If one of your new year’s resolutions was to start a side hustle — You are in the right place. In this article I’ll break down 9 side hustle ideas that you can start this year. And before you start skipping through the chapters to get pointers — I will stop you right there.

A lot of people do such types of articles and even more people reads them, but there’s one important thing we all need to keep in mind: There’s no magic way of creating money. To quote Alex Hormozi (and I may be reading his books now hence the quote)

If you get into business to solve problems, you’ll make money. If you get into business to make money, you’ll have problems.

It’s the same as with starting a YouTube channel. If you create it to be rich and famous — you’ve lost already.

Making Money Is A Skill. And to learn this skill — you need to go through a lot of learning. You can trust me — I’m a good witch.

Now before we start and you click off because maybe you think that side hustles are not for you. 

This article is also available as a video on my YouTube channel
For those of you, who would rather listen to me

Why do we even discuss any “side hustles”?

Well… I think we are being proven time and time again that having just a “safe” 9–5 job and all of our eggs in this one basket is not really as safe as they paint it. Let’s face it. Only last year I heard stories of “not extending the trial period.” “extending the trial period and firing the person the next week”, “making people redundant day to day” getting fired day to day and much more than that. If all of your eggs are in this basket — that’s extremely dangerous especially in the economy we have right now.

As the saying goes:

the average millionaire has 7 streams of income.

So… Why would you settle to one? Who needs this stress? And some of those streams can be passive as well, not taking too much time out of your day

Now how can you actually make money with the help of side hustles?

Let’s separate the ways of earning to some categories:

• Service

• Digital product (my fav)

• Physical product

• Content

With a service business — you are providing a certain service in exchange for money. Make it copywriting, photography, videography, social media management.

With digital products — you can work on something once and sell it throughout the year. This is my fav that quickjly becomes a passive income stream. This can be planners, journals, email templates, digital art etc.

Physical products can be paintings, some DIY decorations, etc.

And content is — well… content. You can put it to other platforms that pay you for it while your clients really don’t. So then it’s more as if the advertisers were your clients.

And in today’s article I will focus on content and services (because we’ll make the products article separately. Don’t forget to follow me so you won’t miss out on that). Also, since content kind of falls into service and product — I’ll be able to explain it more.

And I know… we all live our busy lives and adding a side hustle seems like a bit of a stretch, so let’s just agree on something. We want our side hustle to fit 4 categories:

1. Flexibility — It is flexible enough for us to make more of it when we have time, or a less of it when we are busy. Also, ideally — it is available for you online, so you can work from anywhere in the world.

2. Income — We obviously want to make money with our side hustle, so it has to give us some income. If you don’t sell anything — it’s just a hobby

3. Joy — Unless you are in the lucky 1% — you don’t really find enjoyment in your job 24/7 — so… we want the side hustle not to feel like a job, but something we can enjoy.

4. Sustainability — If you hate it — you don’t go far with it. If it doesn’t give you money through a long period of time — it will not be sustainable and make no sense. You know… the general idea.

I also made a video about this topic if you are more of a

So… With this way too long intro… let’s just get to the side hustle ideas.

1. Copywriter, proofreader (SERVICE) 
   If you cannot stand bad grammar or like reading books — this may be a great side hustle for you — by doing what you love most (and probably taking some courses about it as well) you can create a thriving business on fiverr, upwork, or other freelancer websites. You don’t need any audience to start, the clients are provided by those platforms. Starting price is 0$ and you can set it up from the comfort of your house within an hour. This fits into the SERVICE category, but if you don’t want to work on other people’s writing you can also become a…

2. Writer (CONTENT) 
   Now being a writer means that you can start writing about anything in the world that you enjoy, collect the audience of people, who enjoy your writing or the topics you are covering, and then monetise through sponsorships, courses, products etc. Set up costs however much your website will cost, or a membership on websites such as Medium, which should help you out in creating your audience. Medium also pays its writers for their work on a “per-read” basis. But that’s not all — you can also create a consultation business and make people pay 100–500$ per hour of conversation and consultation with you about the topics you are already passionate about. Yes, possibilities are endless. And this actually falls under the CONTENT category.

3. Content curator (CONTENT) 
   If your dreams don’t get to “showing your face in front of a camera and talking to it” as content creators do — remember that being a content CURATOR — is actually a thing. You can create a nameless channel or account curating the content that has already been made. You do need to learn how those things work and how to grow on those platforms though.
   Now… with content we need to kinda stop for a second. Because the thing with content is that:
   They do take some time to actually succeed
   They actually keep you in the minus, until you can start monetising. So they can keep you without our point number 2. Income. At the same time we need to face the hard truth — it doesn’t matter what some people tell you — there’s no such thing as an overnight success. There’s no magical way for 5.000$/month within 30 days. Those things take time. And if you are about to fuss about it — remember how long university is before you can start doing things. Add the first jobs as junior to it. Or waiting for any “promotions” — things take time, ok? No help in that. And I won’t lie to you — my main YouTube channel was in a negative for some solid years before I started monetising it, and my business started escalating just last year (thanks covid for stopping the first success escalation). And my travel & freedom channel started the monetisation in just 9 months!

4. Content manager. (SERVICE) If you want to learn how social media platforms work and you are getting good at it — consider helping a content CREATOR with their CONTENT MANAGEMENT. Basically you grab videos, photos, podcasts or whatever from a creator… manage it, make it platform-friendly, schedule it and make sure that things are always top-notch, on time etc. This is a service-based business idea, but it is really growing in popularity. you can search linkedin for social media content managers for various companies — it’s a thing — and it’s well-paid as well. This is good for people that enjoy social media, but don’t necessarily want to be on it as themselves. Or don’t want to create content. it’s a pretty sweet deal. And I am actually considering getting a manager of my own now that we are talking about it.

5. Thumbnail designer (SERVICE) Again… To make money we need to provide value to people who are willing to pay for this value. One of such a groups of people is content creators like me. And most of us have a one, huge bottleneck — time. I know how important titles, thumbnails and the whole shabang are — and I am more than willing to pay someone to take this responsibility off my shoulders and do it better than I do. But… How to find such jobs? A couple of options:

• Fiverr, Upwork or any other freelancing website (although there’s a lot of saturation)

• Or, a better idea is to email creators you personally like and feel similar to style-wise.
  
  

What I mean by this is to write emails with proposals to creators that may benefit from your service. And not any type of “hello sir/madam My name is John Smith and I create Thumbnails. Hire me” To be fair whenever I see emails not even mentioning my name or nickname — they go straight to trash. And if I could get a penny out of each email that called me a “sir” — that would create a passive income stream by itself. ANYWAY Send your fav creator a redesigned thumbnail and ask what their thoughts are. The key to this is to re-create the vibes that creators are putting into their work and doing a better job than they did!

Not saying “Go, become a thumbnail designer. But it’s one of the things people would happily pay for. The list DOES go on. All you have to do is to learn some skills. 

6. Research assistant (SERVICE) Going down the rabbit hole of online jobs for creators is a research assistant — because people like I script our videos and sometimes need some research to back things up or do a research on what works right now. If you like researching things and writing about them — this may be an amazing job possibility for you. Approach to creators is a bit harder on this one, and you can look for some jobs on linkedin. Otherwise I’d probably wait for a creator to announce that they are hiring for real. This is also a position that is useful for writers, newsletters, blog writers, journalists etc. 

7. Web Designer (SERVICE) Oldschool, but working. There’s a lot of people willing and happy to pay for a great web design. There’s a huge demand for GOOD WEB DESIGNER. You will have to learn a skill, get good and keep learning all the time. You can start from 0$ with courses available on codeacademy, or EDX, and then move forward to paid programs. You can sell your service on fiverr, upwork or create your web design company that is absolutely self-sufficient. There are many website hosting platforms now that don’t need that much of coding, but they still need good design, writing and well… some code. It’s a great way to make money, especially once you are known as the GOOD ONE. 

8. Video Editor (SERVICE) This comes back to content creators and companies. You can find those jobs on facebook groups, linkedin or with your fav creators. The idea is easy — You need to be able to edit videos better than your fav creator and offer it as a service. A lot of knowledge and learning included, but video editors can earn extreme amounts of money per video/hour depending on how you charge. 

9. Content Creator for a company (SERVICE) or UGC creator I have recently seen rivian posting this type of a job on linkedin.

Picture — LinkedIn Screenshot

Becoming a content creator for a company or business can be extremely well-paying and if you already have experience coming from content management, content curation, general writing and video editing (yes, all as a package) — this may be the one for you. Still not showing your own face — but making loads of money out of what you enjoy doing most. Which hopefully would be connected with content in general.

Now again — I am not saying that most side hustles now are connected with content in any way, shape or form… those are ideas and possibilities of side hustles that present value to a client that may happily pay for your service. As I mentioned before — possibilities for those side hustles are absolutely endless.

And before you click off this extremely long article I’d like you to leave me a comment saying what was your take away and action point for yourself that you’ll take out of this video. I am generally interested and want to see you succeed. So we can have a conversation.

Need help figuring things out?

If you have a ton of ideas, but you are unsure what would make the most sense to start with — you can schedule a consultation call with me. I cannot wait to hear your ideas and help you structure it, so you can start monetising fast.

If you won’t take any action from this long article— reading it made a little to no sense. Unless you like my writing… that’s fine

And as I mentioned — we haven’t even gotten to the product-side of things, because this article would be even longer, so check out my last article to learn more about my personal passive income/product ideas that can make you money.

Thank you so much for reading and see you in the next one!

Bye Bye!