Success comes to those who don’t wait and go out and get what they want. And if you don’t want to be a person who waits for things and gets the things left by those who hustle, become a hustler yourself. This new habit is pretty easy to form. Just believe in yourself. Be determined. And learn the ways of putting yourself out there.  So, let’s kick start your hustle efforts.

Here are 7 ways to kick start your hustle efforts:

1. First things first, do your homework

Have a specific type of client in mind that you’d like to work for. Start doing your homework to find out where they hang out at. There’s no sense in marketing yourself if you’re in the wrong areas.

If you want to work for local clients, look for coffee shops, office supply or book stores, or other places your prospective clients hang out at. Don’t forget about online places like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, forums, or other message boards.

2. Put together a plan of action

Once you put together a bunch of names and information on your prospective clients, it’s time to start putting together a plan of action. For example, to cut the amount of time you spend on email outreach, create a template which later you’ll be adjusting so it’s personalized to them. You might only save 2-3 minutes on an email, but after you send 100-200 of these, you’ll see how much time you can actually save over the year.

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso

3. Now you contact them

If you’re writing an email, go ahead and send the emails out to everyone, as fast as you can without feeling like you’re missing something important. If you want to call the prospective clients, make sure you’ve made some quick notes on paper so you can look at them in case they ask questions like, for instance, how you could boost their profits.

And this is where your expertise and planning goes into action. Point out (quickly) a couple of areas that you could improve and that you’d love to sit down with them for a free coffee (on you of course) to discuss things a bit further.

4. Use Google to find work

Another way you can hustle yourself and find extra work is by googling. I didn’t mention this in the above places because I feel like it’s severely underused and I’d like to shine a little bit more light on it. The method of finding work here is simple, yet effective.

If you’re looking for blogs to design, search Google for “keyword blog” and start looking at every result that comes up. If you feel like you can help make their blog better, find their name and contact them with your skeleton email that I mentioned above. I’d personally go through the first 5-10 pages in order to make sure you’ve got enough contacts out there.

Out of every 20 you send, you’ll generally get 5 or so responses and if you’re a smooth enough talker, you can land a couple of sales. Not bad for an hour or so of leg work, right?

5. Start working on free stuff

A great way to get your name out there more as well as show off your skills is to put together some freebies. For writers, you could release a free guide that gives tips to people you’d normally like to work with. For designers, you can release design freebies on sites like Design Moo.

This will allow you to build a reputation as a skilled freelancer, plus you’ll get backlinks to your website which is always good and could land you some extra work from people who might want something you’ve customized a bit (this happens a lot with WordPress developers and xhtml/css coders).

6. Sleep less

Listen, I know a lot of people out there feel like they need 8 hours of sleep in order to function, but in reality, it’s just an excuse that people use in order to work less. If you’re not where you want to be in your life, you’re going to have to change something. Watching less television and youtube videos is a great start, but by cutting out a few hours of sleep every night, you’ll be able to accomplish much, much more.

When you sleep less, you’ll be able to get emails sent out at night so that way you’re on the top of the list in the morning when people open their inboxes. This will increase your open rates and will hopefully land you some more sales. All while your competition is sleeping.

“I’ve got dreams that is worth more than my sleep.” – Eric Thomas

7. Study your competition

Speaking of your competition, are you studying what they’re doing? If not, you need to be. A lot of business owners talk about how they don’t care about what anyone else is doing, but in reality they do and if they’re not personally checking it, they’ve got a team watching the trends.

By seeing what your competition is doing and building on their successes and making your offers better, you’ll be able to stay one step ahead of them.

You can also learn a lot about the direction the market is headed by studying your competition and seeing what they’ve done right and wrong. Don’t worry about what they’re doing now – think about what they’re going to do in the future and do it first. Put yourself in their shoes and think “what would I do next?” and then go do it.

How are you kick starting your hustle efforts? Please leave your thoughts below!