Year after year, inflation seems to be outpacing growth in income. This means that your dollar just doesn’t go as far as it used to. With talks of another impending financial crisis, looking into a side hustle is a great idea. Not only will an extra side income help reduce your financial stress, but with some hard work and luck, you might even end up replacing your 9 to 5 with your side hustle. Following is a list of a number of side hustle ideas that we have compiled for the year 2021.
Profit by Writing
If you have great writing skills, then writing a book that you can upload to Amazon as either a Kindle book or a hard copy, might be a good idea to explore. Amazon has made it really easy to get published. Selling a book is the easy part. All you need to do is make an account on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and you are ready to publish. It’s the writing part that will require your creative juices. Even if you aren’t great at writing, there are other ways to go about it, keep reading.
Aside from selling books on KDP, you can also publish and sell them on Apple Books, Google Play books, Barnes and Noble, Fiverr and Etsy. You can also create audiobooks on Audible. The age in which we live today, you have a lot of options where even if you have an idea but you aren’t that great at writing, you can outsource the idea to ghost writers that you can find on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork and have them write the book for you.
Besides writing books, consider writing a blog and monetizing it. Blogs can be a great source of generating revenue on the side if you can sustain them long enough. It takes a lot of time and energy to get a blog to a point where it has steady traffic, but once you manage to get it there, you can utilize various means of revenue generation such as ads provided by Google Adsense, affiliate marketing products and sponsored posts.
Start Affiliate Marketing
Another great way of creating passive income is via affiliate marketing. If this is something new to you, affiliate marketing is simply a way to make money by promoting someone else’s product or service and receiving a small percentage of their profit as a commission for your promotional service. This way of generating passive income however requires that you have some sort of online presence and an audience.
There are many avenues for building an audience including (but not limited to) an online blog, a YouTube channel or an Instagram page etc. We will be creating separate posts on creating each of those avenues as well however, for now let’s assume that you already built such an online presence. After that’s done, you just need to sign up for a few of the numerous affiliate programs that can be found on Amazon, Commission Junction and Share a Sale etc.
E-Commerce
Buying and selling online is not only becoming increasingly popular but it’s also becoming easier by the day. You can acquire products to sell from local discount stores, flea markets or directly from Chinese manufacturers on AliExpress and have them dropship those to your customers. Again you will need to set up a website if you want to go the dropship route so you can post your products. We will be creating a post on this shortly as well. You can also sell online using platforms like Amazon, Craigslist, Etsy or eBay.
Build WordPress Websites
If you are tech savvy and either already have some technical chops or have interest in learning to create WordPress websites, this is an easy one to look into. There are hundreds of step by step tutorials available on YouTube for free. You can either set yourself up with a business (again you can find many ideas for this on YouTube) or you can start creating websites for others.
You can find clients for this work on Fiverr or Upwork. Over 20% of the websites on the internet today are created using WordPress. Once you get established, you won’t have a shortage of work. You can also create WordPress templates or plugins which can bring you recurring revenue on autopilot.
Make that YouTube Money
Although putting your face on video for the world to see on YouTube, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the upside of starting a channel on YouTube is enormous. What it requires is for you to pick a niche and stay consistent with posting videos on a set schedule. We recommend creating a lot of content in advance before starting to post it.
You will see that it takes time before your channel picks up but given enough time and effort, things eventually do pick up given there are over 5 billion videos that are watched on YouTube daily! Once you have met YouTube’s minimum requirements for the number of subscribers and hours of videos watched, you can start putting ads on your videos which can start making you money while you sleep. Not only that, once you have enough subscribers, you can start reaching out to brands and offer them to promote their products and services to boost your income even more.
Publish Online Courses
Similar to YouTube, if you can get comfortable being behind a camera, then another thing to consider for a great source of recurring revenue is to create an online course. Think about something that you are good at. Whether it is computer programming, cooking, gardening or painting, you can create a course for them all. The beauty of creating something like this is that you have to put in the hard work once and then reap the rewards for years to come. Creating an online course and hosting it on a website like Udemy or Skillshare can be a great way to make money in the area of online education.
In Conclusion
We would like to conclude by reminding our readers that none of the above methods are get-rich-quick schemes. Each of the above ideas requires patience and perseverance. It takes time to build a clout whether it be around a YouTube channel or a blog. Why most side hustles fail is a result of people giving up too early. ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ maybe an overused cliche but it is very true in this case. So bearing that in mind, stay persistent and success will follow. Keep an eye on out this blog for more posts where we will take a detailed dive into many of the above ideas.