entrepreneurship

The Blueprint For Creating With a 9 to 5 — How I Built A 175,000 Audience

Steal my strategy to build the life of your dreams.

Anangsha Alammyan

06 Feb 2024 • 5 min read

Image from the author’s Instagram.

Steal my strategy to build the life of your dreams.

The hustle culture has over-glamorized quitting a 9 to 5 job to follow your passion.

But is leaving a job isn’t smart if you have bills to pay?

It’s not something I’d recommend.

While being in a full-time government job, I aspired to start working on my creative endeavors. I wanted to decide wisely, so I chose content creation part-time. I switched to writing full-time only when I started making more money than my day job for six months in a row.

Back then, I had a hectic schedule. A typical day in life followed this routine:

Wake up at 7:30 am,
Get ready, have my breakfast, and reach the office by 9 am
Spend 8 hours at the workplace
Get back home by 6 pm
Exercise from 6:30–7:30 pm
Take a shower, and have dinner between 7:30- 09:30 pm.

If I wanted to make time for my passion during weekdays, nighttime was my only option. I spent the next couple of hours tapping furiously at my keyboard. Burning the midnight oil when the rest of the world was sleeping, I felt like a brave little girl on her secret mission.

If you also work a 9–5 shift, creating part-time only gives you 2 hours a day.

It might sound terrifying, but to me, it sounds like a great opportunity.

By creating part-time, you can:

Understand which gig types work best for you
Build an emergency fund on the side
Build a loyal audience
Establish a strong personal brand
Experience the perks of entrepreneurship without leaving the comfort of your job.

I worked on my side hustle consistently every day from 10 pm to 12 am.

Today, I make my living by writing online while catering to a massive audience of 175,000 readers.

I’ve done it while being in a full-time demanding job, and in this post, I’m sharing all about it. Building part-time is pretty much possible if you can think of a strategy that’ll work.

Here’s how.

Action first, plans later

Most people love making elaborate plans about how they’ll have a thriving business. They have action blueprints, marketing strategies, and outsourcing plans, but they have no results.

Why?

Because the biggest battle is the one going on inside your head.

When you’re stuck in the ‘planning’ phase for your business, you’ll find yourself listing all the ways your business might fail. This gets you in a loop of negative self-talk, and your idea never really takes off.

The solution? Take small steps today. You can finalize the strategy later.

For me, I was building a content business. So, my action was to write. I didn’t have a niche or a publishing plan. All I did was write.

Here’s how you can do it —

Define what you want to do as your part-time gig: Let’s say you want to design an e-book to create a passive income source
Ask yourself what steps you can start taking from today itself: Research and write the content of your e-book
Fix a time to get started on it: Be specific about the time by considering your hectic work hours. Early hours can be your saviour if you’re a morning person. Otherwise, choose after-work hours like I did
Follow this every day without stressing about the next step: Like the launch of your e-book, publishing process, etc. These steps come in later stages.

Define your target audience

Every business solves a problem. Know what problem you’re solving and what section of the world’s population has that problem.

In user-centered design, this is called a persona. It’s the identity of the person (from research) that you’ve created.

For example, while building my 90-day freelance guide, my target audience was Aditi.

Aditi is a 24-year-old graduate just coming off university. She’s ambitious but doesn’t want to climb the corporate ladder. She’s exploring how to make money by freelancing (this was me 3 years ago).

Every time I write a piece of content, it’s for Aditi. Every time I send out a marketing campaign, it’s with Aditi in mind.

Know what keeps them awake at night

I know Aditi as well as I know myself. I know all her doubts and insecurities. I know what keeps her awake at night.

The questions she keeps on repeating in her head are:

“I don’t know how to start freelancing”
“I don’t know what to write about”
“I don’t know how to find high-paying freelance clients.”

As a business owner, it’s important to know your target audience better than you know yourself:

Find their pain points
Understand how you can solve them.

With such clarity in your messaging, you can convey it to your target audience and sell your products.

Let data be your best friend

The best way to decide on a strategy is to do it first and then review it.

Once you take action, analyze the results. Use that information to steer your ship and direct what avenue to move ahead.

This step is the most time-consuming and takes some trial and error. But it’ll help you position your product and get first-hand feedback from your audience.

It’s a one-time investment of time and resources that’ll make your side hustle fail-proof, so it’s worth it.

Once you have the data-backed strategy and an audience to buy your product or service, you’ve created an income stream for yourself. Voila!

The blueprint for creating a profitable side hustle alongside your day job: Final words

“You have to work on the business first before it works for you.” ― Idowu Koyenikan.

This is the only blueprint you need to get started on your dream project. No matter what you do for a living now, it’s never too late or too early to follow your passion.

All you need is to work towards it strategically.

I’ve done it by building a content business and earning a massive 175K+ audience while working in a 9–5 setup.

Here’s how I successfully strategized for it:

I prioritized taking action (writing online) over crafting a perfect plan
I created my target audience’s persona considering their age, educational background and future interests to market my content
I figured out their pain points and devised solutions I could help them with
I analyzed the potential of my strategies by reviewing real-time feedback from my audience.

Follow these simple steps to start creating without leaving the perks of a stable 9–5.

Love writing but don’t know where to start? Join my FREE 5-day course. It’ll teach you the successful writer’s framework that took me 5 years to master.

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