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How To Make Money In Your Spare Time: Affiliate Marketing & Other Great Side Hustles

how-to-make-money

Hey there everyone, it’s Jackie here. Today we have a guest post from Victoria Greene. She offers some excellent advice for how to get your side gig on. Thank you!

How to Make Money in your Spare Time

Are you into the idea of lifestyle design and having more freedom in your day-to-day life?

As long as you’re prepared to work hard to make your dreams a reality, then starting a side hustle in your spare time could be the solution you’re looking for.

The side hustle mentality means adopting an agile approach to managing your time, and boxing off projects when you need to focus on your ‘main hustle’. Dedication and a strong work ethic are vital. And while you might find you need to put lots of hours to begin with, rewards such as increased income and the possibility of running your business full-time will definitely make it worth it in the long run.  

Here’s how to make the most of your ‘down time’.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Do you already have your own established blog? Or are you curious about building websites? If so, then affiliate marketing could be the perfect side hustle for you.

Running a blog? All you need to do next is find a company whose products you think would appeal to your target audience, and promote them yourself via an affiliate link. 99% of the time you will want to choose products and services you already know and love — and would easily recommend in a blog.

Running a blog that’s monetised through affiliate marketing isn’t hard — as long as you find the topic easy to write about and can commit to creating a few blogs a week. You will also need to spend some time and money advertising your blog to gain a steady readership.

Review Sites

For the more ambitious affiliate marketer, a fully-fledged affiliate website (often in the form of a reviews site) is another option. This one will take more work, and search engines can be suspicious of sites like these unless they offer a tonne of value to the reader.

Popular Affiliate Programs

If you think that affiliate marketing sounds like the perfect way for you to make money in your spare time, check out some well established programs such as Peerfly. Amazon’s affiliate program is also well-loved and one of the easiest ones to get set up with.

The key to affiliate success? Creating great content, and lots of it.

2. Buy Up Another Online Business

You might be surprised to learn that when it comes to starting a side hustle, it’s not always necessary to come up with your own idea or start a business from scratch. In fact, a good option to consider is buying a website, or ready-made ecommerce business instead. You get  to save on money and time, and walk into a potentially profitable business idea.

Due Diligence

The most important thing to remember when it comes to buying and selling websites is that you always need to do some due diligence checks to ensure that everything is above board.

This means taking the time to examine things like the website’s traffic to make sure that you’re not buying a sinking ship which could mean that all your hard work goes to waste. It also means thinking carefully about the niche market that you want to get into – there’s no sense in buying a website if it’s in a dying industry.

If this side hustle option interests you, then I recommend checking out Empire Flippers.  

Sometimes even just a good domain name is worth snapping up if you know you can sell it on for a tidy profit.

3. Online Teaching & Podcasting

Teaching online has exploded over the past few years. From social media coaching to teaching English —- almost anyone can pass on knowledge online.

You can even use dedicated services to create your own online course and keep selling it long after you have recorded the videos and created the materials. As well as a course format, you may want to consider webinars, social media groups, online communities, and printables as ways of imparting knowledge. Many people are happy to pay a low-level subscription fee in order to access regular expertise.

If you believe that you have great people skills then this could just be the side hustle you’re looking for. And you don’t have to focus on just academic skills either — cooking, fitness, writing, business — all these are ripe niches for a quality online course.

Teaching Online: A Flexible Schedule

You don’t need any formal teaching qualifications and the job can fit flexibly around your current workload and schedule. Best of all, there are plenty of established online tutoring companies out there that you can work for too – meaning that you don’t need to do any of the legwork yourself in order to get started!

Podcasting

Podcasting has also blown up over recent years as a great way to share and create content. All you need is a cheap microphone and some basic sound editing software and you can become a podcaster. Reach out to experienced podcasters in knowledge groups and seek sponsors and advertisers for your show. The easiest route to market — interview experts via video link to get started.

4. Dropshipping Stores

If you want a side hustle that can fit seamlessly into and around your spare hours, then dropshipping may be for you. An easy way to manage inventory, dropshipping can help you scale your ecommerce business with minimal hassle.

Whether you want to sell via Amazon, create a print-on-demand fashion label, or just create a fun store — dropshipping is an easy way to get into ecommerce with almost no experience and investment required.

Setting up the store will take a little while, so make sure you plan a long enough set up period. But once the store is running, all you will need to do is stay on top of marketing and customer queries — both which can be largely automated.

So Many Options

As you will have probably realised by now, there are lots of options out there if you want to make your side hustle happen. Of course, the one you choose needs to fit in with your personal goals and objectives, and how much time and effort you’re prepared to put in. But either way, the potential to earn money in your spare time is almost endless!

Have your Say

Are you an entrepreneur who has made money through a side hustle? What tips were most valuable to you in your early days? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so make sure you leave a comment below to share your story.

Recommended reading: Top 10 Passive Income Ideas

About the Author

Victoria Greene is a branding consultant and freelance writer. On her blog, VictoriaEcommerce, she shares tips on how writers develop their skills and entrepreneurs can branch out. She is passionate about using her experience to help freelancers grow their own businesses.

 

One Comment

  1. I started affiliate marketing back in 2009. It started off as a part-time thing. I would go to work in the day, then when I got home I would spend 2 or 3 hours working on my website. After a slow start I was earning enough to quit my job and go for it full time.

    I had about 4 good years – earning what I think was very good money. Unfortunately my websites were not the bets quality and most of them got dumped by google. I ended up going back to regular work after that – I didn’t want to rebuild. About a month ago I thought I would give it another try. I am only going to work on my website part-time though and see where it goes.

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