grow and scale their businesses. I can talk about business strategy all day long. (I did not realize this until I had started working with clients). 

Future pacing:

• Most people focus on the features of their product and how great it is to work with them BUT what you need to be focusing on is painting a detailed picture of the transformation aka. How the client’s life would look AFTER they have worked with you. What could they be doing in 3 months from now if they start working with you today? Stop selling information and start trading in the outcome and results. 

When it comes to selling, a lot of people struggle with selling their products because they don’t want to come across as sleazy or salesy. 

Here are three things most people believe to be true that is actually not true:

1. Most people believe once they build an amazing product or service and the people will come.

The truth is no matter how amazing a product or service is, if the business owner cannot communicate this in a way that matters to their target audience, they would struggle to convert an audience into paying clients. 

2. Most people believe as new business owners they have to sell at low prices or give huge discounts before they get clients.

The truth is this: your price is not the problem; the real problem is failing to articulate your value to your prospects. 

3. Most people believe they have to wait to be the expert before earning the right to sell. 

The truth is that expertise is overrated, and you only need to know more than the person who needs your help right now, Authority is relative and not absolute, therefore no one can truly know it all, you just need to take the leap and find your tribe.

4. What I find a lot is that most people get very discouraged at the first “No” they hear. They assume it is personal or that no means “No”. 

The truth; “No” is probably just an objection you need to work on creating messaging that addresses objections in your client’s mind. Nailing this one strategy has given me a unicorn sales conversion rate.