How to Launch a Profitable Side Hustle by Founding a Private Slack Group—NEW for 2021.

Familiar with Slack?

It’s a communication platform used by many companies to keep teams in touch with one another throughout the work day—it’s a kind of “business chat” tool if you will.

Outside the walls of industry, though, Slack can be an incredible way to bring together disparate populations with a similar interest, to find vendors for your small business, and if you’re a rising young professional—mentors. How?

With Slack’s premium, paid communities. When you create a paid Slack community, you suddenly become the holder of the keys to the kingdom, and that kingdom can be whatever you dream up. Want to create a place for side hustlers to hang out and share tips? Done. Consultant with a wealth of knowledge and connections to other business professionals? Want to share Leads? Done. Small business wanting to learn how to build and scale your business alongside other likeminded small business owners? Create a paid Slack group, and create your own virtual board of directors and advisors. So, monetize and win on all fronts. Advice and profit.

I like this side hustle business because unlike Facebook groups (which can help with generating traffic to your blog), a paid Slack group YOU own. I also like paid Slack groups because you can run the side hustle from home. Work from home never felt so good, actually.

You even own free Slack groups, but we want you to make extra money this year. So, let’s consider options for a paid group. A paid group cannot be taken away from you like a Facebook group can be, and the members in your private community are (and remain) your contacts.

It’s fairly simple to set up using a service like Launch Pass, or, InviteRobot and you can use various payment gateways (Stripe, Payoneer, Tipalti, etc.) to collect registration and subscription fees.

But, if you can dream up a community that people will pay to be a part of—to get and give advice or other actionable information—then you can really make this solution work for you.

Start small, seed the group with free members, then grow it with online promotion using Facebook ads (they can work), LinkedIn ads (even better!) and by starting a blog, and using Twitter, and perhaps Instagram or Pinterest.

Below I’ve shared a number of tools and resources for you to help you get started so you can create your own private paid Slack channel. Have fun. Let’s make some money this year, no?

• “How to Grow a Profitable Community on Slack with Affiliate Marketing,” by Seth Lesky on Medium.com

• “How to Create a Membership Community on Slack in 3 minutes,” by Tucker Kline on Medium.com

• “Slackbot Business Tutorial: From 0 to $25,000 a month,” by Alex Kistenev on Standuply.

If you start a premium Slack Group will you need a website? Probably. For any site I have in my portfolio that doesn’t have a lot of pages, or need a lot of content, I use the very affordable grid plan offered by Media Temple. I have been with them for over a decade now, and their support (always THE most important part of any sort of hosting package (shared, or managed) is top notch.

You can  Register your domain name for only $18.00, and get a grid hosting plan (the exact plan I use) for only $20.00 a month.

Here’s to business building. Go get ’em.

—Doc