7 Side Hustles to earn 1000€ per month
What is a Side Hustle
A Side Hustle is a job in addition to the main job (either a main job or studies) to get an extra income. Although the origin of these jobs was due to not being able to make ends meet, and having the need to generate other income to meet the cost of living, today we find that not all are done out of necessity. Today we can see people who dedicate themselves to a multitude of additional jobs to generate extra income, to discover new jobs or to get started in a different sector or market.
It is important to take the first steps now with these 7 examples in order to generate more and more income, planting the seed now.
Some classic examples of Side Hustles that many of us have heard or done are babysitting, tutoring students or reselling a product (or the classic scene of a kid selling lemonade at the door of his house in an American movie). However today we will see some ways to have an additional job with which we can generate extra income, whether they are jobs that involve a more or less active dedication.
It is important to emphasize and keep in mind that any exchange of our time or resources in exchange for an income is based on the value provided by our product or service. In this way, we must think primarily about how we are going to generate value, in order to be able to charge for it. There is no easy or quick way and without investment of time with which we can earn money passively, no matter how much the ads on Youtube videos insist on pointing out the contrary.
💡 In order to make money it is essential to generate or add value, there is no magic formula to make money.
In Google you can find hundreds of options to earn money while you continue with your main activity, but today I am going to propose 7 ideas for you to start earning money.
7 Side Hustles to earn 1000€ per month
1. Affiliate Marketing (Affiliate programs)
The first idea is to become an affiliate marketer. What does Affiliate Marketing mean? It is nothing more than selling or recommending products from other companies or stores and in return you get a commission for each transaction. By acting as an intermediary between the buyer and the seller, you receive a reward from the company you are recommending. In return, sometimes the buyer or user can benefit from a discount or a free product or service.
Why become an Affiliate Marketer?
Approximately half of the Affiliate Marketers worldwide earn more than $1,500 per month, taking into account those who do it full time and those who do it just occasionally.
With affiliate programs, and with a large enough audience, you can make a living simply by recommending products.
For example the case of Amazon (largest affiliate program). Anyone who buys through your link, Amazon will pay you a %. For example, if I recommend a Kindle Paperwhite (which by the way, I use every day and is the best investment I could make), which has a price of about 140€, and I get a 2% commission, I would earn 2.80€. To earn approximately €100 a month, you would need people to buy the product 35 times a month. To achieve something like this, you have to take into account how much percentage of your audience, or the people you reach with this message, buy the product when you recommend it. To get about 35 sales per month of a product like this, you would need between 3000 and 5000 people to reach with your message (these values are approximate and based on the average conversion rate, but can vary in each case and of course with the type of audience. There are much more specific niches where the conversion rate can be much higher.
Continuing with the Amazon example, the higher the price of the product, the higher your commission will be, but it will probably also lower the percentage of people who end up buying the product.
The good thing is that you can have a multitude of affiliate programs at the same time that all together start generating higher income.
2. Start a podcast or a YouTube channel
Another way to start earning extra income is by creating content, in this case video or audio. The main advantage of this is that it is very easy to get started, although the difficulty lies in the constancy of continuing to publish content even if you do not see the results immediately.
The formula for growth is Create, Publish and Repeat.
CREATE content that your audience is looking for (and that you like, as it will be a long road), PUBLISH on Youtube at least once a week, and REPEAT this process for 2 years. Normally it is after 2 years when Youtube channels start to take off. The reality is that it is not easy to hold on for two years without seeing growth (or monetary) results, added to the fear of “what will they say” when exposing yourself to the opinion of strangers (and friends), but if you do not hold on long enough you may have come very close to achieving your goal.
Now in Youtube to start monetizing your content you need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of content viewed by the audience to start generating income. The average on Youtube is 90 videos uploaded until you reach those numbers (almost two years at one video a week). Once you reach that point, the average CPM (what you pay for every 1000 views) is 2€, so uploading 1 video a week, if you get 15,000 people to watch each video, it would be 60,000 people per month, or 120€ of benefits.
Once we have reached this number of visits we can also generate income through advertisements, or through affiliate marketing that we mentioned before to lead your audience to the products or services with which you generate a commission.
A podcast will be similar, but it will not generate revenue from ads as Youtube does, but it will rely on the ads that you make as sponsors in your own podcast in order to generate revenue.
The advantage however is that it is easier to get started, you usually require less equipment and time investment in editing, and it is usually less embarrassing to start publishing your voice in an audio format, than a video in which you appear (although in reality, you can create a YouTube channel in which you never appear, talking about the topics you like using infographics, drawings, images, etc.).
3. Small Business Writer (Email / Content Marketing)
One of the fastest ways to get started is by copywriting or writing content for other companies or people. It is a very easy way to start, although it is difficult to keep growing if we do not dedicate time and energy to keep improving the way we write.
One way to get started in this world is to look for companies that you like, sign up for their newsletters and see what they could improve, then do a better email on your own and send it to them to see if they would hire you. If a company (especially if it is a startup or small company, where it is possible that the person sending the email is someone from the founding team) sees that someone is helping them to improve their content, they will automatically be interested in you for having taken the time to improve their copy. It is very possible that many of the companies you reply to will never reply to you, or they will reply but will not be interested in hiring your services, so there will be an investment of time that will not be immediately rewarded. However, you should see it as an investment in your improvement as a writer, which you can also use to attract new companies with examples of how you write.
The next step (or at the same time) is to subscribe to well-known platforms such as Fiverr or Upwork, or others such as Malt.
To generate about 100€ per month in this way, we will have to find clients, on our own or on the previous platforms, who will hire us on a continuous basis. You will be able to decide your price you want to charge per hour (maybe it would be interesting to start low, and go up as the ratings go up). Assuming you start at 10€ per hour, you would need to hire, for example, 5 people for a job of 2h each.
Although it is difficult to start earning a lot of money, there are people who started by charging very little per hour and ended up earning $378,000 per year. It’s all about consistency and improving the quality of the work to also increase the price we charge per hour of work.
4. Create a course (or give online classes)
Another great side hustle that is also a way to earn money passively (once you have made a course and spent time building it, the subsequent earnings will be passive) is by creating a course on some content, process, language, etc. on which you have some degree of expertise.
You can start as something as simple as online tutoring, whether it is language (Spanish for foreigners, for example) or school subjects. There are sites like superprof, tusclasesparticulares (and many more sites dedicated to private lessons) or even Milanuncios (a Spanish second hand market website) to offer your private tutoring services, either online or in the place where you live. To teach languages, in addition to these platforms, there are several dedicated exclusively to languages, such as italki, where you can even earn money simply by having a conversation in a language so that the other person can practice.
The process is simple, you need to think about what skills or knowledge you have that you want to teach, and then you need to find people who are willing to pay to learn your skills or knowledge.
Starting for something like 10–12€ per hour until you build a certain audience and reputation, you can get a good second income (for italki where it’s just a conversation, maybe the entry price would be around 5€), and assuming you only have 3 classes of 1 hour at 10€/h per week you could already earn 120€ extra per month. Of course, as you gain experience and renown you will be able to increase the price of your classes. Another strategy would be to perform these online services for clients in areas of the world where the cost and standard of living is higher, and you can charge more for your services.
The next level would be to create an online course, so that you can generate content that then allows you to generate income without having to be actively devoting your time to it. It can be of the same content (languages, subjects, etc.) on platforms such as Youtube, or more specialized platforms such as Udemy, Tutellus or Platzi (and many more).
The calculation here is simpler. You can have a course with a price of 10€ that you will have to sell 10 times a month, or a premium course oriented to another audience, valued at 100€ that you will only have to sell 1 time a month to get that extra 100€.
Here it will be important to have good quality in the course, good video material and of course, good quality content that adds value in order to get new students while you don’t spend time on it. Again, the key here is great quality content. Once created you will be able to sell the course for a price you choose and get traffic to your course so they can buy it.
5. Employee Referrals (Candidate referrals for companies)
Another seemingly simple way to get some extra income is by recommending job candidates. Companies often find it very difficult to attract talent, and your work here can be that of an intermediary who can help them solve their problem (it is always about adding value).
There are many people who do this professionally, known as Head Hunters.
There are other candidate recommendation networks and platforms, and networks such as Nova also have a job recommendation system.
Another way to generate money this way is to look at companies that are looking for people. You can look for who among your contacts would fit into these companies or positions you have found. The more specific the role and the person you know who might fit, the more leverage you will have. Finally you can contact the company to sell your lead, telling them that you know the perfect candidate and that if everything goes well and they end up hiring them you will charge them a commission. You can also start by saying that you are going to recommend a person to them, and if they end up hiring them, ask them for a donation for the work done. This can be a way to get started and understand the ins and outs of how head hunting works.
You can do this same job by making recommendations within your own company. At AWS I get a bonus for each employee I refer, and the person I refer skips the first stage of the process (if you are interested, send me a message on Linkedin). Many other companies offer the same, so ask your HR department if you don’t know of a similar program (or suggest one yourself!).
In this case it is difficult to calculate how much you could earn, since it can go from a very low commission to very high commissions (in many companies they pay bonuses of more than 6000 USD), so you will be able to see how profitable this side hustle is as you go along.
6. Buying and selling on Amazon (arbitrage)
Arbitrage on marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay consists of buying a product in a store where you see that it is cheaper than on these platforms, and then reselling it for a higher price. Prices on sites like Amazon are constantly changing, and you can take advantage of low moments of stock in these stores, where the price goes up, to sell your products. A common practice in the US is to go to places like Walmart where they have a sale section, and then sell this product at a normal price on eBay or Amazon. You can also go to wholesale stores where there may be discounted prices (a product at 50%) that you can then sell for the market price on Amazon.
In the USA there are many people doing this for many years, and some making millions of dollars a year doing it.
The good thing about this system is that when you buy the product at the time, you do not have to wait to manufacture the product or buy it in large quantities, if not go looking at what times you can earn more money and then work on it. You can instantly calculate Amazon’s costs for their FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) program so you don’t have to deal with shipping costs, or the direct selling model where you take care of the shipping, and Amazon takes less commission. Amazon also has its own app to scan products if you are registered as a seller. You will also be able to see what reviews the product has on your competitor’s Amazon page, or if they use FBA and have Prime shipping, to know whether or not you should lower the price or use the FBA service.
In order to make €100 profit, you must sell enough products whose purchase and sale price difference will ensure this income.
7. Create unique experiences on Airbnb or for corporate retreats.
Another very original way to earn income is by creating experiences on Airbnb for (or not) tourists. Airbnb is one of the most used platforms in the tourism sector, and you can take advantage of this great pull to create experiences on this app. You can start by first practicing with friends, organizing activities that you are good at or that you like, such as a Cooking Workshop, a Tour of your city or a more special Tour. Remember that there are a lot of tourist tours out there, and here you will want to give something special to attract people to your tour. It can be something like a bike tour, a tour of your favorite bars (like this idea from @nomadito for bars in Seville), an excursion to places little known to tourists, or a tapas tour! You can create a special experience in your city and generate revenue this way, the possibilities are practically endless.
Another good idea related to this, and interesting since the great implementation of teleworking since Covid-19, is to create this type of experiences but for companies. Since workers are teleworking from home, and often in other cities, there are few opportunities to interact in person. Companies are looking for ways to connect their workers with each other in a meaningful way. With these types of activities they aim to foster teamwork and motivate their workers. Therefore creating retreat experiences for companies can be an equally great idea. It can be renting a rural house and organizing in it different team activities, a trip to the beach with activities, a tapas excursion (tapas are never too much) or some scape rooms in a rural house.
This can also become a full time activity and organize this kind of activities online for all those remote workers. There are virtual scape room ideas and you can offer this or something similar. There are also many ideas for team bonding activities that could be done online. As for employee referrals, you could start doing this for free, and in return ask for referrals to other companies to do this kind of activities.
I hope you liked all these examples of how to earn money in 7 different ways. The options within these 7 examples are unlimited and you can customize all these activities to your preferences and ideas. In addition to these 7 there are many more ways to earn money, some more original than others, and we can talk about others later.
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