Side Hustles to Make Extra Money

Starting a side business can be one of the most rewarding things you can do. Not only because you can make a little bit of extra cash on the side but also because it can really help fuel your entrepreneurial engine, especially if you’ve got a job at the same time.

Not only that but some of the side hustles I’m about to cover can and have turned into six-figure incomes for entrepreneurs in the past, and I’m hoping after reading this article you’ll be able to do that yourself. So let’s jump into it and take a look at some of the best online business ideas you can do from the comfort of your very own home.

Let’s start off with number 8, which is selling on fiverr.com. Now, if you’ve never heard of fiverr.com, where have you been hiding? Because it is taking off like wildfire at the moment.

So what is Fiverr? Well, initially, Fiverr used to be a place where you could go and buy things for five dollars. You could go and get a logo designed for five dollars; you could get someone to write an essay for you for five dollars, anything you can imagine, really. However, nowadays, the great thing for entrepreneurs like you is that you don’t have to restrict yourself to just providing services for five dollars anymore. This is excellent news because you’re probably saying, “Carmen, I don’t want to work for $5. I can go and do pizza delivery for $5 an hour; I want more than that”. With Fiverr, you can now charge as much as you like.

So the way it works with Fiverr is say you’re really good at creating logos, you can offer to do that for £50, and there is no limit to how much you can charge. I know some people offering gigs worth hundreds of pounds, and they’re making a lot of money doing some very premium work.

The great thing about Fiverr is that there are so many things that you can do. So if you ever go over to Fiverr, you can see just some of the crazy things people are willing to do, and they are also making a lot of money doing those things just through Fiverr.

You might think, “Okay yeah, I could offer some everyday things”, and you really can sell regular gigs. For example, if you’re good at doing voiceovers, you can do that. If you’ve got the skills, you could do some professional web work. Let’s say you’re pretty good at video editing, you could even help a business out with a promotional video, and you can get paid for that. However, some really crazy things are actually on Fiverr as well. If you ever look around on there, you’ll see the incredible things people are getting paid to do.

I wanted to talk about one popular example; there’s this guy who literally dresses up like a clown, and he will wish people happy birthday, and he sings a silly song, and it looks insane, but the thing is that this guy is making a lot of money. He’s charging around about £50 to do this for each Fiverr gig, and you can imagine, he’s probably doing ten of these a day, so he’s making about five hundred pounds a day just for wishing people a happy birthday. So if he can do it, you can do it as well! There are so many things that you can do on Fiverr; the possibilities are pretty much endless.

So coming in at number seven is selling things on places like eBay, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, which you’ve found at places like Tesco or Poundland in the clearance section. This is a huge thing that’s popping up these days. So many people are catching on to the idea that you can get something really cheap in clearance sections in bricks and mortar locations, and then you can resell these to other people at a higher price online and make a good profit off of it.

To me, this is a real side hustle for people who don’t mind doing the dirty work. So the best places to sell your items are generally going to be on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. Now I know I mentioned eBay above, but there are a few caveats with that.

The first reason is that eBay deducts a lot of fees, so you have to be cautious about this because it can quickly eat into your profit margin. So eBay, for example, charges around about 10% on every item you sell on the total price, so say you sell something for £30, they’re going to take £3 off that. Now that might not seem like a lot, but it does add up quickly.

Instead, what I’d recommend is selling on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist; the reason for this is that it’s generally going to be an in-person sale. They might come to your home, or you meet at a service station or something and sell it there. Then it’s going to be a cash payment, or you’re going to use something like Venmo, so that’s probably going to be a better option because you’re going to be able to increase your profits and ultimately save more money.

From what I’ve heard, the best place to actually source items is at places like Tesco, Argos and Poundland. I’ve generally heard that Argos is the one that has the better clearance items. You can often get things that are worth £25 for around about £5, and this is most likely because they’ve done an end of season stock take and they’re trying to get rid of items so they can bring in new stuff or because they miscalculated and ordered too much of it and they didn’t end up selling it.

So what you want to do is go and look for all of the items that look like they’re worth a little bit more, make sure that they’re nice and cheap. An excellent tip is installing the store’s app because you can usually scan the barcode with the app and get better prices than on the label. Sometimes the price label might say it’s worth £5 when in actual fact, they’re giving it away for £1, so always get the app.

Now one other place that you can do this is also at places like charity shops, and I’m kind of in two minds with this, but generally, I think it’s a good idea because ultimately you’re helping them out, and they’re benefitting from your custom. So people are coming in and donating these items that they don’t need anymore. Then when you buy these items from the charity shops, you’re supporting them, and they get to keep the money. So everyone wins because you’re also going to profit on these items and continue to help them out and buy more items as you become more successful.

Next up is to drive for Uber. Now, this is a classic one, and it’s obviously only going to work if you’ve got a car, but if you’ve got a car and you don’t have anything else to do, this can be a great side hustle that you can do when you’ve got a little bit of free time.

What I’d really recommend when you’re doing anything with Uber is to up your game as much as you can when it comes to service so that you can get those good ratings and reviews because that’s what makes the difference between the people who earn a lot of money with Uber and the people who do not.

So make sure that you’re always offering free water bottles; you can get bottled water for like 20p a bottle. You can also provide things like mints and anything like that that you can give away for free in order to up the service and become a better entrepreneur. That way, you’re going to be able to get more clients and then make more money with Uber.

So coming in at number five is to become a virtual assistant, and I absolutely love this one because pretty much everyone can do this. You don’t have to have a car; you don’t have to have any kind of skill really, you can just help people out doing whatever they need you to do.

So I actually used to hire a virtual assistant. Hopefully, she’s reading, “Hey Hazel!” Hazel was super helpful by assisting me with research, helping with my emails and calendars and things like that, and that’s essentially what you would do as a virtual assistant. There’s no real difference between working in an office and remotely working on a computer.

This is a great side hustle if you’ve maybe got different reasons why you can’t actually physically work in person, or you can even do virtual assisting after your day job, especially if you’re in a country different to the country the person’s in. So say someone’s in the UK and then you’re in the US, you can work after your job because that’ll be morning time for them, so it works really well in that respect.

Obviously, a lot of work is moving online. It’s totally normal now for everyone to expect that. The majority of skilled labour is now online, so everyone’s kind of accustomed to using Microsoft teams. Everyone’s used to using Zoom or Skype calls. You can definitely do this if you want to, and not only that, you can make plenty of money being a virtual assistant too.

I used to pay my virtual assistant around about £10 an hour to help me out, as I said with just basic things like emails and calendars and stuff like that. Now, I’ve got a little tip for you, if you can learn how to do some fundamental bookkeeping, which is essentially helping people file their expenses and income for their business, you will get paid a whole lot more.

Also, if you know how to write relatively well, that’ll help, and if you know how to use social media, you can increase the amount of money that you’re going to be getting paid. So rather than getting paid £10 an hour as a virtual assistant, you can get paid £15-£25.

All right, coming in at number four is food delivery and another one of these ones which you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, I already know that’s a side hustle”, but the great thing with this is that you don’t need a car. You can use a bike or a scooter, and there’s almost always so much work available. So if you can get the work available and get the job done, you can make a lot of money.

So if you’ve got a bike, if you like to walk, if you have a scooter or an electric scooter, I’d highly recommend trying out food delivery as a good side hustle.

Number three is probably one of the best, and it’s managing social media for small businesses. So most of us know someone who owns a small business, and if you don’t know anyone who owns a small business, I’m sure that there’s plenty of small businesses in your local town or on the street nearby you and a lot of them are craving to get online, but they don’t know how to do it.

The reason for this is because a lot of them are older. Most small business owners are in their 50s, their 60s, or even in their 70s, and some of them have no idea how to use social media, but they keep on hearing that they need to get their business on social media.

So if you know how to use social media, you can go to them and say, “Look, I’ll update your business pages, I’ll update your business YouTube, Instagram, Facebook page, and I’ll do it for a monthly fee. Let’s say £300 a month”. So they’ve got this disposable income which they can write off as a tax expense, and you can do their social media for them.

What I would definitely recommend is trying to get a few different accounts. So you can maybe make £300 a month from one business. Then hopefully, you get more coming in, so let’s say you’ve got three different companies for who you’re doing social media tasks; that’s £900 extra a month that you’re making, and it’s recurring revenue.

This one really speaks to those who have either a van or a larger car than average, and that is starting your own removal service. So yes, I know it is a little bit niche, but if you have

either a van or a large car, it can be pretty lucrative. I was actually speaking to a friend the other day, and he was telling me about the services that he was offering with his van, and he told me that not only does he get paid a fee for the actual removal service, but he also gets to keep what they are getting rid of.

Now, of course, a lot of the stuff that you will get will just be complete rubbish that you will just have to take to the tip and dispose of in some way. Still, he told me that when people want to dispose of the stuff in their house, they want to get rid of all of it, and there were so many things that he was picking up that he could sell on eBay. He showed me his eBay stats, and for 60 days, he made over £10,000 in eBay sales just from picking up items with his removal service. So definitely something to look into if you’re an ecommerce reseller and you have access to a van.

So this is number one, and it can be very lucrative, what with everyone working and learning from home. This is different from creating your own course; with that, you actually have to spend time to make the course; you need to build authority and become a trusted source of information before people start purchasing. Whereas with online tutoring, if you apply and you’ve got the right skills, you can get started right away.

Now I’ve done some research about which is the best platform to sign up with to be an online tutor, and the best one that I came across was a website called MyTutor, which looks like the real deal. I read a lot of reviews about it from people that have used it and their experience. I personally haven’t used it, so I can’t give you my own experience of the platform, but from what I’ve seen and I did some pretty extensive research on it, it looks like the best one to sign up for. However, otherwise, you can still offer your online tutoring services on sites like Fiverr as well, so there’s plenty of different options to sign up for.

There are so many online tutoring sites, so make sure that you do your research before signing up and offering services on one of them. The demand for this is so high, especially with everyone staying at home, and you can offer so many things. If you have a particular skill in anything, then there is a high chance that you can do some online tutoring. Yes, you may have to set your prices a little bit lower when you haven’t got the feedback or the experience on these platforms to start with, but the good thing is that you can start making money right away.

So there you have it, eight excellent ways to start earning some money in your spare time as a side hustle. Now, if you do one of these side hustles that I covered in this article or maybe one that I haven’t mentioned that you think would be good to share, please make sure you leave it in the comments down below. We’d love to hear all about it!