8 Side Hustles That Can Replace Your J-O-B

As you’ve probably already noticed, one of my main goals with this blog is to master making money. Then it should not come as a surprise that I dabble in side hustles. The reason why I say dabble, is that I like trying new projects. I’ve been told this before and I learned its truth first hand, is that an entrepreneur gets driven by two things, serving the public and trying new things. And some time we try new things just to see if we can make it work.

Now its up to you to decide if you fall in this category of people who generally work longer than your typical nine to fivers. Running a business, be it on the side or full time is no easy job. I’ve learned that there are is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme, at least not without moving towards the gray side of business. A good way to find out if you have what it takes, is to start a side hustle. So if your willing to try and put in the time or wondering why start a side hustle?, read on!

A side hustle is a great way to start a business that generally won’t interfere with your day job or career, yet still gives you the flexibility to earn an extra stream of income. Not to mention, they also encourage you to do something you might enjoy more then your main job or even act as a stepping stone to venture into the world of entrepreneurship with your own product or service.

The internet is a cloud of questions on how to start a side hustle and what side hustle to start today. With this article I plan to give you a couple of good online side hustles that have the ability to be scaled to thousands per month and maybe even quit your day job. Like I said, be prepared to work even more, but you’d be working for your own dream instead of that of some one else.

Is Your Side Hustle A Hobby Or A Business

How far your side hustle comes, depends on how you treat it. A lot of people treat it more like hobby then a business and then it will forever be a hobby. Of course there is nothing wrong with a paying hobby, but when it comes to the law, it’s important to know the difference. I cannot talk about the country where your reading this from and I do not want to go too deep into it with this article, but I do want to express the importance of this.

Every country has is own laws when it comes to income and businesses. In some cases you can deduct certain expenses and in certain countries or states this is not allowed. If your in the US the Washington Post wrote an article about this chapter, which could help you avoid costly mistakes with the IRS.

Looking at personal side, what is your goal. By setting a goal for you venture you will be able to determine if your starting a side hustle or a hobby. Either way a goal will also help during the entire experience to keep you motivated. If your goal is to have an extra income or completely replace your main job, your starting a side hustle, which is a business by law. If your doing it mainly for the love of what you do without expecting money, then its a hobby.

The goal is not the only indicator of having a hobby or a business as a side hustle, there’s also a financial aspect. And of course, this is where the law and IRS are most interested in. Every year we are al bothered by doing our taxes, and this is where it’s important to define the difference. As a business owner you are entitled to certain tax deductions, which a individual is not. Look at the online publications of your region if your starting a business, even if its a side hustle to just supplement your retirement income.

More often than not a side hustle starts by taking loss

A couple of tips,

• Keep complete and accurate financial records of everything.
• Take the right courses or higher a financial adviser to prevent tax problems

What Side Hustle Is Right For Me?

Choosing the right side hustle depends on what you like to do. This can be what you like to do in your free time, or your professional life. Of course you can choose a side hustle that looks like its making a lot of money of which you know nothing of. In my experience if you start a side hustle in a niche you don’t know anything of, then it can take you a lot of time and frustration before you even start to earn money.

Passive vs Active Side Hustle

There are two main forms of creating an income, passive or active. Most people starting an side hustle, do this with the intention to create a passive form of income. This helps to free up your time, to do more of what you love and still have a steady income. And it is believed that this is also the way to actually get rich, but that’s a story for another time. Here you can find a short explanation of both.

A passive income is when you receive income for work done in the past that needs little to work and maintenance, e.g. making money while you sleep. You set up a income source that can run itself and needs little to no maintenance. You will find some examples of this later on in this article.

An active income is when you trade your time for cash. Earning money in this traditional way of working is a form of active income, meaning if you don’t work, you don’t get paid.

Here I would like to cover the blogs that have semi-passive possibilities. My goal starting these side hustles was to create multiple streams of income, which will help me to become financially free. Side hustles like babysitting or dog walking, no offense to those doing this, is a active income that can never help you to get free. There great for fast money, but cannot be properly scaled into a full time passive income. Unless you have employees of course!

What Are Good Side Hustles?

I would like to list a couple of my favorite side hustles that I myself use to create both an active and passive income. These are in my opinion great side hustles because each one will show you a different aspect of creating income online. They cascade into each other nicely from simple to more advanced ways of side hustling.

Blogging

Welkom to one of my ways! Blogging is a good way to get started online, in this process you learn how to engage with people, how to find and use sources for information, and even promote yourself or your product. But can you actually earn money blogging? Let’s dig into some ways.

Although blogging is a profitable side hustle to start with, it may take many months sometimes even years to earn good money. It has does have a earning potential of 10k per month I’ve been told. Unfortunately I’m not there yet, but it will be a wonderful milestone I plan to reach.

I will not go into how to make and style a blog, as this has many possibilities. Until I’ve written my own how to start a blog, I like the one that goodfinancialcents.com made. If you don’t just google and you can find many how to sides for creating your side hustle blog.

There are a couple of ways to make money using a blog, some examples are:

• Affiliate marketing; I will cover this down the line.
• Sponsored posts; Is when you get payed to post a story a given or self written post as advertisement for a service or product. Depending on your following the earning can be $100+.
• Ad revenue; Is when you place ads (Google Adsense, Media.net, AdTrive) on your blog as a banner for example.
• Sell your own products; You can also create your own products and sell them or a membership. If you have a skill, you can create an ebook, or video series and sell those online. I will touch on courses briefly down the line as well.

Although it may take you time to earn a solid income with this side hustle, keeping your eye on the prize is crucial. The first couple of months it might seem as hard work that may look as if it doesn’t pay off, but stay the course. It takes google up to 3 months to rank your page for others to find. In the mean time you keep publishing great content. This will help to learn about the process, get organic traffic as you build a community around your brand. Eventually this blog will turn into a profitable side hustle!

YouTube

YouTube is a form of blogging, a-k-a vlogging. I must admit that this is not a side hustle I’ve tried yet. Just as blogging, this side hustle also takes time. You need to record and upload the videos, .

There are different ways to earn money on YouTube. As I haven’t personally done this, I won’t go in to too much detail. I only want to give advice about things I’ve actually tried myself. But I did do some research to give you a good image about the possibilities. These will be the steps I will follow when I’m ready to jump in front of a camera.

After you created your great content and have enough subscribers you can start to monetize your YouTube account. The steps I found to make money via YouTube are (sounds like a set up for a drum-roll):

• Monetize your account; When you monetize your accounts via YouTube, you turn on the option to show ads before, after or even during our videos. With this option you earn money on ad clicks. Some more information can be found here.
• Affiliate Marketing; I will cover this later on, but some ideas here are doing reviews on products and linking to them with your affiliate link.
• Sell your own products or services; If you have your own product or service, you can use YouTube to promote it for FREE!
• License your viral content; You can sell the rights of a video of yours that went viral, tv shows can buy the right to use it in their show
• Influencer marketing; This might not always earn you money, but companies often send you products to review and make a video about. This is a way to receive free stuff that you might have bought anyway. If not, you can always sell it.
• Fan funding; If you content is sensational, you can ask your followers to fund your work. This can be either one time of as a membership using Patreon for example.

As you can see there are different ways you can monetize your work. Although YouTube takes time and these days there are a lot of people vlogging, if you can create exceptional and new content, there are multiple ways this side hustle can earn you a good income passively.

e-Commerce

e-Comm is one of my favorite side hustles, and like most businesses it also takes a lot of work to get running profitably. But it has the biggest earning potential if done right. This is one side hustle that has the possibility to transform into a full fledged business. This method has the potential to earn you 7 figures and create millionaires.

The first is dropshipping. And you might’ve heard people claiming it to be dying or saturated, but don’t believe the hype. I’m actually glad that this rumor is trending, this clears the space for those who aren’t trend hoppers. Dropshipping is the art of selling a product straight from the supplier. You could sell a product without ever touching the product. You can start in just 3 steps:

• Create a website, using this link you can get a 14 day free trial at shopify.
• Find a product to sell. This can easily be done with an shopify app, called Oberlo which looks for products on AliExpress.
• Promote your product on Facebook. Facebook gives you the option to laser target the right audience.

Another way to get into the e-commerce market is to use a fulfillment center like Amazon. This is basically the same as dropshipping, the difference is that you buy your products in advance and let your supplier send it to a fulfillment center like Amazon FBA. The advantage here is that the shipping time is faster and if you fulfill using a known center (eg Amazon) you can take advantage of their already growing audience. The disadvantage is that the overal initial costs will be higher. This options has a bit more steps:

• Buy products in bulk from your supplier.
• Ship and store at your chosen fulfillment center.
• Create a website, using this link you can get a 14 day free trial at shopify.
• Promote your product on Facebook. Facebook gives you the option to laser target the right audience.

A a bonus you can also build a profitable online store and sell that store for profit. If you have a store that makes $1.500 revenue per month can be sold for $15.000. You can bank this money and start a new store or another side hustle.

Affiliate Marketing

You’ve heard me say this before, well we’re finally here. Affiliate Marketing! I’m sorry, I made it sound like the holy grail. You might have noticed that affiliate marketing is a center point in a lot of side hustles when trying to make money. Affiliate marketing is when you promote someone else their product or service. You take care of the traffic and send them to a purchase page through your affiliate link. When the product or service is purchased through your link (within a given time), you get a commission.

There are several ways to get traffic, you can do this through a following on YouTube, a blog or advertising straight to your affiliate link. The most common place to find these links is a website called ClickBank. You can signup and choose a product or service to promote, you then receive a affiliate link and you use this to drive traffic to that product page.

Online Courses

After you’ve mastered all of the above, its time to teach others. I’ve asked entrepreneurs, I’ve heard them say it at events and I’ve noticed this to be true, the most rewarding thing they did is to teach another and see them actually follow your teachings and make it. I’ve felt it, everything I learned, I try to teach to another. This helps me to retain the information and seeing someone else also doing it as successfully as I, just feels wonderful.

Even if your skill is not one of the above, you can still create a course within the niche of your choosing. All you need to do, is create a video series, add any other needed materials and upload them. You can create a course about anything really, I’ve seen courses about fishing, riding horses and playing piano that make up to seven figures each. This might not be a fully passive side hustle, you will need to keep you content up to date and relevant, so there is some minor upkeep.

There are a lot of platforms online you can use to upload your content. Some good examples of platforms to upload them to are Udemy and Teachable. Getting the traffic is quite easy as well, if you use Udemy you can take advantage of the organic traffic they already have. Although the downside of Udemy is you usually have to price your course pretty low and they take around fifty percent of the price.

Another traffic stream you can use to gain organic traffic are things like YouTube or a blog website. I know someone who gets most of his traffic from posts he has written in the past. Others use YouTube by first providing good example content and then promoting their course by linking to them. This method does take some work in the beginning. Another way to speed up this process is to use ads. This does ask for an initial investment and you need to ensure that the costs of ads weigh up against the income you receive from your course.

Software-As-A-Service

This is one I still want to try. Software-As-A-Service, or on-demand software is when you create or hire a developer to create a software, you then charge a monthly subscription for use. This side hustle also requires some upfront money to start, but can develop into a lucrative side hustle. Some examples of highly known and used software as a service are WordPress, Facebook, Instagram and even YouTube.

You think of a (problem solving) software and hire a developer to create it for cheap. After they have created it, you promote it and charge a subscription. If thinking up this types of software is not your thing, you can also choose to buy an already developed software company via for example businessesforsale and skip the whole designing phase.

Unfortunately, I haven’t tried this side hustle yet, but I’ve heard good things about this method and I see new ones popping up all the time. So what I recommend you do is research how to create a software-as-a-service product and hire people to do that for you and then it does become passive over time as you build out a team and you get traffic to that particular product. If you choose to design your own, my advice is to play into your strengths. Choose a product you know something about.

Real Estate

Now this is not an online business, and not even a new one at that. Real Estate is as old as the country you live in, but is still a profitable and passive side hustle if done right. Some of the richest people accredit a large portion of their income to real estate. Disclaimer, this is a long term side hustle!

To get started into real estate you will some money to start with. You find a property that’s not to expensive, and doesn’t need allot of work. If you have the money you could finance this yourself, but the advice I got from most investors is to have the bank finance a part of the price. You contact your bank and discuss getting a mortgage or a loan and buy the property.

Then you rent the property to someone. In this rent you calculate the costs you need to make on the mortgage and your profit. Essentially someone else is paying off the mortgage on that property and the difference is your profit. After 20 to 30 years, the mortgage is payed off and you could sell the house and make a profit. The profit would be whatever you got from the bank, plus the difference between your selling price and what you payed for the property.

Taking Your Side Hustle To The Next Level

After some time hustling and your side hustle starts making enough money to replace you nine to five, its time to take it to the next level. There are numerous people who we’re able to quit their day job using their side hustle. And when your ready I have a couple of points you might want to think about.

First of all, create a business plan. A business plan forces you to think about where you plan to take your business, who your target audience is, your competitors and how you plan to scale your side hustle into a full fledged business. You create a business structure and research your options keeping in mind tax and  liability protection. I always advice new entrepreneurs to have a look at Limited Liability Company which gives you a bit more protection then a sole proprietorship.

If you haven’t already, start thinking about how you want to brand yourself. You can either create a personal brand or company brand, as long as you put some good thought into it. Think about the nature of you brand, it’s characteristics, a logo or font so people recognize your brand and how you plan to build awareness around your brand.

Then you can start planning how you are going to scale the business. A lot of people fail or forget this part when transitioning their side hustle. Now you take your business plan and implement your tactics to generate more clients, more sales and everything you need to scale. You invest in marketing to get attention for your brand. There are many ways to promote your brand, a couple options are content marketing (eg blogging), social media marketing (eg Facebook groups) or paid advertising (eg Facebook or Google ads).

If you’ve written your plan well, and I always advice you have someone with experience in what your trying to do look at it. This can help you to prevent common mistakes others have made in the past. Assuming all goes well, you will slowly transition into a full fledged business and making a decent amount to start automating your business to make it more passive.

Now your the CEO and you once again think about scaling to the next level. Remember there is always a new level to transition to, a business should never stand still.

Conclusion

No matter what your side hustle ends up being, remember to choose something a side hustle your comfortable with, choose a niche you know and if applicable always keep a record of the financials. Have a look at my article on financial mastery for some tips on how to take care of the money side of things.