Is This Unexpected Habit Wasting Your Side Hustle Clicks?
I have noticed something odd going on across a lot of the Facebook groups and pages I follow while building my own side hustle. Somebody writes a useful post, then tucks the one thing worth clicking down in the comments, hoping it looks less like an advert.
It does not look less like an advert. It just costs them side hustle clicks they already earned.
If you are over fifty and building something on the side without forty hours a week to give it, this matters more than it sounds. Every extra step between someone’s interest and their click is a chance for them to simply scroll on.
I post through eShowcase myself, and I had been following that same old advice without ever questioning it. Then I started paying attention to what it was quietly costing me.
An Old Rule That Has Quietly Stopped Working
For years, the advice going round social media marketing circles was simple. Never put your link directly in a post. Hide it in the comments instead, because platforms supposedly punished posts containing outside links by showing them to fewer people.
That advice made a certain sense once. It does not make much sense now.
Even people running some of the biggest platforms in the world have been caught following it out of habit, long after anyone could show it still held up. Old advice has a way of outliving the reason it existed.
And on some platforms, hiding your link in the comments does something worse than simply underperforming. The comment containing your link can get filtered out of view entirely by the platform’s own sorting, leaving your reader staring at a comment section with no link anywhere in sight.
Picture someone reading your post, interested, opening the comments because you told them the link was there, then quietly giving up when they cannot find it. You did the hard part. You wrote something worth clicking on. Then you buried the one thing that mattered.
Every Extra Step Loses You Someone
This is not really a story about one outdated rule on one platform. It is about something simpler that applies wherever you post.
Every extra step you ask someone to take between interest and action gives them another chance to disappear.
Opening the comments is a step. Scrolling to find the right one is a step. Reading five replies from strangers before spotting your link is three more steps. None of those steps are difficult on their own. Together, they are enough to lose somebody who was ready to act thirty seconds ago.
If you only have an hour or two most evenings to put into your side hustle, you cannot afford to lose interested people to friction you added yourself.
Every extra step you ask someone to take between interest and action gives them another chance to disappear.
Why This Matters More When You Are Starting Later
If you are fifty or older and trying to build an income to sit alongside a state pension that does not quite stretch to the extras you want, you are probably not posting twenty times a day or chasing viral reach. You are posting when you can, often through something automated, and hoping the right person sees it at the right moment.
That makes every side hustle click more valuable, not less.
You cannot afford to waste the handful of interested people you do reach on a habit left over from advice nobody ever properly tested on your own business.
What Removing One Obstacle Did For Me
I learned this lesson about obstacles long before I ever had a social media post to write.
After the 1993 recession nearly finished my business, I ended up depressed, the house was repossessed, and I was living in a bedsit. I was not looking for a way forward. I did not have the energy left to look for one.
Someone in my life at the time decided I needed removing from the whole situation rather than talked through it. She told me it was about time I sorted myself out, and paid for me to go to Australia with her for four weeks. We travelled the East Coast, from Sydney up to Cairns.
She did not ask me to find the money, book the flights, or work out whether I could afford the time away. She removed every obstacle between deciding and doing. When I got back, I realised I had to get up again and start using what I had, and I found subcontract work with people I had known before.
That is the part worth noticing for your own side hustle. I did not need convincing that getting up again was a good idea. I needed the obstacles between knowing it and doing it taken away.
Your reader is no different. They rarely need convincing that your offer sounds worth looking at. They need the step between noticing it and acting on it made as small as you can possibly make it.
Make The Click The Easiest Part Of The Post
None of this means every post needs a link. Plenty of good posts exist simply to be useful, build trust, or start a conversation.
But when you want someone to click through to your opt-in page or your latest post, put the link where they can see it. Not hidden behind the words link in comments.
I still use eShowcase to post automatically to social media and follow up by email afterwards, and the one change that made the biggest difference was putting the link in the post itself rather than tucking it away out of habit.
This matters even more if you are relying on a tool to post for you while you are doing something else entirely. If the link is not sitting in plain sight the moment someone reads it, nobody is coming back later to go hunting for it.
You can still mention other posts I have written recently alongside the main link, giving a reader somewhere else to go if they are not ready to click just yet. But the main link belongs where their eyes already are.
A Small Change Worth Making This Week
None of this requires new skills, new software, or more hours than you already have.
It requires noticing where you have quietly been making things harder for your own reader, out of habit rather than good reason.
Look at your last five posts. Count how many buried the link somewhere a reader had to go looking for it. Then change just that, nothing else, for the next five.
Put the link where they can see it. You are not trying to sell harder. You are trying to stop losing people who had already decided to click before you got in their way.
That is the whole fix. Not a new platform, not a new system, just one less obstacle between somebody wanting something and getting it.
You do not need a bigger audience, a cleverer hook, or a different way of posting. You need the people who already want to click to be able to click, straight away, without hunting for you first.
Make that one change this week, and watch how many more of your side hustle clicks turn into someone arriving exactly where you wanted them.
