The Benefits of Side Hustles
“Side hustle” should probably be 2023’s word of the year for how often it’s been discussed lately. It’s no surprise that side hustles have become very popular. For one thing, many of us are struggling to achieve our financial goals, whether that’s saving for a house, wedding, car, vacation, or paying off our student loans. Between inflation, high interest rates, and massive demand for many goods and services, almost everything feels pretty unaffordable.
On top of that, COVID and the Great Resignation led many of us to rethink our day job. A full-on career pivot is pretty scary. But side hustles can let you do a dress rehearsal of a possible dream job in your spare time. Of course, you can’t side hustle just any career. I’m guessing (and hoping) that there are no surgeons who are doing it as a side hustle. However, if you’ve ever wanted to become an artist, writer, woodworker, business owner, website designer, tutor, etc., you can try it out as a side hustle.
So side hustles can be a great way to earn a little (or a lot of) extra income and try out new career options. You may even find your next full-time job!
In this post, I go over some side hustle ideas and resources. I focus on relatively easy side hustle ideas that reliably earn income and don’t involve much in the way of upfront costs. I also discuss some of the pitfalls of side hustles. Hopefully you find some exciting side hustle ideas here that will set you on the path to financial independence!
Pitfalls of Side Hustles
First, I’m going to start with those pitfalls because most of us like getting bad news out of the way first.
The biggest pitfalls of having a side job are that:
- Having a side gig is often hard work. Indeed, they are often more work than you expect.
- Sometimes the commodification of an activity you love can cause you to lose your passion for it.
- The side hustles that have the potential to earn the most also tend to have the highest chance of earning no money at all.
- Our capitalist culture glorifies working as much as we can. So we may feel pressured to start a side hustle when really we should just enjoy our free time.
Blogging Side Hustles
Take blogging, for example. There are people who make thousands and even millions of dollars blogging. It’s also a really fun side hustle that a lot of people (myself included!) try out. However, over 95% of bloggers (myself included) make no money on it and, in fact, spend money building the blog.
Personally, I’ve spent about 10-20 hours a week on the blog since I started it in January. I would absolutely love to make money blogging. In fact, I started the blog kind of hoping that would be the case. I really want a house with a yard, mainly so that I can adopt this dog I really want from the shelter. However, I do not make “house with a yard” money and so have been trying out various side hustles. Luckily, I still love writing and maintaining the blog regardless of whether it ever makes any money.
I say this not to garner sympathy but to highlight that the best side hustles are ones where you either truly want to spend the time pursuing the side hustle regardless of the outcome, you can reliably make money, or the experience will help you in the future in some way. Luckily for me, I enjoy blogging a lot and believe the experience has helped me become a better writer and more creative person. So lots of bonuses for current and future me.
Good Side Hustle Ideas
Participate in Market Research Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups
I love this side hustle and have made hundreds of dollars over the past year and a half doing online surveys. Plus, you don’t need much time and 0 experience to do it.
There are sites such as SurveyJunkie, Ipsos, and Amazon Mturk where you can often earn a few dollars for taking a short market research survey. People who use these sites often take multiple surveys a month, so it’s a great way to earn a little extra money. That being said, you’re not going to get rich off these surveys.
While these sites can be great options, I personally prefer to use focus group sites where you can earn far more by participating in an interview or focus group. You’ll need to take a short screening survey (about 5 minutes) to try to qualify for a survey. The catch with these sites is that you will only qualify for a fraction of the surveys you complete screeners for. As a result, you have to regularly take screeners to increase your chances of getting chosen. My favorite sites for these kinds of studies are Fieldworks and Respondent. Most of the surveys I’ve done for these sites have paid $50-$150 for a 1-2 hour survey.
Freelance In an Area You’re Already Skilled
Freelancing in an area where you have a solid skill set can earn you a lot of money. Not sure what your passions and skills are? Beautifully Over 40 recommends making a list of activities that make you feel joy and fulfillment (for more tips on choosing the right side hustle for you, check out their post).
Of course, the demand for your services will vary depending on your profession and experience level. For example, if you are a freelance writer, you’ll likely to have price your services quite low starting out in order to compete. Knowledge of SEO, data science (particularly machine learning), and graphic design are often in high demand and so people skilled in these areas may be able to charge a bit more.
Regardless, if you are interested in freelancing, you can create a profile with sites like Fiverr or Upwork and market your services there. LinkedIn can be another great resource for finding freelancing opportunities through your network or job postings. If you want guidance on how to effectively promote your services on Fiverr, you can check out this post from Work Master.
Ideally, you’ll want to develop a portfolio of work and perhaps create a website to showcase your skills. When you’re starting out, you might consider offering your skills on a volunteer basis to an organization you love to network, build a portfolio, and gain experience. If you have colleagues (or former colleagues or clients) who can speak to your work, you might also consider asking for testimonials to boost your credentials early on. There’s a lot of freelance work out there. But also a lot of competition. So anything you can do to spotlight your great work is helpful.
Dropship
Starting a dropshipping business is a really cool option where you start an ecommerce store but don’t actually have any inventory. How does it work? Say you want to sell an at home gym kit. You would find a third party company that can create and ship the at home gym kit. For example, AliExpress, Worldwide Brands, and SaleHoo are very popular online supplier databases that supply and ship a large variety of products. You could source an at home gym kit from one of these suppliers.
Then you set up an online platform to market and sell your product. When someone buys your product, you simply verify the order and send it off to your third party supplier to be fulfilled and shipped. The supplier doesn’t have to worry about marketing and customer service (you do that) and you don’t have to worry about building all the capital you would need to start a business.
People have made thousands of dollars drop shipping furniture, food, crafts, and more. For a more complete guide on drop shipping, see this resource from Shopify.
Create an Airbnb Experience
In last week’s post, I discussed how you can use house hacking to make money. However, if you aren’t interested in or aren’t able to house hack, you can still make money through Airbnb. Airbnb experiences are a great option for tourists to do fun activities with locals. For example, chefs host cooking classes with local ingredients, artists offer classes and art tours, outdoorsy folks lead hikes in their local area, sailors take tourists for sailboat rides, the list goes on. I mean, who wouldn’t want to get paid to hike? You can even offer online experiences, including helping people plan trips to your locale, improv classes, magic shows, and more.
If you would like to create an Airbnb experience, you need to get verified through Airbnb. However, the process isn’t overly difficult and for most activities you don’t need special qualifications. See Airbnb’s website for specific guidelines. Once you are verified, you can offer your experience on Airbnb’s website.
Most people charge per person for their experiences. The prices tend to range from $25 per person for a walking tour to $125 per person for a sailboat tour.
Dog Walk / Pet Sit / House Sit
This is obviously a classic. However, new websites and apps make this option easier than ever to take advantage of. You can find gigs on Care.com, Rover, Wag!, Sittercity, NextDoor, or neighborhood listservs.
Dog walkers tend to make about $20-$40 an hour. And, on average, house sitters earn $70 a night (though some may earn more for doing additional work like taking care of pets or cleaning). Some pet owners even hire people to chaperone their dog to the dog park. If you’re an animal lover this can be a fun and relatively easy option to make some extra cash.
Yard Work (Including Pressure Washing)
Yard work is an obvious one, and one that will become less relevant as Summer turns to Fall. However, I bring it up because of a very creative idea I heard recently. A guy started his own business pressure washing people’s houses! He now makes $60,000 a year on that business alone. How did he do it? He got a used pressure washer for $300, started advertising his services on Facebook, and was quickly booking gigs for hundreds of dollars a pop. Plus, he’d only pressure washed a few times in his life before starting the business!
You may not want to start a pressure washing business. However, people are busier than ever. And many homeowners have very little desire or knowledge of how to take care of basic home maintenance. So there is a lot of potential opportunity if you want to get creative in this area. Do keep in mind though, that you may want (or need) liability insurance or certifications for some kinds of home maintenance tasks.
Sell Print Items, Digital Products, Templates, or Etsy Crafts
The best side hustle ideas are scalable. In other words, you can build your business and make more money over time without the amount of work you put into your business increasing at the same rate. Some businesses do this by hiring employees or charging more per hour or product as demand increases. In contrast, prints and virtual products are naturally scalable. For example, if you sell templates for resumes or planners, calendars, postcards, or even e-books if you’re real fancy, you may put in a lot of development work up front. Once the product is done, however, you can sell virtually limitless numbers of those products with very little additional work.
It’s important to keep in mind that there can be a lot of competition when it comes to selling these products. You’ll want to think carefully about how you’ll make your product unique and market it effectively before you pursue this option.
In a similar vein, though less scalable, you can sell crafts on Etsy. While, again, competition is massive, you can strike gold if you have a unique idea. The lady who invented squirrel picnic tables made serious bank.
Pallet Flip
Have you ever wondered what happens to products when you return them? Often, sellers can’t or don’t want to resell them. So they package together a variety of different products on a pallet and sell them at a steep discount to… well, just about anybody who wants them. Pallet flippers can then resell these products individually at a higher price.
To be successful at this side hustle, it helps to develop relationships with store managers. The most successful pallet flippers often get first dibs on the best products precisely because they’ve built up relationships with suppliers.
Some stores and organizations sell pallets directly to customers. However, most use liquidation companies. It’s a good idea to find a local liquidation company to save on shipping costs. To find a local company, type “liquidation companies in your area” into your preferred search engine. Alternatively, you can find national or global ones on sites like bstock.com and liquidation.com. Though keep in mind that you’ll have to pay shipping costs for those items.
Tutor or Teach Online Courses
If you feel reasonably well-versed in a subject area, standardized testing, or even college admissions, you can make tons of money tutoring or creating an online course. Indeed, tutors often make $100 an hour! Plus, tutoring and teaching are more flexible than ever now that you can carry out sessions over Zoom and make session available online.
If you want to teach an online course, you can develop a curriculum and record classes through sites like Outschool, Thinkific and Udemy.
You can advertise your tutoring services on social media, neighborhood listservs, or Wyzant, Care.com, Lessonface (for music lessons specifically), and Varsity Tutors. Alternatively, you can become a tutor through established businesses such as Kumon.
Side Hustles Summary
Of course, there are so many more profitable side hustle ideas. If you are interested in more ideas or resources, check out the podcast “Side Hustle Nation.” It has hundreds of side hustle ideas and interviews with side hustlers whose side gigs are now their main source of income. The blog, Fuelled by Coffee and Chaos also has a great list of online side hustles.
Have other side hustle ideas? Let me know in the comments! If you liked this post, please consider liking, subscribing, or sharing with others, each one gets me closer to getting a shelter dog! Side note, her name is Soozy and she’s at Resilient Hearts Animal Sanctuary. If anyone want to adopt her before me, I really just want her to find a family.
And if you’re interested in related content, check out my posts on house hacking, how to ask for a promotion, saving for any goal, and my intro to investing.
