Having a side hustle is one of the best ways to make more money and increase your financial capacity.
With the additional earnings, you will be able to meet your daily needs and yet depend less on your major source of income. And, that’s a huge step to greater financial freedom.
What makes a source of income a side hustle is that it does not stop you from earning from your main job or business.
You should be able to combine them with other businesses and even have some little time to spare for other things.
Some side hustles may take time to build before you start earning, while some are quick ways to earn some extra bucks.
It all depends on what you want and what you can make out time for. Let’s see the reasons you need a side hustle and the best side hustle ideas for you.
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Why Do You Need a Side Hustle?
Side hustles are creative ways to build financial support and improve your financial security. If you are an employee under a boss, you don’t have a guarantee that your job is safe.
No matter how good it seems at the moment, different possible unforeseen circumstances can crop up at any time and you get dismissed from work. In such cases, where do you fall back?
This is why having only one source of income is very risky. With a good side hustle, you can always make some money to settle your bills and sustain yourself until you find another suitable job.
Maybe you are your own boss as a business owner, and your business is doing great. Well, it still won’t be a bad idea to add another stream of income.
At least, it will help reduce the burden on your business and give you more financial cover in case of unfavorable business seasons.
There are many other reasons why you should consider getting a side hustle, and some of them are:
- Side hustles help you to maximize your spare time and make money even as you are catching fun.
- You can have more spare money to save or invest. It helps you maximize investment opportunities.
- Side hustles are great opportunities to start a good business with little or no starting capital. You can start with whatever you have and take time to grow the business since it’s not your main source.
- You can improve yourself by learning or developing new skills in your quest for a side hustle. Sometimes, the skills can even grow to become a major income source for you.
- Just in case your current job or business does not satisfy your personal interests and passion, you can find side hustles that let you find expression in the things you love doing.
Now, let’s get to the real deal. Here are some top side hustle ideas that you can earn additional income without much stress.
#1. Affiliate Marketing
Creating and managing your own store – whether physical or online – can be very tasking, capital-intensive, and time-consuming.
If you cannot possibly cope with the demands of running your own shop, affiliate marketing is a great option for you.
In affiliate marketing, you basically refer potential buyers to product sellers and earn a commission for each transaction.
All you need to do is to find an effective platform to generate traffic of potential clients and redirect them to different sellers who offer what they want.
You can do this by running a blog, an affiliate marketing website, or social media.
There are also ready-to-go platforms that you can maximize, such as Clickbank, Kartra, ShareASale, etc.
You can check out Kartra vs Clickbank to learn more about how these platforms work and which is best for you.
On your affiliate marketing platform, you can post contents to market your sellers’ products through strategies such as product reviews.
On each content, you attach your affiliate link such that when people click on it, it takes them to where they can process the transactions.
The affiliate links are customized by the sellers to easily identify which customers come from visiting your link.
You can earn different percentages of commissions based on the type of referrals, type of products, the platform, etc.
It all depends on your agreement with your affiliates. And the best part of it is that you can market for as many affiliates as you want.
#2. Blogging
Blogging is one of the easiest ways to make money while having fun.
There are various ways you can monetize your blog. But, how much you make from blogging largely depends on how much traffic you can command.
You can set up a Google Adsense account and let Google place ads on your blog and pay you for them.
You can run direct adverts for businesses on your blog and get paid. To keep your audience interested, the ads can be tailored to the niche of your blog.
You can also earn money by making sponsored blog posts for companies or brands. The posts may be positive reviews about their products or services as you recommend them to your visitors.
Through Call-To-Action (CTA) links, you can redirect the customers to the seller’s platforms, and this is another opportunity for affiliate marketing via your blog.
Setting up and running a blog does not cost much both in terms of time and money. With CMS such as WordPress, you can create a good blog and host it on the fly.
You can hire content creators for your content and create a content calendar to automate your posts.
#3. Ridesharing / Car Rentals
If you have a car(s) you can spare for commercial driving, then car rentals are a great opportunity to make passive income from them.
You can enlist your car for rent in car-sharing platforms such as Getaround, Turo, etc, and get paid while your car is used for ridesharing.
Most of these platforms have certain requirements your car must fulfill to be accepted for rent.
On the other hand, they also provide certain regulations as to how the rented cars are managed, as a way of protecting the car owners.
If you have a car and you’re willing to drive by yourself, you can earn as much money as you can via ridesharing platforms such as Uber or Lyft.
Since it’s a side hustle, you can determine your working hours to fit your schedule.
What about when you don’t have a car but you’re willing to drive to make money? You are not left out also.
Ridesharing platforms such as Lyft can offer you a car to work with provided you keep to their working conditions and regulations.
#4. Graphics Design
This is one of the most popular freelance services you can render as a side hustle. Like other freelance services, you get to choose when you want to work, how much you want to earn.
You can build a graphics portfolio on Behance to display different works you have done. With the portfolio, you can send proposals to different potential clients who may need your services.
Scouting for clients can be burdensome at times. That’s the gap that freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr have come to bridge.
All you need to sign up, set up your profile, create your gigs, and keep optimizing them.
The higher you rank among sellers on the platform, the higher the chances of your services being visible to potential clients.
You can negotiate both the price, the delivery date, and other working conditions with the clients as long as you don’t violate the regulations of the platform.
#5. Freelance Writing
If you enjoy writing, you can offer your writing skills as a service and make cool cash from it.
There are various kinds of writing services you can offer, ranging from content writing gigs such as articles to creative writing such as fiction.
To make it easier and more flexible, you can sign up on freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr.
These platforms connect you with potential clients who need your services and provides job security for you by managing the payments.
However, they charge some fees for their services, which is in most cases not more than 20% of your earnings.
The beautiful thing about freelancing writing is that you can comfortably work at your own schedule and at your pace.
You accept jobs when you want and set delivery deadlines yourself on agreement with clients. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about: a side hustle that puts you in charge.
You can also set up your own blog where you can post your write-ups and generate traffic with which you can make money via other means. Remember, the idea is to earn more money while having enough for your main job.
So, you can have a content calendar to automate your postings, and you can hire content creators for your posts if you don’t have enough time to create them.
#6. YouTube
YouTube is one of the most used social media platforms on the internet alongside Facebook, and Instagram.
According to Statista, YouTube has over 2 billion active users. You can carve out an audience from this large crowd and make money from them.
YouTube offers different ways of making money, but all of them depend on how many subscribers, views, and watch-time your channels have.
Hence, you may need to spend good time and resources to build your channel and gather enough crowd.
You can monetize your YouTube account when you get the required number of views and watch time. You can make money from YouTube in the following ways:
- Ads revenue
- Channel Memberships
- Merch Shelf
- YouTube Premium
- Super Chat & Super Stickers
You can find out more details about how to earn via these means by going through How Do You Make Money With YouTube.
YouTube allows only video content, so you need to make good quality videos to attract your intended audience. Different kinds of video contents you can start with on YouTube include:
- How-To tutorials
- Product reviews
- News and Updates
- Comedy skits
- Movies and Movie Trailers
- Online video courses
- Etc.
#7. Social Media
In January 2021, the number of active social media users around the world reached up to 4.2 billion.
This means that you have the opportunity to reach out to so many people if you decide to push any business through social media.
As earlier mentioned about YouTube and blogs, how much money you can make from social media depends on how large your audience is.
Besides having a large audience, you also need to find effective management and marketing strategies to pull your strings.
You can make money on social media through different ways which include affiliate marketing, brand sponsorships, paid ads, platform-generated revenue, etc.
For instance, Facebook, just like YouTube, pays you for your video uploads if you meet their monetization criteria.
You can create a page or group on social media and start posting relevant content on a particular niche until you gain a strong reputation in that niche.
By that time, you can then use your platform to advertise for companies and brands and get paid in handsome amounts.
To ensure that it doesn’t encroach into your main income activities, you can automate your social media to-dos.
Apps like Facebook let you schedule posts and have them get posted automatically when it’s time.
#8. Forex Trading
Forex trading is one of the most lucrative side hustles you can get for yourself.
Again, it’s a business you can do at your own convenience, so it doesn’t affect your major source of income unless you let it do so.
Forex simply means foreign exchange and involves trading of different currencies to make profit.
Basically, you take advantage of price fluctuations in the forex market to earn your money.
How it works is very simple. In a currency pair, you predict which currency is going to rise in value against the other.
For instance, in the USD/GBP currency pair, you can predict that the USD will fall in price against GBP.
When you predict an upward movement, it’s called a BUY, and downward price movement is called a SELL.
There are many platforms where you can register and trade forex. These platforms are known as brokers, and examples include Deriv and HotForex.
Brokers help you execute your market orders and also help you manage your fired account via a dashboard.
Investing in Forex can be quickly rewarding but can also lead to massive losses. As such, you may need to spend time understanding how the system works before you start trading.
Most online brokers provide you with free demo accounts where you can practice your skills and strategies until you build enough confidence to invest real money.
If you feel you don’t have enough time to learn and trade by yourself, you can look for reputable forex traders and invest with them.
They give an agreed percentage interest on your investment, and you will not have to bother how the trade goes. But beware of scammers when you are considering forex investments.
#9. Crypto Investment
Crypto is more or less like the next big thing in digital finance. Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that run on blockchain technologies.
These terms may seem confusing to you as a beginner, but the truth is that you don’t even to understand them before you can start earning.
There are various ways of making money via crypto, but the two major ways are by trading and by HODLing.
As a crypto trader, you capitalize on frequent changes in the price of coins to make money. The idea is to buy coins and resell them at a higher rate when their prices go up.
HODLing is a jargon from the English word “hold”. In the crypto space, it simply means to purchase and hold coins for a long time.
Like trading, the aim is to resell the coins at a much later date when the price must have gone much higher.
So, if you find out a coin or token with prospects of a massive increase in value in the future, you can buy them and keep them until their prices get high enough.
Platforms such as Binance, Coinbase, Trust Wallet, etc, provide you with all you need to start your crypto journey and fly to the moon.
#10. Real Estate Rentals
Renting your real estate properties can provide a great means of earning passive income.
If you have lands or houses, you can make very huge amounts of money just by letting people use them for rent.
You can even get a mortgage loan to boost your capital for setting up real estate rental properties.
The good thing about this is that you can start paying back your mortgage from your rental earnings as soon as your property is due for rent.
Real estate can also be a long-term source of passive income.
So, you can keep receiving rents from a house 20 years after you built it and after you must have recovered your investment capital.
All you need to do is to keep the property in good working condition by running maintenance at intervals and as the need arises.
The internet has even made things much easier for everyone including real estate investors.
You can now list your property for rent on online rental platforms such as Airbnb. Airbnb helps connect you with tourists and other immigrants who need a place to rent and may find your property a worthy option.
Airbnb charges you only about 3% for every reservation made on your properties on their platform.
So, you can keep enjoying rents on your properties at little or no running costs while you still go about your normal businesses.
Bottom Line
Having only one source of income is a big risk on its own considering how unstable many economies have become. With these great side hustle ideas, you can open more streams of income and boost your earnings without losing your current source. You can also check out our article on Best Business Ideas To Make Money for more lucrative options.
