Starting your Side Hustle Part 2: Advertise your Offer

In part 1, we discussed the importance of writing down your value statement (read more here). This week, we will briefly discuss how to present your offer to the public, your network, colleagues and possible leads.

Entering the Digital Economy

E Commerce is becoming more and more important in the modern world. Therefore, an easy way to begin attracting customers for your side hustle is to build a web page showcasing your skills, products and offerings. Once this page is developed, you can share the page on social media, and create posts dedicated to your business. Regular posts and outreach activities across different websites and social media outlets is a good starting point when it comes to finding projects or customers.

Whenever you reach out to clients or customers, your website and profile will be the selling point you put across. Therefore, it is important that it is clear, detailed and concise enough to be understandable by your target audience. It is also important that it is carefully worded. Apart from the benefits of tailoring your site for search engine optimization, you need to make sure that you do not overcommit, or exaggerate your offering. What you publicly display can be tantamount to a legal “offer” of goods or services. Therefore, if reality contradicts your offer, you could be liable for what you put in writing.

Tie Up your Risks with a Solid Terms and Conditions Page, or a Clear Disclaimer

The Terms and Conditions, or the disclaimers on the website, set the boundaries on your offer, and form the backbone or structure of your obligations. Therefore, it is very important to have them professionally and comprehensively created to manage risk and operations. This is especially relevant if you are selling internationally. There are many cross border issues which are relevant to ecommerce, and these should be addressed in your terms. You would want to disclaim your liabilities to the maximum extent possible, otherwise you could end up getting sued in countries with more punitive tort liability regimes. Oftentimes, many claimants may also simply raise issues or disputes just to bait you into settling the case by paying compensation to them preemptively. When weighing the cost of defending a lawsuit in a foreign country, with a foreign customer, against settling, many small ecommerce businesses will choose the latter. Therefore, a strong terms and conditions page will mitigate these risks to the extent possible by using well worded language which preclude such scenarios. At the end of the day, the terms and conditions ground your business in the physical economy, by setting physical limits and parameters for your digital business.

Next week we will discuss Payment Gateways and how to make it easy for your customers to pay you for your offering.

If you need any assistance with terms and conditions or disclaimers, reach out to us at info@borderlesscounsel.com