A Free Website for Your Side Hustle

The thing about a side hustle is that it's real to everyone except the admin. You bake forty brownies on a Saturday and they sell. You fix three phone screens a week in your kitchen. You do nails for people from work and their sisters. Money changes hands, people recommend you, and somewhere in there it stopped being a hobby.

But it doesn't have a website, because a website felt like a thing for businesses — and paying £15 a month for a page about brownies felt daft when some months you make less than that.

That's the bit that changed. It's free now. Not free-for-a-month, not free-with-a-banner-across-the-bottom. Free.

You don't need to be a company

Worth saying plainly, because it stops a lot of people before they start: you don't need to be incorporated, VAT registered, or have a shop. If you sell something or do something for money, that's enough to have a page about it.

Blinko gives you a page at yourname.blinkolocal.com. Building it, editing it and hosting it are free — there's no upgrade wall in front of the contact form and no advert on your pages.

What a page does that a phone number can't

Right now, when someone recommends you, the recommendation has to survive two extra steps. "You should message her, she does brilliant nails" — then finding your name, then finding your number, then working up to messaging a stranger. Some of those people arrive. Most of them meant to.

A link removes all three steps. It's the difference between a recommendation and a booking.

And the page answers the questions nobody wants to ask you directly. What do you actually make. What does it cost. Where are you, roughly. Do you deliver. How far ahead are you booked. All of that in one place means someone can decide about you at eleven at night without messaging you and waiting.

You describe it; you don't build it

There's no editor, no template gallery, no dragging boxes around. You have a short conversation with Blinko Copilot — what you make or do, who buys it, anything you'd want someone to know before they order. Every question is skippable. It doesn't need answers in business language; "brownies, cookies, birthday cakes if you give me a week" is a perfectly good answer.

Copilot drafts the page. Then you read it and change what's wrong by saying so: "take the cupcakes off, I stopped doing those", "put the collection point at the top", "swap that photo". It shows you the change and waits — nothing goes live until you approve it. Change your mind afterwards and one-click rollback puts it back.

Sites run to ten pages. For most side hustles the answer is one, maybe two.

Enquiries reach your phone

Someone fills in the form on your page — what they want, when, photos if it helps. You get a push alert, and the message sits in your leads inbox with everything written down.

Which matters more here than for a shop, because you have a day job. The enquiry arrives at half two on a Wednesday while you're at work. It's not a missed call you'll never return. It's a note waiting for you at six.

The honest condition

There's one, and it's not money.

You can build and edit your page from the moment you sign up. Publishing — putting it live on the internet — waits until three things are true: your profile is filled in, you've signed in from the Blinko Business app, and you have your first followers.

A follower is somebody who scanned your Blinko QR code and chose to follow you. In practice that means the people already buying from you — put the code on your stall, on the box, on the back of your phone case. It's a small number and it's a setting rather than a rule, and if you're genuinely selling, you'll clear it in a week without doing anything unusual.

The reason it exists: a live page with nothing behind it does you more harm than no page. Everything else about this is free, and this is the one thing asked instead.

What it isn't

Not a shop — there's no basket and no checkout on the page. It's the place people find you, understand what you do, and send you a message. If you take payment, Blinko has a way to do that from your phone, but that's a separate thing from the page.

Not a custom domain, at least not by yourself. You get yourname.blinkolocal.com. If you already own something better, that's a conversation with us.

Not a project. That's most of the point. The version of you that has been meaning to sort this out for eight months can do it on a Tuesday evening while something's in the oven.

See how the Blinko Website works → · How to publish a business website free →