Nobody Is Searching for Your Side Hustle

I have started three side hustles in the last two years.

One of them involves laser engraving golf clubs, a business I got into because I own too many golf clubs and apparently my brain decided the correct response to that problem was to buy a laser.

Here is what all three had in common in month one: zero leads.

Not "a few leads." Not "some traffic that didn't convert." Zero. The websites were live. The logos were good. The logos were, honestly, great. I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time on one of the logos. And the internet ignored all of it completely.

I should mention that I do this for a living. I have run a link building agency since 2010. I have spent fifteen years helping companies you have heard of show up when people search. And I still had to relearn the same lesson on my own little projects, sitting in my kitchen at 10pm wondering why the contact form had never once made a sound.

The lesson is this: nobody is searching for your side hustle.

They are searching for their problem. Your business is, at best, a possible answer that shows up while they are looking for something else. Everything below comes out of that one sentence.

1. Chase the phrase someone types when they already have their wallet out

Most people starting out go after the big search term. The one with the traffic. "Home improvement." "Marketing." "Fitness."

That is a lovely way to compete with companies that have a full time SEO team and a budget with a comma in it. You will not win. I would not win, and this is literally my job.

Go the other direction. Get boring and specific. Not "engraving," but "custom golf club engraving." Not "gutter cleaning," but "gutter cleaning in Eagle Idaho." Twenty people a month search that second one. Twelve of them need gutters cleaned this week.

Search volume is a vanity number. Somebody typing a four word phrase with a city in it has a problem, a timeline, and a credit card. Somebody typing "marketing" is a college student writing a paper.

Pick two or three of these phrases. Write one page for each. That is your whole search strategy for the first six months.

2. If you serve a place, your Google Business Profile is the entire ballgame

This is the single highest leverage free thing on the internet and side hustlers skip it constantly.

When someone searches for a local service, Google shows a map with three businesses on it before it shows a single normal website result. Three. That box sits above everybody. You can outrank a company with a hundred employees by filling out a form correctly and getting eleven people to leave a review.

So fill it out. All of it. The hours, the service area, the categories, the list of services, the section where you upload photos. Real photos of your actual work, not stock images of a smiling person in a headset.

Then ask every customer for a review. Out loud, with your mouth, at the moment they are happiest with you. It feels awkward the first four times and then it stops feeling like anything.

3. Make one page that does one job

The average side hustle website is a homepage that mumbles.

It has a carousel. It has a paragraph about passion. It has a services section listing nine things you would technically do for money. It does not say what you do, where you do it, what it costs, or how to reach you without filling out a nine field form that asks for a budget range.

Kill all of it. One page per thing you sell. At the top: what it is, who it is for, where you do it. In the middle: proof, which means photos of finished work and words from people who paid you. At the bottom: your phone number, as a link, that a thumb can tap.

Then take your contact form down to three fields. Name, phone, what you need. Every field you add loses you people who were already trying to give you money.

4. Get mentioned somewhere that isn't yours

Here is the part I know the most about and the part nobody wants to hear, because it is the slowest.

Search engines and AI assistants both decide whether to trust you based partly on whether anybody else out there vouches for you. If your website is the only place on the internet that has ever mentioned your business, it looks exactly like the thousand sites that got spun up last Tuesday.

You fix that by existing somewhere else. The local chamber directory. The supplier whose products you install, who almost certainly has a "where to buy" page. The neighborhood association newsletter. A podcast where you talk for forty minutes about your weird niche. A reporter who needed someone to explain something you happen to know.

None of this is glamorous and none of it works in a week. But it compounds, which almost nothing else in marketing does. The mention you earn today is still working for you in three years. The ad you ran last month is gone.

5. Answer in ten minutes or don't bother with any of the above

You can do everything on this list, rank beautifully, and still lose every lead to a guy with a worse website and a faster thumb.

The web gets you the lead. The next ten minutes get you the money. People filling out a contact form at 8pm are filling out four contact forms at 8pm, and the first human to respond wins most of the time. Not the best. The first.

Put the notifications on your phone. Answer from the grocery store parking lot. "Hey, saw your message, can I call you in twenty?" is a complete and winning response.

I lost my first three inquiries because I checked that inbox on Sundays like a normal person. Do not be a normal person about this.

The part I have to be honest about

The first lead took four months.

I want to be clear about that because every article like this one implies that if you do the five things, leads arrive by Friday. They do not. You will do all of this correctly and hear nothing for a long enough stretch that you start to feel stupid about the laser you bought.

Then someone calls. Then someone calls the next week. And at some point you notice it stopped being random, because the same page keeps bringing them and you finally understand which of your problems you actually solved.

Nobody is searching for your side hustle. They are searching for their problem. Your only job is to be standing there, clearly and specifically, when they do.

Zach Ball has run Page One Power a link building agency since 2010 and has three side hustles that all started at zero.