Side Hustling with Zero Down is my series where I share my experiences starting a side hustle using $0 from my day job, in the introduction I shared how I bootstrapped this Blog without spending a penny from my pocket, this post is more details about the choices I made to start this blog, and the tools I use to draft articles, polish them and then share them with you.
I have always liked writing and now I’m no longer in college I’ve lost touch with writing and no longer have the time to try writing a book, but I do have the time to dedicate to the part I enjoyed most – writing and sharing things that I think will help people and use it to keep myself honest.
First Steps
Before starting this blog and publishing it I knew from experience that without having some content ready to go its very easy to get overwhelmed by the demands of posting content even once a week, let alone the twice a week I’m starting out with. In order to reduce the burden on myself I decided that I would not setup this blog until I at least had the ideas for enough posts (8) to fill an entire month. The other thing I wanted to have in place was a workflow, similar to the one I used to employ for videos, where I would start with a badly written, rough outline of a post or multiple posts, and then I would rework it into a collection of coherent and hopefully more valuable and interesting items.
Idea -> Article
Each post on this blog has been through an iteration of this workflow, its also the same workflow I use when Im drafting any important document or email at work. To start with I open a blank document in a whatever text editor is convenient and I start outlining and typing a first draft of my content. Usually this is full of typos, has dodgy grammar and is probably not all that clear in its purpose. The first draft of this series contained pieces that are spread across multiple blog posts, and of course plenty of ideas that on reflection weren’t good enough or relevant enough and so were dropped.
Once I have my rough draft I then go back through the whole post and try to split it into multiple posts, if I can’t do that then it goes wholesale to the next step, if I can split it I will then redraft it in separate documents for each subsection. I find this helps me create clear content as even if I rejoin the articles at a later date, at least if they are separate while being written they will be truer to my intent.
Now I’m usually in a place where for each post on the site I have a relatively clean draft. It might be missing some affiliate links, or some finesse, but I’ve usually spent a good hour or two on it at this point and so I find it best to save, walk away and actually not come back to the article for at least 24 hours. Once I come back with a fresh pair of eyes I will give it a once over and start polishing the wording and lightly reworking the content. This is the final pass I give it inside a Word Processor. Next stop – WordPress & Publishing!
Monetization
Once I had my first months articles written and felt confident I had a large enough buffer of ideas to not run out of steam immediately, I took the plunge as it were and paid for hosting via BlueHost as they come highly recommended by other bloggers, and also have WordPress immediately available. I also spent a couple of days configuring this site with a customized version of a default theme and uploaded my ‘About’ page, as well as my first couple articles. The next steps I will be taking as I publish more content and build an audience is to start monetizing the blog – stay tuned to see how my plans evolve here as while I’m sure advertising works I really don’t like blogs where there is an advert every three of four lines.
I am a financial freedom hustler and entrepreneur based in Seattle, WA. I run this blog to share the tools and techniques I use to stretch my income and radically increase my savings rate for the future in the hope it inspires and helps you to build your own version of the future.