5 Tips For Restarting A Side Hustle In 2024 [LNIM264]

Episode two six four.

Late night. Internet marketing.

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're gonna talk about the coaching breakthroughs we had in episode two, six, three, and we're going to apply it to extract five tips for restarting your stalled side hustle in 2024. All this and more on the late night internet marketing podcast.

The late night internet marketing podcast with somebody else. But you want a business to run yourself. You wanna know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burning inside. So keep it up and you will find, at the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights. Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time.

And now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason. Hey, hey, hey, hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark mason, coming to you from the little studio in dallas, texas, with tips about finally restarting that stalled side hustle of yours. You know I have a lot of experience with this particular topic because I've been side hustling since 2007. And sometimes, no matter how excited you are, no matter how good you think your plans are, no matter what your intentions are, your side hustle stalls. And I've seen this over and over, especially when coaching. And the most common thing that happens, and the thing that makes me so sad, is when people stall for whatever reason and they quit before the magic happens. You know, the only way you can truly fail at building a business on the side, creating a side hustle, working through that side project, is if you quit before you get it figured out, and a lot of times that quitting takes the form of a stall that never gets recovered. So in this episode I want to go through my five best tips for restarting your side hustle. And this is super relevant because if you listened to episode 263, you know that I just worked through a bunch of new learning and issues of my own in a coaching session that I shared the highlights from in that episode. So now we can take what we learned in episode 263 and we can apply it to restarting a stalled side hustle. So here we go Now.

The first tip that I have for you and I think this is one that is so often overlooked is actually I'm going to call it tip zero. It's such a fundamental side hustle restarting tip that it's going to be numbered zero. It's like before all the other tips. That's how important it is, and it's simply this Make sure you still want to do it, make sure you're really committed to achieving the outcome that you've imagined, and the best way for you to do that is to reconnect with the reason that you're doing the side hustle. To begin with. What is it that motivated you to start the side hustle in the first place? Maybe you've got an outcome that you're trying to get to because doing the thing makes you feel great. Maybe it's because you've got income goals that will enable you to do something in your life that's important to you. Whatever it is, make sure that you go back and spend some time committing to why you're doing the thing in the first place and write that down to. Based on the learning that we discussed in two, 63 was the developing the new practice, or redeveloping the practice of journaling. And so you should write down in the form of a journal or on a piece of paper, on a sticky note that you stick to your monitor, exactly why it is you're doing what you're doing. That will help you get through when you would rather be watching old reruns of Seinfeld. Okay, so that's tip zero. Make sure you still really want to do it and make sure you remember why it is that you really want to do it.

Tip number one is to reassess your commitments. You know, back in episode 263, we talked about a value system and that we all have value systems that cause us to prioritize commitments in a certain way. But just because you have a commitment doesn't mean that that's a commitment that you should have. Maybe it's something you should stop doing. Maybe you have commitments to people that you want to renegotiate or reassess in the face of the thing that you're trying to get done. Maybe it means you need to go through a season where you no longer do something that you had committed to do. Maybe you committed to mowing the yard every week this summer and maybe this is the season where you need to hire someone to do your lawn care, to free up time for you to actually work on your side hustle.

Maybe, if you've been going for that promotion at work and you've over committed at work during your day job, trying to get things done so you can be considered for a promotion, maybe this is not the right time to restart your side hustle. Or maybe you need to set some better boundaries at work I like that answer better so that you make sure that you have time for your side hustle and these things go on and on and on. Maybe you're committed to watching Drive to Survive, the Formula One series on Netflix. Maybe you need to reassess that commitment. Maybe I'm talking to myself here. Whatever it is, you need to make sure that you understand what you're committed to and just rethink whether or not that commitment that maybe you made three, four, five years ago is still the right commitment for you, giving your values and the things that you're wanting to get done. And then the other thing I want you to do is, once you understand what your commitments are and what commitments you have left. I want you to make sure you understand the relative priority of those. For example, just because something is first, it doesn't mean it has to be first each and every time, all the time. It just means it needs to end up first in the end. So maybe there's room for your side hustle to be first on Fridays. That's the thing you're going to get done for sure on Fridays, no matter what else happens. Those kinds of choices can be made and you can still have integrity with your priorities averaged out over time. So that's the first tip Make sure you're aware of, you reassess your commitments and you ditch things that no longer are important to you. Second tip this is super important.

Another thing that came out of my coaching session with Cliff that I described in episode 263 is make sure that the goals that you're setting are realistic and achievable. And here's why If your goals are too massive, you will lose faith that you can achieve them. So make sure they're realistic, make sure it's something that you can actually achieve. It doesn't need to mean that they're easy or that you're taking it easy on yourself somehow by setting goals that anyone could achieve. I just mean avoid setting goals that you can't accomplish, because that's just going to result in a massive amount of demotivation. We want to avoid that.

The other thing that I recommend is we've talked about this many times on the podcast Instead of setting big goals that are far away, set smaller goals that are near, where you can focus on achieving them. You understand what's necessary to win in those small situations weekly targets rather than large, overwhelming annual targets, or 12 week years instead of complete years, because that not only allows you to stay focused on the objective, it also gives you more things to celebrate, because when your goals are achieved, you should definitely take time to celebrate and achieve those goals. And then finally, as we've talked about many times, just make sure they're specific and measurable, actionable and relevant and time bound, so that your milestones are solid things that really exist, that you can hit. Of course, I'm talking about the use of smart goals, and this is something that we've talked about many times. So we've recommitted to the project, decided we really want to do it, we've reassessed our commitment around the project, the things that might get in the way of the project. We've reassessed all the things that might compete with the project. Now we've got realistic and achievable goals.

The next thing I want you to do is establish a dedicated working schedule. I think this is one of the most powerful things you can do. I think there's two really good ways to do that powerful things you can do and I think there's two really good ways to do that. Cliff and I as I mentioned in episode 263, we talked about identifying times where you are the most productive, looking for those times, trying to work during those times, trying to understand your natural rhythms, both on a daily and also on a much longer timescale over weeks and months, and I'm trying to accomplish that with time tracking and journaling myself. So understand when is the best time for you to work, and for you, the best time to work might be when the kids are at school, for example. Or perhaps you can't work during the day because you've got a day job and you're an early riser. You want to get an hour in every morning before you leave for work. Whatever that is, identify that time when you're the most productive and, obviously, when the time is available, and try to focus in and use that time.

The other thing I want to suggest to you is sometimes the best thing to do is just to block some time. So if you know you need to record a podcast episode like this and you need an hour to do that, like this, then maybe you should consider blocking time on your calendar to do that specific task and, like this, your calendar will come up and tell you hey, mark, it's time for you to record the podcast. Get busy, dude Now. Ahead of that, I had already done the show notes, done the research for the show, created the show outline and done all the things. So when that calendar time came up to actually record the podcast, I was able to do that. I think that's a really valuable and important thing, this idea of mapping your tasks into blocks of time where you can actually hold yourself accountable.

And here's a pro tip here Treat these appointments with yourself like doctor's appointments. You know how, whenever you have a doctor's appointment, you're hesitant to miss it. I mean, you're not going to certainly miss it without calling and rescheduling it, but usually you're not even going to miss it because somehow things like doctor's appointments or airline flights or other things that somehow in your value system you've decided are really important, you make those. You don't reschedule those. You make it to those things. Well, treat these appointments with yourself, to work on these things with yourself the same way. Make an appointment and stick to that appointment, just like you would a doctor's appointment. So the fourth tip is I want to recommend that you assess the work that you've got to do and make sure you're leveraging the latest technology and automation.

So, for example, once upon a time when I created a podcast like this and a lot of you probably know these podcasts are not just audio podcasts, but I also have a YouTube channel where I post this and you can go over to late night. I amcom forward. Slash YouTube and it will take you to my YouTube channel and one of the playlists is actually video from this podcast and if you go over there, you'll see my smiling talking head and a little bit of editing and graphics added in to make it interesting. Because I want this content on YouTube. The main reason I do that is so that I'll have video for social media posts, because video of me talking is a lot more effective as a piece of social media content than video of an audiogram with just pulsing sound. People respond to video. They respond also to this closed captioning that people burn into the video, and the combination of those two. That's a best practice for social media. In the old days I would do that myself. I would edit those.

Now I have newer automated social media clip extraction tools that are based in AI and those tools help me automatically extract that content. If you're interested in the tool that I use, go to latenightimcom forward slash opus O-P-U-S. That's my affiliate link to the Opus Clip Tool. I think it's fantastic. It's relatively new. They're doing a lot of development but if you catch it now you can get in at a really nice price. Again, that's latenightimcom forward slash opus to check out the Opus Clip tool and, of course, that's my affiliate link and if you buy through that link I get a commission, even though it doesn't affect your price. That's the tool that I use and that's the tool I recommend for you.

Of course, all kinds of AI are coming and a lot of people are using AI to help outline the episode. A lot of times. What I'll do is I'll describe the episode in detail to ChatGPT and I will ask it to suggest an outline. Then I'll edit that and feed that edited outline and ask it for additional tips and suggestions of things that I might want to cover. Ask it for additional tips and suggestions of things that I might want to cover, and what happens is I don't usually use the outline as it comes out of chat GPT, but a lot of times chat GPT will suggest something that I just didn't think of. There's like oh yeah, how do I forget that? And that's a really good thing to do. I'll give you another pro tip on chat GPT, and this is also a productivity tip. You know the cell phone version you can talk to and it talks back to do. I'll give you another pro tip on chat GPT, and this is also a productivity tip. You know the cell phone version you can talk to and it talks back to you.

So a lot of times when I'm driving in a car and I want to work out the details of an outline or a blog post or some video content or some other project that I'm working on, like a lead magnet, I'll start talking to chat GPT and ask it what it thinks and tell it no, I don't like that, give me some more ideas. And we'll go back and forth Just like I was having a conversation with a regular person. You know, that's sort of the direction we're headed. An assistant that's like me talking to a virtual assistant that was going to help me create the document. So make sure you're leveraging technology and automation. Another great piece of technology that I use in my podcast creation flow as a cool tool called descript, and descript allows me to edit this video by manipulating the text, and that is really quite an amazing tool. You can check that out at late night. I amcom forward slash descript D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T Again, an affiliate link. I get a commission, but that is the tool that I really use and that's what I recommend for you as well If you're creating any kind of video or audio content where you're talking.

So those four tips it's five really with tip zero, made sure you still wanted to do it. You reassessed your other commitments, you set realistic and achievable goals. You establish this sort of dedicated working schedule where maybe even you're using your calendar to block time. You've leveraged technology and information. And in the fifth tip, I want you to think about how you rekindle your passion around this topic. So you know, we've already talked about the first part of that, which was tip zero, which is to remember why you're doing it, but what I really want you to do is to think about the good outcomes and imagine those happening Like. Put yourself in that space. If you actually accomplish this side hustle and it goes the way you want to, I want you to spend time periodically, once a week or maybe even every day in the morning when you get up, thinking about what it's going to be like when you finally accomplish the goal that you're trying to go. Make that part of your morning routine or your weekly planning routine. Make it a habit to visualize the future outcome. Put yourself there and your subconscious mind will find ways to get you there. But keep that fantastic successful outcome top of mind and that will help you find solutions to problems, help keep you motivated and help you restart your side hustle. So those are my five tips for you to restart your stalled side hustle taking what we learned in episode 263 and applying it to restarting your side hustle here in episode 264. I hope that's helpful to you In the next episode next week. In episode 265, we're actually going to talk about in some more detail this tip.

Number four leveraging technology and automation, and particularly AI. I work with AI in my day job and in some business context and I also use AI a lot in my side hustle, so I thought it might be really good for us to talk about in episode 265, how you can leverage AI in your side hustle to get better results. I think that's really important. Better results faster also really important with less effort. I think a lot of people understand the less effort part, but if you just go for less effort, you're going to get lower quality. What I want to talk about is that amazing trifecta easier, faster and better. That's like the holy grail of optimizing processes easier, faster and better all at the same time. I believe that's what AI enables, but only when it's used properly, and that's what we'll talk about in episode 265 next week.

Hey, look if you've got a reaction to this episode or you've got your own tips that you'd like to share with me. I would love to hear what you think. Maybe there's a tip six out there that you feel strongly about that you'd like to tell me about. Hit me up at feedback at late night, I amcom. I'd love to hear what you think about these side hustle restarting tips, and I'd love to hear your personal story about a time when your side hustle was stalled, or maybe you're stalled now and need some help with that. Hit me up at feedback at late night I amcom, and until next time. I wish you all the best in your internet endeavors. Ciao.

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Hey, that was fun. I'm excited to be back on the mic more regularly. I'm really enjoying delivering this content to you. I hope that you're enjoying the content as well, and I hope this content is helping you. I'm also super excited to be watching a lot of baseball right now. My son, as you know, goes to the largest high school in the state of Texas. He's on the varsity baseball team. He's not the star player, but we love being there all the same. It's a really fantastic experience. My younger daughter is playing volleyball. She's on a team full of friends that she absolutely loves and she's having fun as well.

And if you're not a youth sports family, I want to encourage you to think about finding a youth sport for your kid to play. I think there are so many amazing, valuable life lessons about determination and camaraderie and respect for individuals and yourself and your teammates, and winning and not quitting, and how to win gracefully. There's just a plethora there's a big word starting with P a plethora of things that you can learn, that children can learn from youth sports, and, in fact, parents can learn too, if they just pay attention. Most youth sports parents are a little bit crazy. I'm not one of them, but you, you know, man, they're crazy, but their kids are awesome and so definitely recommend If you don't have youth sports in your life and you've got some kids, that's a strong recommendation from me that you consider that Until next week, ciao.

Late Night Internet Marketing.