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An Online Writing Side Hustle

An Online Writing Side Hustle

Learn from Maria who has built her side hustle through her passion for writing.

January 19, 2025

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Happy Sunday. This week we’re talking with Maria, a marketer with a passion for writing. In her spare time she writes daily newsletters sharing her thoughts on social media, writing, and email marketing. During this interview, Maria will share her advice on:

Setting realistic expectations to avoid burnout.
Pick a specific business niche to build a tailored audience.
How you should start your business if it’s still only an idea.

Now, over to Maria!

The Lunch Break

Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your side hustle?

My name’s Maria Marchewka (Mar-Hef-Ka) I’m a married mom of two (three if you count my corgi, Carl), and I live in Pittsburgh. I’ve been in marketing for over 10 years, but I fell in love with writing during a third-grade creative writing class. It’s been my goal since then to write every day. This goal influenced me to start my own newsletter, The Lunch Break🍴

I serve up bite-sized thoughts on social media, writing, and email marketing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

What was your main inspiration for getting into this niche?

As a marketer, I write for other brands; their strategies and initiatives influence the content. While I love what I do, I wanted to create something where I could write about what I wanted when I wanted.

Plus, with constant algorithm changes on social sites, the conversation around it being “rented land” pushed me to start a newsletter and have an owned channel where I have more control.

How do you define success in your side hustle?

I have two definitions, but they work in tandem.

The first is that I enjoy the process.

Now more than ever, we measure everything. It’s important, but it can quickly zap the joy out of something. The Lunch Break🍴is my creative outlet to talk about topics that I love in the hopes of helping someone else. Whether it’s an analogy that leads to a lightbulb moment or a social media post prompt that ignites a creative spark, I want to help people help themselves.

The other piece of this success puzzle is the feedback I get from my subscribers. The email replies and comments on social posts that hype up the content I share motivate me to get better. Knowing that an idea I shared struck a chord with someone so much that they took the time to tell me is a great feeling!

If you were to start again from scratch, what would you do differently?

I started the Lunch Break 🍴as a daily newsletter in 2024.

I sent an email every workday at 12 p.m. EST with a fresh idea.

Towards the end of last year, I realized two things:

1. I was burning out trying to find a new daily topic and then writing about it.

2. My content was all over the map because I had an aggressive content calendar to fill.

This year, I moved from a daily cadence to now sending my newsletters on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and focusing exclusively on social media, writing, and email marketing.

If I were to start over again, I’d launch with a three-day cadence to narrow my focus and attract attention from more targeted audiences to scale faster. If you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

What advice would you give to someone just starting out with a similar gig?

Planning is easy but beware of your plans turning into excuses that delay you from starting.

This is my first newsletter so I had no prior experience.

But I didn’t let that stop me, I chose Beehiiv as my platform (I HIGHLY recommend it) and started building things out by watching their tutorials, listening to podcasts about newsletter growth, and subscribing to other newsletters like Matt McGarry’s Newsletter Operator for advice and insights.

The hardest part is starting. If you’re sitting on an idea, this is your sign to put it out in the world.

Where can people find you?

I spend most of my time on LinkedIn and Threads, but you can occasionally find me on a Tweeting spree over on Twitter.

Subscribe to The Lunch Break 🍴

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This week we’re talking with Jessica, a marketing manager who runs a side hustle as a personal trainer. Over the past 3 years she has built her side business to earn up to $2k a month in additional income.
In this interview she’ll cover:
— Ciaran (@fivenineformula)
12:08 PM • Jan 13, 2025

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How was this week's interview?

If you’d like to read last week’s newsletter, an interview with Jessica, a marketing manager who runs a side hustle as a personal trainer. Check it out here.

Thank you all,

See you next week! 👋