Want Your Side Hustle to Become Your Full-Time Job? Take These 3 Steps

Working a side gig can be a great way to bring in extra income. Side hustles bring in an average monthly income of around $483, which can go a long way toward helping you accomplish financial goals.

In some cases, though, you may decide you prefer your side job to your full-time work and want to turn it into a small business of its own. If that's the case and you're hoping to make a full-time living from what used to be a part-time side hustle, there are a few key steps you need to take to make sure you can live off what you earn.

1. Calculate the income you'd need to get by

The first step towards turning a side hustle into a full-time business is to figure out the financials. You'll need to know just how much you want to earn -- at a minimum -- to cover your costs.

Say, for example, that right now your side hustle is earning you $2,500 a month but you are spending $4,337, which is the average monthly expenses for single people (according to the Ramsey Solutions blog). Assuming you wanted a little cash cushion, you might need your side hustle to provide you with $4,500 a month. That would mean you'd need to increase your earnings from it by $2,000.

2. Make a plan for scaling up

Once you know how much more income you need to earn from your side hustle, it's time to make a plan to actually earn extra cash in your business bank account. You can do this in a few ways:

• Working more hours: If you're making $2,500 a month by working at your side hustle for 15 hours a month and you have enough business already to double that, all you'd need to do is put in those extra 15 hours and you'd be able to achieve your goal. Of course, you'd need to make sure you'd have that extra business for the long haul.
• Finding more clients: If you can make a high enough hourly wage to produce the income you need by doing your side job but you don't have enough demand for your services to work the number of hours you need, you'll have to find more people to hire you. Act on ways to do that, like reaching out to existing customers for referrals or advertising your goods or services online by making a great website.
• Increasing your rates: Say that you're making $2,500 a month by charging your clients $50 an hour for your services. If you could find enough clients that would pay you $100 an hour for your work, that would also give you the income you need -- as long as you were confident that those clients would pay you the high rate consistently.

Whatever your plan is, you'll want to be sure it works for the long term and is realistic. For example, if you'd need to work 100 hours a week at your side hustle to bring in the income you need, you are not going to be able to keep up with that for long and when you fail, you'll fall short of the income you need.

3. Start putting in the extra work

Once you've made your plan for scaling up, start putting in the extra work immediately. Look for those higher-paying clients, start looking for more clients, or start putting in more hours at the job. Ideally, you'll want to actually scale up your business and begin producing the income you need to cover costs before giving up your day job.

By taking these steps, you can ideally turn your side hustle into a great job that produces more than enough money to make ends meet. And maybe you can even turn it into a job that helps you get rich.