10+ Ideas for Earning Extra Money Online with Side Hustles

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To hustle is to move towards obtaining or completing a goal. Don’t let the name fool you though. Side hustles can and do become real businesses. All businesses, including part time ones, require work, so hustlers work hard. You can hustle with the skills you already have, but to become better at hustling you need to continue learning new skills.

10 passive income ideas for earning extra money with side hustles

Reasons for making extra money – The reasons for people to hustle or hold side gigs are all different. You may want to quit your job and replace it with side gigs. You may want to keep your job and make some extra money. You may want to retire or semi retire early. You want to get rid of debts or maybe buy a house. Every hustler has his/her unique reason. Also, you may just want to be your own boss.

How I earned extra money – I started my side gigs (freelance online writing and my first blog) in 2010 to help with the bills and to keep myself busy. This, after becoming a stay-at-home mom.

I worked in Banking 9-6, sometimes 9-7 and couldn’t see doing that forever. Also, I was coming home to my little ones all tired with no energy. Thankfully, I figured out how to make money from my side gigs and haven’t looked back.

First, I joined an online community of freelance writers that paid me royalties for my articles. After a few months, I started making some money and after a 1.5 years I was making $2,000/month. The company decided to buy all the content up, so I had to sell. I received a 5 figures lump sum for my library of articles, all 420 of them.

The money was good, but I had no more passive income coming in. I was already bitten by the passive income bug, so it was time to figure something out. [Here comes my first own blog]

Second, because I couldn’t make extra money with that online community anymore, I created my first Personal Finance blog, in a foreign language. I figured competition will be lower than the general market. You know demand and supply. That blog is still running after 8 years.

Lessons learned from that experience – One, never just set up one passive income stream. Two, set up your own platform that you can control and not depend on someone else’s platform that they can control.

Traits of a hustlers – Want to be a digital hustler? Here are some things to keep in mind. A hustler keeps an open mind, challenge himself, learn new things, work his business hard, have fun and find meaning in their work. A hustler should have or develop an entrepreneur mind set. The reason for this is because everything depends on you. Sure, you can set your own schedules and goals and even outsource some things, still all falls on you.

Self care for hustlers – Once you’re in the game, here are some things to start doing. Hustlers in the digital world use their heads a lot for new ideas and to implement those ideas. Because of this, hustlers should do activities that can ground them regularly. Running, hiking, practicing a sport, going to the beach, taking vacations and staying off line for some periods. Those are all things that can improve your health, mind set, and general well being.

So with all that, here are 10 passive income ideas for side gigs to make extra money. These will generate passive or semi passive income. Some of them may require that you learn a new skill.

The good news is that there are so many free and easy ways to learn new skills online. The better news is that once you learn these skills, not only can you apply them to your side gigs/businesses, but you can also teach them to other – and make money.

As a bonus, I included side gigs which are not passive, but can have flexible schedules. These are more real or traditional economy side gigs, these jobs still exists.

Learning and working to make extra money can be life changing, here are some benefits.

Create passive income for a long time
Opting for retiring early
Taking more vacations
Spending more time with family
Paying your debts or mortgage off
keeping a lower stress lifestyle
Stop living paycheck to paycheck

Make Money Online

There are many opportunities to work online due to technology. You can work from anywhere or from your home. These jobs are typically flexible in terms of schedules too. You can work 3, 5 hours or make it into a true part time or full time opportunity or even a full fledged business.

1)Create your own blog

Creating your own blog is my top recommendation to make extra money for the long term. You can blog about any hobby or expertise you may have and make money, There is a market or a niche for everything. Everything can be monetized, not in the same way, but monetized nevertheless.

You can monetize a blog with banner ads, like Adsense, with sponsored posts, with affiliates sales and with your own digital products. The skills you need to make extra money with a blog are; writing, a hobby or expertise, learning some basic SEO and doing some social network promotions.

I recommend your own blog to make extra money online from home because it can open so many opportunities for you. Opportunities such as, teaching your craft and making money from it.

Check out my article: How to Start your Own Blog

2)Teach Online

Teaching any subject can make you money online. However, teaching English is specially desirable. Teachers can also create their own blogs and sell ebooks and lessons plans to keep a flexible schedule.

Teachers can make money online by teaching English to kids worldwide. Generally, you’ll need a bachelor degree and fluency in English. There are many platforms, so you’ll need to decide what are your goals and needs when choosing one. Are you looking for flexible schedules? Good pay?.

Platforms like, VIPKID, Teach Away, Qkids, GoGokids (this one has a $300 bonus) and EnglishHunt are some of the ways to teach English online and make a set hourly rate. You can also set your schedule and even travel as you work.

Related content: How to make extra cash as a teacher

3)Make money as a Virtual Assistance

Virtual Assistance help businesses, big and small, with tasks that needs to be done to run the business efficiently. Tasks such as social media sharing, scheduling social media posts, making appointments for speaking engagements, conferences, travels. Some VA may also do graphic designs and email marketing for businesses.

4) Email Marketing

Businesses use email marketing to connect and develop relationships with clients. You can do email marketing for other businesses or run your own business focusing on email marketing. If you become very knowledge, you can sell an email marketing ebook or course.

5) Create a course and teach it to people on your niche

Develop a course on your expertise or niche and teach it online. This form of teaching and learning is very popular and there are a few platforms that make them possible. Teaching platforms like Teachable, Click4Course, DigitalChalk, Thinkific make the creation and delivery of online teaching material possible. This field is growing very fast, therefore there will be newer platform coming to the market.

6) Freelance Writer

Are you a good writer? Freelance writers offer online content writing for magazines, blogs and other sites. Freelance writers also offer academic writing services to students and user’s manual writing to businesses. Jobs network like Upwork, Freelancer, Problogger, Blogging Pro advertise writing gigs on their job boards.

7) Web designer

This is a great way to make money online because every business needs a webpage nowadays. Web designers create the look and feel of online pages and sometimes they may create content. Freelance work for web designers can be found on Freelancer and Upwork.

8) Affiliate Markting

Affiliate marketing works by recommending products to your readers or audience. Your job is to write or show your audience how to use the products and the benefits. The customers use your link or code to purchase the products and you get a commission from the sale.

You need to apply and be accepted by the company whose products you want to promote. Once accepted you can start including the company’s affiliate link on your posts, emails or seminars.

For affiliates partners you can start looking into these companies affiliae programs; Amazon associates, Commission Junction, ShareASale, and Clickbank.

9) Create and sell ebooks

Ebooks are still popular forms to teach or to tell a story. Platforms like NOOK Press, iBooks, Google Play, Lulu and CreateSpace have made ebooks publishing easy.

Creating your own blog can help you sell your ebook to a ready audience.

10) Video Transcriber/Editor/Producer

Transcribing videos means that you add a transcript (text) to the video. Instead of listening to the audio, a person reads the transcript. Videos are transcribed for different reasons; easier to index on search engines, more shareable, more users (some people don’t like or can’t listen to audio).

Video editor and producer are the more traditional videos activities where you create videos and edit video’s content. You can find freelance video gigs on platforms like Upwork and Indeed.

Make extra money by creating a side business

Even though the internet offers great opportunities to make a living or extra money online, you can still make money on the side with a traditional hustle. Do it on your own or join an established business.