The way people earn a living is being rewritten. I like helping people stand up a brand of their own and take charge of their income. So here’s how to build an online platform, and the tools that actually make it happen.
Plenty of people are making the leap to working for themselves. When you’re the one calling the shots you set your own schedule, build what you want, make the decisions and — not least — control what you earn. It’s a real option now, whether you’re starting out or getting out of something that stopped fitting years ago.
I’m in love with the freedom that comes with being my own boss. That’s the whole reason I write any of this.
There are more ways than ever to plant a seed and grow an income that keeps arriving. You can plant several, in fact, and end up with something recurring that pays into your account every month without you touching it.
Most of the people I work with are looking for a different way to earn than the one they were handed. This is the practical version of that.
How do I build my brand and income?
Easier than it’s ever been, which is not a sales pitch — it’s just true. The tooling got good.
The minimum viable setup is a website on WordPress that you design yourself, and an email platform to collect the people who show up. That’s it. That’s the foundation, and everything else is an extension of it.
What follows is what I actually use, with the honest state of each one.
Get a website, then design it to match your brand
If you don’t have a website, start there. Your site is the one hub you own outright and can shape however you want.
Don’t take your customers to a noisy café. Take them home to your own garden, where the only thing happening is you serving them.
Some people try to run a business on a Facebook page or an Instagram account alone. It works, right up until the platform changes the rules. Worst case you lose the audience entirely. It isn’t yours, and the only thing you control is what you post into it.
You also can’t properly customise it, or add email sign-ups and payment forms. You need both of those to look like a business rather than a hobby.
So: WordPress. And when I say WordPress I don’t mean WordPress.com — install it on your own hosting with your own domain, so you get a clean setup that behaves the way you want.
On hosting, I’ve written a full comparison rather than repeat it here: quality hosting for WordPress. Pick from there. Hosting recommendations age badly, and that post is the one I keep current.
How to build a professional site without being a web designer
I started as a web designer when the job meant hand-writing HTML. It is emphatically not like that now.
You can build a genuinely good-looking site with a visual builder and no code at all — drag, drop, done.
Build it with Bricks. It’s what I use for my own sites and for client work, and it’s what this site runs on. Three reasons it’s my recommendation and not just my habit:
- The output is clean. Bricks produces lean markup rather than the nested wrappers a lot of builders leave behind, which shows up directly in how fast your pages load.
- It scales past beginner. You can start by dragging things around and end up doing genuinely custom work in the same tool, without hitting a ceiling and having to rebuild.
- It plays well with the rest of a modern stack. I’ve written about using Tailwind CSS with Bricks if you want to see how far that goes.
I built on Divi for years before this and it served me well — it still has the largest library of ready-made layouts if that’s what you’re after. But performance is the reason I moved, and I’m not going to recommend something I no longer choose myself.
Sending email newsletters, properly
You may remember MailChimp — the monkey that was everyone’s default for years.
I used it once, then found Kit — which you may still know as ConvertKit, since that’s what it was called until fairly recently.
I moved immediately and never went back.
A client of mine once asked me to set up an email form on her Shopify store. She wanted MailChimp. I told her I couldn’t recommend it and suggested Kit instead. She refused. A week later she emailed asking how the hell MailChimp works.
It’s the simplest email platform I know of: professional, quick to learn, and effective at the one job you need it for.
How to take payments for online services
Two methods, and you may well need both.
Sometimes you’re invoicing a client. Other times you want people to pay for something recurring, or buy once from your site — which needs a payment form.
You can set both up yourself.
For invoicing, try FreeAgent (invoicing plus accounting), Invoice2Go (invoicing only) or WaveApps (invoicing plus accounting). All three send proper PDF invoices. There’s more detail in three ways to send an invoice through email.
To take card payments, all of the above support Stripe, which is the industry standard, free to set up and has no monthly fee.
A workable alternative is Fondy’s platform payments, which handles split payments and instant payouts to partners — useful if money has to reach more than one party.
For payment forms on the site itself I’m fussy, because I need something that looks right and sends PDF receipts, particularly for recurring clients. I use ThriveCart for that.
What can you give people for free that actually helps them?
This is the last piece. Someone lands on your shiny new site — what makes them want to hear from you again?
Whatever it is, it goes behind an email opt-in, and Kit delivers it automatically.
…maybe a picture of your aunt, picking apples naked in the garden?
A free consultation call? A PDF guide, a roadmap, an ebook, a short course, maybe a picture of your aunt picking apples naked in the garden?
Only joking — checking you’re still here.
Be creative with it. What do you know a lot about, and who do you actually want to help? Make something genuinely useful for those people and let them trade an email address for it.
Every tool named above, and the rest of what I use, is on my recommended resources page.
Want the whole thing laid out in order?
The Web Designer Side Hustle is my beginner’s book on building websites for a living — the domain, the setup, the workflow, and how to actually get paid by clients anywhere in the world. No coding, no design degree.