Good morning, side hustlers, and happy Friday!

In today’s edition, we have:

• 🛠️ 5 tools to get your side hustle off the ground

• ⭐ 1 featured tool

• 📚 A lesson on optimizing your sales funnel

• 🚀 3 top tips to get your entrepreneurship juices flowing

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🛠️ Tools for Side Hustlers 🛠️ 
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• ↩️ AimReply - Never write an email again

• 😮 Open Rates - Boost engagement on your newsletter

• 🤕 PainBoard - Turn messy customer feedback into actionable insight

• ✨ WriteSparkle - Streamline your content creation

• 🔁 LoopGenius - Automate your marketing process to land the first 100 customers for your personal brand, side hustle, or business

↩️ Featured tool: AimReply ↩️

AimReply is a cutting edge email replying assistant. Between content creation and your need to save time, the AI can effectively change how you send emails for the foreseeable future. Aside from efficiency, AimReply understands managing expenses as well. This is why they provide a cost-effective AI email tool that acts as your writer and assistant all in one.

When you consider how much time professionals and individuals spend managing email accounts, you'll see there's room for innovation. People have become accustomed to emails being a part of everyday life, and although it used to be a beacon of efficiency itself, AimReply believes it can be improved.

Simply highlight the email that you would like to reply to, select from a range of preferences about how you want to respond, and let the AI write you a flawless email. The assistant, which can be used via the web or as a chrome extension on both desktop and mobile, will put time back in your hands and help take back control of your busy days.

📚 Marketing School 📚
Today’s Lesson: Turning Clicks Into Sales

Whether you’re selling a product (e-commerce, a virtual course) or service (consulting, other type of agency), finding those people who are willing to pay you for what you offer can be the biggest hurdle - even the most legendary entrepreneurs struggled with their first sale. There are two very common mistakes made when trying to attract customers: 1) focusing too heavy on outbound sales, or 2) focusing too heavily on fostering organic inbound growth. The fact is, you need to make an inviting space for inbound traffic and generate an effective sales funnel through outbound efforts. Before you can make that first sale, it is critical that you make a great first impression on the potential customer.

Let’s start by discussing how to optimize sales from inbound organic traffic. This can be done by having an attractive website or landing page. When a customer clicks a link to your website, where your product or service is showcased, an engaging and inviting home page can lend credibility to your value as a vendor. Beyond that first landing page, it can be useful to have other content on your website that builds further credibility. This could be a blog section, where you offer opinions on the industry, or an “about us” page, where you describe your personal background and mission.

“[The ‘about us page’] is an opportunity where their visitors get to know their company. This is a chance for your customers’ to introduce themselves and the kind of business they do to their clients.” - Reseller Club

Having a separate pricing page is also critical for making that first sale. There are a number of tactics to make an effective pricing page (linked here), and these are of principal importance because the pricing page is often the most visited page on any website after the landing page. Plus, it is where the sale makes or breaks!

After having a great storefront to show potential buyers that you are a credible vendor selling a useful product, we can then focus on outbound efforts. This is a combination of direct sales outreach and marketing tactics, and the purpose is to clients to our page where we can then close the sale. We’ve discussed in previous editions of Beyond 9to5 the importance of marketing with social media advertisements, so I won’t go into too much detail there. Instead, I’ll offer some unique tactics to reach your target audience:

1) Email Campaigns: Setting up an email newsletter or implement drip campaigns to keep prospects engaged. A regular email update can keep your name top-of-mind when prospects decide they’re ready to begin a project.

2) Retargeting Ads: Retargeting ads help you stay in front of prospects wherever they go on the internet. If you’ve ever looked for something on Amazon and then your social feeds suddenly have several ads for that item, you’re familiar with retargeting. Put it to work for your business. Consider highlighting how you can solve major pain points for ecommerce business owners.

3) Personal Outreach: Personalization goes a long way in making prospects feel like you understand their business. After you’ve launched a new site or solved a problem for a client, consider sending personalized emails to some of the prospects in your pipeline. For example, if the new site you built for a client reduced their cart abandonment rate, email prospects a link to the site.

If you want to do further research on this topic, some great resources for turning clicks into sales can be found at the following links: Gorgias, Nexcess

If you have suggestions for next week’s lesson, let us know here, and good luck optimizing your Instagram sales!

💡Entrepreneur Zone💡

💰 Arizona teacher started a side-hustle that makes more than her $40k job.
Ingrid Bayer was no stranger to long hours and low pay as a certified K-12 teacher who worked in public schools for more than 25 years. She was working as a university curriculum developer when she stumbled upon the side hustle that would change her life. Read more here. 

💭 How one person got their first 100 newsletter subscribers from Reddit.
Back in December, one user launched a writing and marketing newsletter. It wasn't a ceremonious launch, and he had no existing audience to leverage — so it truly was a ground-up project. A few minutes and a couple Reddit posts later, he had hit 70 subscribers. Two weeks after that, he passed 100. Not huge numbers, but the first step is often the hardest. Read more here.

🤝 How one person grew an email list to 5,000 subscribers and had a $20,000 course launch.
Aurelia lives in South Africa and runs a thriving online business that gives home bakers the confidence to turn their cooking skills into profitable and successful businesses. She has a thriving email list of over 5,000 home bakers, and she just wrapped up a $20,000 online course launch with her “Home Bakery Startup” course. Read more here.

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