Birdsong and birdwatching boosts mental health
Listening to birdsong or encountering birds in your environment has a positive effect on mental health. In a recent study conducted by academics from King’s College London, it was found that hearing birdsong and encountering wild birds in the environment gave a noticeable boost to an individuals mental health. As a bad mood is not generally conducive to getting work done, this effect is an interesting find, considering it may just take a walk outside to get through a case of writer’s block or a spark of creativity.
“A sample of 1292 participants completed a total of 26,856 ecological momentary assessments between April 2018 and October 2021. Everyday encounters with birdlife were associated with time-lasting improvements in mental wellbeing. These improvements were evident not only in healthy people but also in those with a diagnosis of depression, the most common mental illness across the world. These findings have potential implications for both environmental and wildlife protection and mental healthcare policies. Specific measures, aimed at preserving and increasing everyday encounters with birdlife in urban areas, should be implemented,” as reported by Nature.
The next time you’re stressed out at work or finding yourself unable to get a project done, maybe taking a short break with a walk outside (or maybe even listening to some birdsong on YouTube) is just what is needed.
How to learn from Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a platform created by Amazon that serves as a marketplace for small tasks that need to get done. If your business has thousands of hours of audio that you need transcribed. If your organization wants to double check the results of a computer vision experiment, against a third party, Amazon Mechanical Turk can show your data set to however many people you want to pay for validation. Amazon Mechanical Turk lets people list tasks, that may in the future be completed by artificial intelligence, to be completed by people that get paid for their work.
As Amazon describes, “Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development.
While technology continues to improve, there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as moderating content, performing data deduplication, or research. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce, which is time consuming, expensive and difficult to scale, or have gone undone. Crowdsourcing is a good way to break down a manual, time-consuming project into smaller, more manageable tasks to be completed by distributed workers over the Internet (also known as ‘microtasks’).”
How can your small or future new business learn from Amazon Mechanical Turk? The experience of someone listing a microtask on MTurk is as if an artificial intelligence was completing the work and reporting back to the creator of the job. The reality is that, based on the job specifications, Amazon took that information and listed it to a workforce, who then completed the task. This completed work is then sent back to the job creator, seamlessly and seemingly automatically.
This principle can be applied to many other technologies that people use every day. What is Uber but an app that connects someone to a driver, who then drives that person to where they want to go? What is AirBnb bus a website that shows you places in the real world that you can stay a weekend at? If you order groceries online, doesn’t that set off a local supply chain of people fulfilling that order?
If you aren’t familiar with technology or someone that codes, then technology can seem elusive and magical. Uber can seem like an impossibly difficult concept because of how novel it is to be able to request a taxi service on demand, when the previous non-tech version had such a difficult user experience. Airbnb can seem like an experience of wonder booked from your phone, teleporting you to a fully lived in environment, when you’re really just traveling in a new way. Ordering groceries online is so easy that you can forget that the simplicity is made by several people shopping, packaging and hand delivering your goods.
So what does this all mean for your business? If you’re a small business, a business that hasn’t started yet, or a not-yet-tech-enabled business, ask yourself this question: what simple tech can be used to make my business seem high tech?
If you’re a retail boutique on Main Street, you can very simply bring your live inventory online and make your physical store shoppable from anyone in your community’s computer or phone. If you’re a food truck with a knockout bestseller, you can create a subscription meal service for regular customers. Maybe you want to make a local marketplace for personal trainers, but don’t know how to code. Couldn’t you just make a webpage with an application form, hire trainers, then make an e-commerce website that lists the profiles of your new hires?
To tech enable your business, create a new tech platform, or just start a business online, you don’t have to have years of expert coding knowledge or a team of elite computer programmers on staff. A lot of the work has already been done by the people who made platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, social media, and the tools that work with these platforms. All you need to do is to be able to think about your business creatively, and ask yourself what you want to get done. Then break that down into tasks, and see what online tools are available to achieve those goals. If your business isn’t online yet, how are you going to start?
Artificial intelligence can generate creative works, what now?
Artificial intelligence can now generate unlimited creative works almost instantly. Not necessarily literally, but AI can now create text, images, audio, video, and edit these elements together to present a completed work, on demand. If you are a creative that makes a living working with any of those creative elements, this can be a stressful thing to think about. It isn’t far off to think that artificial intelligence will very soon be able to complete most job functions that a person would otherwise had needed to type into or scroll along a laptop. While some creative jobs may get replaced by artificial intelligence in the future, as long as humans are around, so will careers, jobs, tasks, or even DIY projects to occupy idle time in a fully automated, technology enabled future.
“Stock image giant Shutterstock has announced an extended partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI lab’s text-to-image model DALL-E 2 directly integrated into Shutterstock ‘in the coming months.’ In addition, Shutterstock is launching a ‘Contributor Fund’ that will reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI models,” reports The Verge.
Imagine walking your favorite art fair, going to a local art gallery opening, or admiring artwork at a nearby cafe. Do you imagine the art fair to be full of artists and people enjoying the day? At the local art gallery opening, would it eventually get boring if week after week the artist at the event was a nondescript supercomputer in a box? While waiting for your brewed tea latte, would you rather read an artists statement generated from an algorithm, or a story from someone in the community?
While jobs like writing news articles on stock prices may get replaced over time by an artificial intelligence, what may remain is the long read analysis written by a human author. An artificial intelligence may end up generating rudimentary social media graphics for business-to-business companies, but a startup clothing brand will likely benefit from hiring a photographer and graphic designer to create custom graphics that incorporate visuals of the product. An AI is already one of the most successful contemporary pop stars, but there will always be an audience for human musical acts that perform live.
Artificial intelligence can also be a tool to help people perform their creative pursuits better, faster and more experimentally. A single person can now generate infinite content, and can use to that new ability to create unlimited social media imagery for the app that they’re coding before they launch. An architect can use image and video generation to develop infinite concepts for clients, with relative ease. AI can be a symbiotic reality for creative people, if used to enhance one’s current ability.
As long as there are people, there will be jobs, tasks and creative pursuits. Creative work may evolve, but it will likely stay around as long as people do. While people are around, there will likely also be a need for human stories. Art is less about the work than the story of it. The context of artwork is what ascribes meaning to an object. If you made an artwork that you like, it’s partly because you made it. If you’re interested in the story of an artist, you may also find that meaning in their work. Even if you enjoy artwork just for its visual or craft appeal, there’s usually a cultural history to dive into that gives greater meaning to the work. Just because AI is here, doesn’t mean opportunities for people to be creative are going away. Even on the off chance that all jobs get automated by a computer, you may still want to paint a painting to pass the time.
Have you tried Upwork to find work?
If you’re a writer, editor, producer, designer, marketer, analyst or perform any other service that can be done for a client remotely and haven’t checked out Upwork yet, it may be worth it. Upwork and other online job marketplaces are excellent ways to market your services to the entire online world of people who are trying to hire for their jobs. By tapping into online job marketplaces you can reach millions of hiring managers and independent businesses, who are trying to hire for gig-based jobs, expanding your total addressable market to the entire online world.
When you list your services on an online job marketplace like Upwork, your immediate surroundings become less important, because you can reach an almost limitless audience.
In a report published by Upwork, the benefits to becoming a digital freelancer are almost obvious:
“Freelancers are seeing more demand for their work -- Twice as many freelancers have seen an increase in demand in the past year as have seen a decrease (32% increase, versus 15% decrease).
Technology is helping freelancers find work -- Nearly seven in ten (69%) freelancers said technology had made it easier to find freelance work, and 42% said they have done freelance work via the Internet.
As demand increases, so does reputation -- Almost two out of three (65%) freelancers said freelancing as a career path is more respected today than it was three years ago.
The potential for earnings is helping to drive freelancing’s growth -- 80% of non-freelancers surveyed said they would be willing to do additional work outside of their primary job if it was available and enabled them to make more money.
There’s room for growth -- Three times as many freelancers expect their hours to increase in the next year as expect their hours to decrease (38% expect to increase hours, versus 12% expect to decrease).
Millennials (workers under 35) are more likely to freelance -- 38% of Millennials are freelancing (compared to 32% of those over 35) and Millennials are also most optimistic about the future of the freelance job market, with 82% saying that the best days are ahead (compared to 74% of those over 35).”
You no longer have to find every single one of your clients yourself, in your local area. You don’t have to find a way to advertise your services independently, and you don’t even need to make freelancing your main job. Online job marketplaces like Upwork make it so that you can reach out to millions of potential gigs, regardless of where you live. This means that you can build your portfolio a bit faster and easier than you would have if you had to do it all yourself. Technology, like digital marketplaces, does a lot of the work for you, you then just have to actually complete what you’re hired to do.
Hardware and software has made it possible to do anything
Even just ten years ago, in order to open an online store with premium quality product photography and attention grabbing videos on social media, you would have to spend thousands of dollars upfront—before even making a sale or listing your first product. Fast forward to today, in 2022, modern smartphones and online tools have cut that cost down to almost nothing. If already have a relatively new smartphone (with a good enough camera and video capability) and an internet connection, you already have all of the tools you need to start an online business.
A decade ago, in the faraway land of 2012, Squarespace had yet to launch commerce tools. Shopify was available, yet not as simple to use as today. You still needed some time to learn the specificities of whatever tool you were using. Today, in 2022, Squarespace has commerce tools (in addition to scheduling tools, membership tools, the ability to sell directly on social media, etc.) that are simple to use, and take very little time to get up and running with. Shopify is simple to use today, and now even offers warehouse management for big businesses. Most platforms you’ll use today are generally pretty similar to figure out, and much more user friendly.
Today, there exists a combination of software and hardware that makes it simple to start a business online. This is a possibility that is so new, that the effects have yet to really be seen.
Before this new availability of easy to use and widely available technologies, to start a business you’d need to rent a space, find a way to reach an audience, figure out payment processing for yourself, and still have time to actually run your business. Now, it is possible to start any business that you want, online, and sell on day one.
While you’re likely not going to develop a self sufficient online business overnight, after some time, you really can build something to support yourself for the long term. According to ZipRecruiter, “as of Oct 18, 2022, the average annual pay for an Ecommerce Business in the United States is $68,139 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $32.76 an hour. This is the equivalent of $1,310/week or $5,678/month”
The ecommerce market is also relatively new in scope, despite having had players like Amazon around for what seems like forever. According to Statista, “in 2020, e-commerce sales accounted for over 14 percent of all retail sales in the United States and were forecast to rise to nearly 22 percent by 2025.” This means that the vast majority of people are still buying in stores. Ecommerce has yet to even get close to 50% of total retail, meaning that the online market only has room to grow.
Now that the physical limitations and barriers to entry are mostly out of the way, save for a monthly fee to keep a website running, or the cost of your phone bill, anything is possible. If you want to start a clothing business where you sell designs that are extremely niche, you don’t have to worry about finding enough people in your local community to support that business. You can just sell online, and find your place within the online marketplace. If you want to sell meal prep kits from your kitchen, you can now do that from Instagram. If you can think of it, it can probably be a business. So now that anything is possible, what do you want to start?
Nothing is new, everything is new
Nothing is new. You’re likely never going to think of a completely original business or idea. If that’s holding you back from starting something, consider this: Apple didn’t invent the smartphone. Canon, Nikon or Sony didn’t invent the digital camera. Did McDonald’s invent the cheeseburger? Probably not. Thought Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, they are the leading smartphone manufacturer in the United States. Kodak invented the digital camera, but other brands offer the industry’s best reviewed cameras. McDonald’s absolutely did not invent the burger, but they did create a process that has made their business the most successful in its category.
Nothing is new. This is a good thing because that means you don’t necessarily need to invent something out of thin air to create a successful business. You don’t need to create a sublime work of artistic genius to sell consistently, and make a living on Etsy (in fact, it’s probably better if you don’t). If you want to open a coffee shop, an idea that has been done before, then what is your differentiator?
You don’t need to wait to think of a brand new idea, as long as you aren’t directly copying other people or infringing on copyright. All you need to do is think about what you want to do, and put your own personal spin on it. Are you starting a clothing brand? Are you trying to convey a specific message or idea with your work? What kind of products do you want to sell? What is your personal take on your idea, either aesthetically, rhetorically or in process?
If you want to start a business, side project or creative pursuit and have been waiting for a completely original idea to start, then free yourself of that limitation. Once you begin trying out ideas you will figure out your own style. Learn from your progress and follow where your work leads you. Stay mindful of your initial ideas, and don’t be afraid to pivot after finding out new things based off your progress. What do you want to work on?
Don’t know where to start? Good
If you’re thinking of starting a new project, creating a business or beginning a creative outlet but have no idea where to start, that may actually be a blessing in disguise. Sure you don’t need to think too much about what you’re making if you’re just drawing a quick sketch or painting, but if you’re thinking about starting something more long term without a solid idea, you may be intimidated. Luckily, if you’re thinking about starting something new, you likely already have an idea of where you want to go. All you have to do is try something, and listen to yourself.
It’s easy to look at successful companies or masterworks of an artist and think that those ideas came to the creator fully formed, and created in one go. However, this is usually never the case. Amazon was originally going to be called Kadabra, and started only selling books. Facebook (now Meta) started as a less than kind website where people rated other people on their college campuses based on their physical appearance. Airbnb started as a company where you could rent air mattresses in homes. The more you look into your favorite companies, the more you’ll see that success is more a factor of persistence and change, than clairvoyant vision and perfect execution.
You may or may not be working on the next Facebook, but if you aren’t, and just want to get started on working on something, then just begin to think about where you want to end up. Think about what motivates you to get started on your project. Don’t get too hung up on specifics. Be general with your thoughts, and consider that is realistic for you to accomplish.
If you only want to start a creative side project, don’t oversubscribe and commit to yourself something that is too much work compared to your available time. Setting realistic goals will help you feel positive about your progress, and not get down on yourself by not meeting unrealistic goals.
Anything that you want to do, just break down your goals into smaller milestones. If you want to start a business, then break that up into setting up a website, setting up your social media, incorporating your business, and launching. Those are all different things to work on, and by separating the tasks, they will become more manageable and satisfying to work on. Anything is possible, just not immediately. Where are you going to start?
Now growing at Homestead Creative (October 2022)
Homestead Creative’s first indoor farm is already showing growth a little over a month after first planting. The 4”x4” grow tent space contains five 10 gallon grow bags, two 5 gallon grow bags, a potted Jade plant and a one and a half year old Jade plant propagation. Outdoors, two flower grow bags are being prepared for 50 bulbs of daffodils and tulips.
Within the 10 gallon grow bags are Yukon Gold potatoes, planted on September 18th. The potatoes begun sprouting around October 14th, increasing vigor daily, watering only as needed. The potatoes are planted in potting soil comprised of alfalfa meal, bone meal, earthworm castings, sandy loam, kelp meal, fish meal, forest humus and moss.
Planted in the 5 gallon grow bags are Grey Oyster mushrooms, planted on October 18th. The mushrooms’ rye grain based spawn are growing in a substrate made of straw. The mushrooms are expected to inoculate the straw based substrate and fruit within 3-4 weeks.
The Jade plant propagation grew from a leaf that dropped off of the other Jade plant in the terracotta pot. Succulents can be propagated by taking a leaf or a cutting, and placing on top of a bed of soil, watering infrequently.
A part of Homestead Creative’s vision is a symbiosis of nature and creativity. As plants grow, so do creative ideas. Ideas grow from one another, and similarly this first planting will inform future plantings at Homestead Creative.
Start collecting emails as soon as possible
Whatever your business is, you should think about collecting the email addresses of your customers as early in your business as possible. Email addresses are the best way to reach customers. You can reach out directly to an audience of people who have already purchased from you with new products, services, sales or announcements. If you don’t spam your mailing list, you’ll likely keep subscribers, and gain more as you post more content or grow as a business. Over time, this can become an invaluable asset to your business, and possibly your most successful sales channel.
You can use your mailing list for anything related to your business or industry. You can write about the latest news about your business, discuss future plans, link to blog posts, announce future products, offer pre-sales, really anything you can think of that gets your business out there. Mailing lists are a direct way to reach people who have opted into hearing from your business.
Whatever you use you mailing list for, keep track of your open rate and unsubscribe rate to inform future mailings. If you notice that your open rate is going down and people are unsubscribing, you may need to either send email less frequently, or invest more time in the quality of your mailings. Infrequent and information rich mailings can payoff by not annoying customers, and giving them something that is worth their time to read or shop. An added benefit to reduced email frequency is that you can work on your emails over time and with less stress than a weekly or daily commitment.
As for a base metric to consider, “Your conversion rate tells you, in no-nonsense terms, the efficacy of your public-facing content. If 6% of your website visitors join your mailing list or make a purchase, your website is 6% effective.
But here’s the thing: That's actually very good. In fact, a ‘good’ website conversion rate falls between 2% and 5% across all industries. Industry-specific conversion rates vary quite a bit more,” according to Mailchimp. If you’re an artist or creator that has an engaged online audience, your open rate will likely be a much higher percentage than a big box store. Once you figure out your own baseline open rate, check to see over time what content is more popular with your specific audience.
According to ConstantContact, “the average ROI through email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent. Simply put, you invest a dollar and in return receive 36 times from it.”
Every business is different, but one thing that is common amongst all businesses is that it’s best to have a direct line of communication with your customer base or audience. If you don’t think about doing this early enough in your business, you may overspend on advertising or spend too much time focusing on reaching new customers than working on your business.
If you have a retail storefront, you can collect email addresses at your cash register. If you’re an artist that sells at art fairs or a farmer selling at a farmer’s market; either keeping a signup list handy, or integrating email signup into your Square Reader can be a great way to build a mailing list. Most website hosting platforms like Squarespace and Shopify have email collection and newsletter functionality built into their products natively.
However you decide to use your mailing list, figure out a way as early as possible to be able to reach your customers or audience directly. Over time, a list of email addresses can grow into a growing customer base that can be infinitely rewarding for your business, depending on what you sell. Obviously a luxury real estate broker’s mailing list may be worth more over time than a graphic t-shirt makers, but what’s the same is the direct line of communication to an established customer base.
Planning your Zone 5b garden in the fall
When should I plant in Zone 5b? Whether you’re new to gardening or someone who has been growing vegetables your whole life, it is helpful to see a list of commonly grown vegetables, and when to plant them. This helps if you’re planning for next year or checking to see what can be grown at last minute. The chart provided below, made by the University of Illinois Extension, lists whatever you may want to plant, and when to plant it. Click through to see if planting outdoors by seed or transplant is recommended.
If an outdoor transplant is recommended, check the germination time for whatever seeds you’re propagating, and count that time back from the recommended plant date. That will be the recommended day to start germinating seeds indoors. You can also find ready-to-plant vegetable plants at your local garden center.
Go for a walk
You should probably go for a walk. Metaphorically, literally, however you take your walk, maybe a walk is something to consider. Going for a walk can clear you head, help you generate new ideas, process current problems, or focus on future goals. Going for a walk with another person can help you do all of these things with the added benefit of another person’s perspective, while also keeping social and in touch with another. Going for a walk by yourself can help you learn more about yourself, think about what you’re working on, or figure out how to improve personally or in business.
Going for a walk, with an intention in mind, is essentially dedicating a specific amount of time to a goal. If you go for a walk on a few mile long trail, then you’re going to have a lot of time to think. You may as well make that thinking productive. In a business sense, going for a walk to think about your business objectives can help you explore new ideas and drill down on current operations. In a personal sense, going on a walk with an open mind will let you get in tune with yourself, with time to think, or just let thoughts pass along with your footsteps.
Going for a walk can even help you from getting too stressed out in business, according to Harvard Health, “getting 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise, such as brisk walking, is important for all aspects of health, including stress management.”
Going for a walk can even mean taking time out of a full day on the laptop to recharge during work from home, doing something offline. Watering houseplants can be staggered to become a daily 10 minute task (one plant Monday, another Tuesday, etc.). Doing 10 pushups and 10 sit-ups is an easy way to get some quick endorphins and light exercise for the day. Taking a break from typing to make freshly squeezed lemon water, with a lemon and a carafe of water can be a delicious, simple thing to look forward to in the day.
Going for a walk is taking a short amount of time out of your day or week to get outside (or outside the day) and focus on something peaceful or productive personally. By taking that time for yourself, you can create space for yourself to ask yourself questions about your business or life, and figure out what you want to do. You can process things that are happening currently, or reflect upon the past to learn. You can simply be, and recharge. Going for a walk can be whatever you make it to be. Find some regular time to do something positive for yourself and make it a routine.
You can start a creative business with $10
You can start a creative business with ten dollars. Less even. Under the right circumstances, you could probably start a creative business for zero dollars, and some imagination. What is a creative business? A creative business is a business that generates capital, or dollars, via a means of creativity. A creative business can be anything. A creative business is a lemonade stand, a creative business is a fashion brand, selling your art, or starting a business for a craft or the trade you work on. A business doesn’t have to be a billion dollars yet, or ever. A business can be something where you start small and grow into a self sustaining income, over time.
How can a creative business that can sustain someone’s living expenses be created for $10? By starting with an idea and $10, you can grow to become anything you want to be, with effort and focus. If you want to create a business selling art, you can purchase a good amount of art materials from Walmart, and list you art works on Etsy for $0.20 each. If you want to create a fashion brand, blank t-shirts can cost as low as $3-4 (from, again, Walmart) or you can curate ideas (and make money) by thrifting and reselling on Depop. If you offer a service, you can create a month’s worth of Google Ads for $10 and teach what you love to do.
If you have a lot of friends or a well developed social network, you can sell directly to people that you already know. You can also tap into the global e-commerce market of billions of people by selling online. By utilizing online marketplaces, social media to promote your work, and in-person events and networks, you can jumpstart a creative business almost overnight.
The idea is where to start. What do you want to do with your business and where do you want to end up? Is this something that you’d like to become your main source of income, or keep as passive income? Is there something specific that you’d like to accomplish with your business itself? What do you want to work on?
If you’re already making things in the world, these answers may be more clear. If you’re just starting out, these are things to think about and ask yourself. The answers will guide yourself to where you want to go.
Ten dollars is all you need, and again, probably even less. Even just thinking about what you’d like to do is technically working on your business, and thoughts are free, so I guess you just need to think about what you’d like to do. You don’t even need a name or LLC for your business yet. Formalizing your business costs a bit more, but you don’t need to do that until you want to start making more money, or make your business your primary income. So what do you want to work on?
Internal podcasts for businesses are great employee resources
If you have ever listened to a podcast before, you’re probably aware of how dense they can be with information, especially over a long period of time. By keeping an internal podcast for your business, you can create that same information dense resource for your own business. Creating an internal podcast, that is only accessible by your employees, can help you set goals for your business while keeping everyone informed with the steps to get there. Your podcast can be a weekly 15-minute business update, a monthly hour, or released infrequently as company-wide communication is needed.
This podcast can be created at zero to very little cost to your organization. Your spend is essentially however polished you want the final podcast to be. If you’re just recording yourself on your phone and that’s all the podcast needs to be, then your new company resource essentially only costs your time. If you want a little bit more production value or programmed segments for your internal podcast, then the cost can run you a manageable amount that can be done at a DIY scale.
With the convenience of your employees being able to just listen to a podcast about company wide announcements, like events and special projects, you may reach more employees in a new way. Dive into depth about specific ideas and how you want your business to operate. You can interview business leaders and managers of your business to explore how employees can improve business results. Take employee feedback for discussion or suggestions for topics
An internal podcast really doesn’t have to be something to be intimidated by. It is easy to record, edit and upload a podcast to a service like Spotify’s Anchor that will give you a private link to send your employees, or include in company-wide communications.
Over time, an internal podcast can become a deeply information rich resource for your employees that takes shape in progress. It can be a minimal time investment for great long term reward, or a fun new project to try that will have good impact for your business. A prompt to start: what does your business do and what keeps it profitable?
Why not make your hobby a business?
If you’re someone who has a hobby, you’ve probably thought about monetizing your work before. Your hobby could be art, like painting or photography. You could be someone who builds furniture, or makes pottery. Maybe you sew or knit in your free time. Do you play intramural sports or go to the gym? If you haven’t yet started to monetize your hobby, generating an extra income source from something you’re already doing could be an easy and fun way to help save extra money.
If you haven’t started monetizing your hobby yet, maybe you’re thinking that making a business out of what you do would take the fun out of it. That could be the case if you created unrealistic expectations for yourself, or added unnecessary pressure onto yourself. You can avoid this by thinking of your hobby business as a side project. If the business isn’t your main source of revenue, and you only work on it when you want to, you’ll likely avoid burnout and resentment of your hobby.
By starting your hobby business small and scaling it to the capacity that you can manage, you can keep the fun aspects of your hobby, whether it be creativity or stress release, and give yourself a new revenue source.
You can monetize your hobby in several different ways. If you’re a painter, selling on Etsy is extremely easy. If you build furniture or make pottery, Squarespace is a great tool to build a beautiful shoppable gallery. If you like to thrift, you can re-sell your best finds on platforms like Depop. If you have a specific skill, like cooking or another trade, you can sell your time by using Square Appointments.
The great thing about keeping a side project of something that you are passionate about, is that you can scale your side project to become your main job over time. If you’re an artist, it has never been easier to sell your work passively online while working a day job. If you’re a chef, but can’t open a restaurant yet, you can sell dinners on social media to an online dinner club.
The digital tools of today make is to that if you have ever considered a creative pursuit as a business for yourself, it is now the easiest it has ever been in history for that to be possible for people. You don’t need to wait for a gallery to display your work, you don’t need to save up money for a retail space, you don’t need to wait for someone to tell you to start. If you have a goal in mind, or want to try to make something for yourself, it is now entirely possible to build something from what you love to do.
You don’t need to sign to a label
It costs $15 a year to release music on all of the digital streaming platforms that the majority of people use to listen to music. For fifteen dollars a year, you as an artist can release as much music as you want to on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, or wherever people generally get their music from. Musicians no longer need a label to release music, and with modern day music publishing services, you can monetize your own music, cutting out a label’s take.
Labels perform a multitude of functions, like touring and merchandise operations, but more and more, these tasks can be performed or automated by a musician with little effort. A band website can be made with Squarespace, and a basic merchandise store can be made in about an hour, that prints and ships band merch automatically, with services like Printify. Tours can be booked over email after some research, or booked at publicly available spaces. Entire label marketing departments would not be able to reach audiences as well as digital marketing tools like Meta, TikTok and Google advertising.
Thinking about music as a business, without a label, means incorporating as a business on a service like LegalZoom. Opening a business checking and savings account is another necessary step. Changing your social media profiles for your music from personal accounts to business accounts is needed to be able to create ads on social platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. You can even press your own vinyl.
Not needing a label doesn’t mean that you need to become focused on business and lose sight of the joy of art. Not needing a label means utilizing modern tools, and creating your own business infrastructure to create your music at your own pace, without someone taking a percent of your earnings.
Once you’ve put in the work to be able to schedule a release on digital streaming platforms like Apple Music, you can then create your own social media promotions that link to that music. The ads are the same whoever is buying them, whether it be you or the label. You can target your exact audience with a link to stream your music, or target an ad for show tickets and merch to your fans. Anything that a label would do for you, you can now do for yourself, with the added benefit of learning how to build your own music business along the way.
Not needing a label isn’t failing or not getting success as a commercial musician. Not needing a label is betting on yourself as a musician, and choosing to sign yourself the day you decide to self release your own music. Having control over your artistic output means that you get to start from the beginning and work towards what you want to achieve, yourself. Along the way you learn how to get better, and have a direct connection to your how the music business works. You don’t have to split your earnings, and no label executive can tell you what to do with your creative output. Why not sign yourself today?
Start somewhere, anywhere
Focusing on developing the perfect idea, the perfect product, the most successful business, the greatest work of art, something that will last forever with infinite profit is not a helpful thing to focus on. If you are working on starting a business or creating something new, you really just need to start somewhere, anywhere within your ability, and start today. It is impossible to craft the perfect idea or the best business plan ever, and keeping that as a threshold to pass before beginning is only holding you back.
As articulated more simply by co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn and partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, Reid Hoffman, “if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
This statement rings true for almost any business or creative pursuit you may be thinking about beginning. If you want to open an online art store, starting to publish daily sketches on Instagram or TikTok for free and opening a web store for cheap is going to get you a better chance at success than obsessing over creating your perfect first group of listings to no audience. If you want to make movies, fixating on developing the perfect script is not going to get you closer to your goals rather than collaborating with other like minded creatives in your area on unscripted short films.
Of course this is not to discount craft, time and dedication to a business or creative pursuit. If your business is deeply technical, then maybe starting today means figuring out what permit you need and making the plan to file for it. If you are making a fine wine, or growing specialty foods then don’t be casual with your craft. Maybe then begin to build your online brand in parallel, instead of after, so you have a built-in audience to launch to.
You just need to start. Figure out what you want to do, imagine your endpoint, but also think of the steps to get there. What is the smallest step you could take today to start to walk towards your goal? Once you begin to think of your goals as destinations to reach instead of something that needs to be have already been arrived to, you can begin to make your way.
Sabbatical programs increase employee retention
Do you have employees that work hard, overtime when needed, and that you would never want to lose if you could avoid it? If you don’t already offer a sabbatical program for your employees, it may be a great thing to consider offering as a benefit. This benefit gives your full time employees much needed time off that they may not get otherwise. This time off can have strong mental health benefits and otherwise for employees, while also giving your business the benefit of increased employee retention.
In other words: by giving your employees the ability to schedule as little as two weeks off as a benefit, you’ll give your employees a mental boost and they will be less likely to quit. This can be a benefit that employees earn after a certain amount of time employed at your company, or offered at hiring as a recruiting strategy. This sabbatical program can be paid or unpaid, it all depends on your business.
“Stress derails our focus and memory while relaxation and time off leads to better memory, ability to focus, and boosts creativity. Taking days off work can give employees the mental break they need to stay productive at work. In fact, 84% of managers reported employees’ increased productivity after a break,” as explained by Total Brain.
Linkedin further explains the benefits to businesses by reporting that, “a sabbatical program can improve a company’s employer brand and boost retention. Employees at Clif Bars, the California-based energy bar company, always rank the sabbatical among their most important perks. Which helps explain why turnover at the company is less than 3%.”
Sabbatical programs can be symbiotic to both businesses and employees. Offering employees the ability to schedule a break will help you attract top talent, keep them happy, and ultimately retain them. Customize the program to your business. Offer a week at hiring, and another day every year of employment, or just two weeks at hiring. Turnover and training new employees can be costly, so why not invest in your business' greatest asset, the people you employ?
Automate your business savings for rainy days
If you haven’t started saving your business income yet, that wouldn’t be too hard to believe. Running a business can be a cash intensive process, banking has historically been a cumbersome industry to engage with, and there are only so many hours within the day. However, having no business savings can be a dangerous position for your business to operate from.
If an emergency happens, and you don’t have business savings, you may have to dip into personal savings or even worse, rely on potentially high interest credit to tide you over. Simply put: without savings, your business is at risk. By automatically saving, you’re building up a capital for your business to use in emergencies or when you have something you’d like to invest in.
Luckily, banking has evolved a bit since the completely paper and in-person days of not that long ago, and opening a business savings account can be done from your laptop or phone, within an hour. You don’t have to wait for your bank to be open or schedule a time to meet with a banker, you can now just sign up on Square or open a savings account from your mobile debit account.
If you’re a Square user for invoices or otherwise, something that you really should be using is Square Balance. This is effectively a high interest savings account that can exist within your Square account. If you invoice customers with Square or use Square Register, you can automate a percentage of all transactions to be saved to your Balance. Square Balance pays out a APY of .5%, which is far and away a better interest rate than most (if not all) in-person retail banks.
By saving a flat percentage of all your business transactions using Square Balance, you’re building a reserve of capital for your business over time that can be accessed whenever your business needs it. If you transact a large amount of small ticket individual orders as a coffee shop or retail store, it may make sense to only save a small percentage and let that build up for a few months. If you transact larger amounts less frequently using Square Invoices, automatically saving a larger percentage may be a good strategy to develop savings.
If you don’t use Square for invoices, use another online payment processor, or use a different digital POS, you may not have automated savings natively. Check with your payment processor to see if they offer savings, and if those savings can be automated. Worst comes to worse, whatever bank you use for your business savings will have some sort of automated savings program, likely based on time.
Developing savings for your business can be a safety net in emergencies, or a reserve of capital to deploy for growing your business and increasing sales. Saving as much as you can will never be a bad investment, as it will always be money that can be withdrawn if needed. Saving money isn’t like other investments that lose and gain value over time, it is a relatively stable fund of money that is available to your business whenever it is needed. Save as much as you can, and maybe even a little more, because that money can be withdrawn again. What payment processor do you use for your business?
Fox River Forest Preserve - Port Barrington, Illinois (July 2021)
"Situated along a peaceful stretch of the Fox River, the site’s natural areas include rolling topography, oak savannas and high-quality wetlands that support several native species and offer habitat protection for diverse wildlife.
In some sections of the preserve, the hilly landscape is typical of southern Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine area. Unique to the site is a large rookery, home to great blue herons and egrets, and a fen that supports two state-listed plant species."
Linktree gives you a link for all of your links
A business with a modern online presence will likely have more than one link that represents what they do. Businesses currently operating will likely have a website, a few different social media accounts on different social media platforms, a feature article in a local newspaper and an appearance on a local YouTuber’s local business tour vlog that all represent your business in different ways, still featuring your business. All of these links exist separately online and you may only list your website in a social media bio. Linktree is a service that solves for this problem, as it gives you a single www. link that will direct someone to any number of different places your business might appear online.
More specifically, Linktree gives you a homepage online where you can list various links that you want to point to. You can also collect donations, embed streaming service pages and sell products on this webpage. You get a customizable www.linktr.ee/[example] link that directs to a simple webpage that lists these content vertically in an easy to use menu. You will be able to change the order of this list, and enable and disable buttons in real time from Linktree’s website. You also get analytics on the links so that you know what’s performing and what doesn’t need to be listed.
If you only have a website and an Instagram page, you can still get benefit from Linktree because you can link to different pages on your website. You can link to a specific campaign that you’re running, link to your shop, link to a list of bestsellers and also link to a page that lets people subscribe to your newsletter.
If you’re an artist or musician and don’t even have a website yourself, Linktree can still be helpful to you because you can either link to your music on different streaming services while linking to an online store where people can buy your latest concert tickets and merch; or link to your latest appearances at a local gallery, link to your newsletter and link to a local boutique that sells a collaboration that you made with them. You just have to have links to point to that are relevant to what you do.
Linking out to several different sources that represent your business, brand or organization gives your customers, donors or patrons more of what you do to engage with. Instead of linking to just your website’s homepage, you can now optimize your social media profiles to be a central hub for all of your work online. Instead of hoping that whoever clicks on your link ends up where you want them to, you can refer them to several different places that you operate, potentially driving an increase in sale or desired outcomes.
This is a simple trick that can have an immediate, and potentially outsized benefit. Linktree isn’t limited to just a social media bio use case, you can use it in your posting online, essentially becoming a supercharged link shortener like bit.ly. Put your Linktree link in your social media posting, and now each post becomes a directory for everything that you do online, curated by you. Businesses, nonprofits, festivals, really anyone can benefit from using Linktree or a similar service. What are 3-5 links that you would want to use for your business?