17 Side Hustles To Make Extra Money
What would you do with a bit of extra cash on the side? Sometimes projects you started as side hustles to make extra money turn out to be so successful that they become a full-time business.
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Where To Start
It all depends on how much time you are willing to devote to a side hustle to make extra money. The bigger the plan, the more overwhelming it may seem, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Think of it as small, bite-sized chunks instead of the whole enchilada.
Could you bake a mega batch of dog treats and sell them to your neighbours for some quick cash? Sure you could.
Do you know your town, its history, culture, interesting facts, fauna, and flora very well? Offer your services as a guide to visitors.
If you are not a people person, don’t despair. There are plenty of virtual opportunities out there too. You just have to know where to start looking.
What Are You Looking For?
- Hiking Guide
- Local Tour Guide
- Baking Dog Treats
- Personal Chef
- Rent Out Your Home
- Home Deliveries
- Mystery Shopper
- Watering and Care of Plants
- Facebook Ads
- Virtual Assistant
- Create Your Own Digital Products
- Online Tutoring
- Start a Blog
- Social Media Management
- Write an Ebook
- Mechanical Turk
- Freelancing
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Physical Side Hustles To Make Extra Money
Hiking Guide
Good fitness, a positive attitude, and local knowledge go a long way to leading a hike that people will never forget. Know the area well and make interesting observations to educate in a fun, engaging way about fauna, flora, geology, history, and culture.
It’s important to be able to gauge people’s fitness levels, especially if they have never hiked before. Very often people overestimate their physical abilities, which is fine if it’s just them, but could wreck a group hike very quickly. Proper planning and preparation are vital and First Aid is a must.
For seasonal, low-level guiding, approach local ecology centres, community centres, kid’s outdoor programs, tourist offices, and local hiking clubs.
Local Tour Guide
Become a guide for visitors to your town or city. Organise walking tours to take in historical sites and other places of interest and impart your local knowledge in a fun way.
You could even arrange with a restaurant for the group to stop for lunch at a special price.
It’s useful to write up and practice a script beforehand and to plan your route carefully. Strong public speaking skills are recommended.
Have a look at ToursByLocals and see if this would be something you would like to try.
Baking Dog Treats
A quick search online will have a whole list of recipes popping up on your screen. Try a few until you find some that are easy to make and have no fancy ingredients. Then test them out on dogs that live with family and friends. The one that gets snapped up the fastest is the one to concentrate on.
Start by selling to friends and neighbours and then expand to sell at farmer’s markets and other local markets. Some countries require you to have a license to sell anything to do with food, even dog treats.
Having trouble finding out where to start? No problem. Check out the course run by Diva Dog Bakery to guide you.
Personal Chef
A personal chef prepares meals in a client’s own kitchen and tailors the menu based on preferences and allergy requirements. The best way to make this work as a side hustle is to prepare one or two weeks’ worth of meals to put in the freezer for the client to take out and heat up as needed. You will have to do the grocery shopping for menu items, prepare the meals, package for freezing, and clean the kitchen afterwards.
Always take out personal liability insurance just in case things go wrong and someone gets sick from your cooking, either due to an unforeseen food allergy or due to some other issue beyond your control.
If you’re a trained chef and want to join an online platform rather than strike out on your own, then check out HireAChef for the US and Canada, and Bidvine for the UK.
Rent Out Your Home
Join Airbnb. Business is booming, no matter how large or how small your place is. I even found a tiny studio with a single bed close to the Eiffel Tower in Paris for 20 Euros a night. Ok, the guy had to sleep on the couch while I took his bed, but for a short stay on a budget, it was perfect.
Home Deliveries
Work with local businesses to make home deliveries, or if you are in a high-traffic area in the States, check out PostMates. With PostMates and similar sites, you decide when you are available to work and which pick-ups you will take.
Mystery Shopper
What started as a marketing thing in the US in the 80s has spread worldwide. A Mystery Shopper is someone who poses as a customer and visits businesses or retail stores to assess customer experiences.
Google will bring up a whole list of Mystery Shopper sites in your country. The other option is to contact companies directly and offer your mystery shopping services to them.
Watering and Care of Plants
Go to offices and restaurants and offer to take care of their plants. Pricing will depend on how many plants there are and how often they will need to be watered.
Some people may even hire you to look after their plants while they are away. Make cards and hand them out in your neighbourhood around the time when people tend to go away on holiday.
It helps to take photos of the plants you are not familiar with so that you can research them online to find out what their requirements are.
Virtual Side Hustles To Make Extra Money
Facebook Ads
You create the adverts for small businesses and set them up to target the right audience.
The most successful adverts give something away. For example, a restaurant could offer a free dessert or a free glass of wine with every entrée ordered during a specified period. The aim of the advert is not to make the sale, it’s to get people through the door. Once someone is inside warming the seat, then the work of getting them to become a repeat customer begins. That will be the restaurant’s responsibility to make it happen.
A useful ploy is to make an irresistible offer that the customer finds hard to refuse. This would work well with a gym or salon where they can offer a special price for the first month.
Choose smaller businesses like gyms, restaurants, tours, coffee houses, gift shops, bars, and hair salons.
Professional-looking Facebook adverts can be created with ClickFunnels. You get a 14-day free trial to check them out.
Virtual Assistant
Help others to do the tasks they either don’t have time to do or don’t want to do themselves.
You will need to be highly organised and have good time management skills, but you can work from anywhere in the world. Proficiency with popular business and web software is necessary.
Check out Upwork, Indeed.com, and for US-based readers, FancyHands.
Create Your Own Digital Products
Create labels, checklists, calendars, time management sheets, templates, or other digital downloadable products to sell. Design them in Canva and then upload them to Etsy.
Online Tutoring
You can teach anything that you are good at. Maths, science, a musical instrument, cooking, baking, sewing, cryptocurrency, gaming, you name it.
It helps tremendously if you have a TEFL certificate if you want to teach English as a foreign language and it would be a grand idea to have some sort of degree if you want to teach rocket science.
Start A Blog
Blogs might be one of the best ways to earn a passive income, even when you are travelling. The more you work on a blog, the better the ratings and the more potential for getting to the top of the heap in Google search.
It’s dead easy to start a blog, but it’s important to choose a niche that will interest people. No one will read a blog about “My Ingrown Toe Nail”, but you can be sure that plenty of people will want to read a blog on how to trade in cryptocurrency or how to reduce their student loans. Mom blogs with loads of useful hacks and information have hit the stratosphere since the start of lockdowns.
There is some work to get a blog going and once it does, generating an income through affiliate links and ads is pretty straightforward.
Follow my step-by-step guide on how to start a blog here.
Social Media Management
Even though people know that a social media presence is essential, not everyone has the time or the know-how to manage a platform, never mind several.
You will need to know things like – the best time to post for each platform and how to create engaging posts. A bonus would be knowing how to make adverts for each platform.
Each business you recruit will pay you a fee, which all adds up.
Write An Ebook
An ebook costs nothing to produce. Once you upload it to your preferred platform, then often there will be the option to have a print-on-demand hard copy to sell as well. There is absolutely no warehousing or schlepping to bookstores to try and sell your book.
Have a look at Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace by Amazon.
Mechanical Turk
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk takes massive jobs and breaks them up into micro portions, which they farm out through crowdsourcing. Most jobs can be done in a short time and you pick what you want to do. You won’t get rich, but you will get paid for what you do.
That being said, quite a few people have been complaining on public forums that their applications were rejected without explanation and there was no recourse for an appeal. However, many more have been accepted and are very happy with what they do. If your application is rejected, try again in another month or so and make sure that all the information on your Amazon account is up to date.
Freelancing
Online freelancing has been with us for quite a while, but with the pandemic and lockdowns, it has really come into its own. Platforms like Insolvo, Fiverr, 99Designs, Tongal, and Creativepool, rely on hundreds, if not thousands, of freelancers worldwide to supply work to businesses and individuals.
Freelancing is one of the easiest ways to create a side hustle to make extra money.
No need to uproot and move to a new place to be close to work. Everything is done online.
Note: If you decide to join Insolvo, put in the code fp285117 on checkout for a special deal.
Photo Credits
- Hiking – Image by carlaborella from Pixabay
- Tour guide – Image by Imo Deen from Pixabay
- Beagle puppy – Image by Nick Winchetser from Pixabay
- Cherry pie – Image by RitaE from Pixabay
- Bed – Image by ErikaWittlieb from Pixabay
- Bike delivery – Image by Kai Pilger from Pixabay
- Mystery Shopper – Image by Q K from Pixabay
- Terrace plants – Image by Michelle Raponi from Pixabay
- Special offer – Image by Anastasia Gepp from Pixabay
- Virtual assistant – Image by Werner Heiber from Pixabay
- Label – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
- Blackboard – Image by Biljana Jovanovic from Pixabay
- Blogger – Image by kalhh from Pixabay
- Social media – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
- Books – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
- Work from home – Image by Standsome from Pixabay
- Online job – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
- Cover stickies – Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
