Alan R. Simon - Side Hustles For Dummies

Ravi’s sister Maira, a junior at the same school Ravi attends, also has an entrepreneurial focus. Ever since her freshman year, she has been creating YouTube videos with fashion tips. This year, she expects to make close to $15,000 in ad-sharing money from her videos.

Ravi’s and Maira’s next-door neighbor Paula has been living in the same house for the past 40 years and is now the last remaining original homeowner from when the development was first opened. Paula was a college professor for most of her professional life, but she retired five years ago. After six months of reading and going for long walks, Paula started to get a little restless. She had always been high-energy, filling her days with not only teaching and other university-related tasks but also several hobbies, most notably scrapbooking and stamping. She still spends a fair bit of her time with those hobbies, but now she also makes YouTube videos from which she earns some decent money from placed ads.

Kelsey just turned 50 and retired from her city’s public school system after 25 years teaching elementary school. With a lot of free time on her hands, Kelsey is a constant presence at garage sales, swap meets, flea markets, and church bazaars all around her city. She looks for great bargains in older toys, children’s books, nostalgic Americana such as old signs and posters, and other items that she then sells on eBay and other websites. She spends around 15 to 20 hours a week buying and listing items and packing and shipping what she sold. Kelsey doesn’t make a killing, but she does make a fair bit of money to supplement her teaching pension.

Your side hustles may — and probably will — evolve over time, along with your interests and experiences. I’m a great example of this proposition. My side-hustle journey began with doing small business PC applications on the side and teaching people about then-new microcomputers. After 40 years in the technology world, I’m ready to leave databases and analytics and other techie stuff behind. I may still write a tech book or two, or do some data- and analytics-oriented videos every now and then. But I’m much more energized writing novels or doing videos about my lifelong hobby of baseball and sports cards or writing about non-tech topics … like side hustles!

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Identifying your side-hustle topical area

Fleshing out your idea

Deciding what your side-hustle venue should be

Matching up your side hustle with your full-time job or other side hustles

Tallying your financial considerations

Zeroing in on your time commitments

Identifying any special side-hustle skills or licensing

Coming up with your side-hustle short list

You’re all-in on the side hustle game — or at least the concept. But how do you even get started?

You can do an online search for “best side hustles” or “side-hustle ideas” or a similar term, and you’ll wind up with hundreds of results, many containing dozens of ideas. How do you make sense out of this information overload? How do you find the needle in the haystack: the side hustle that’s a great fit for you?

Fortunately, you can follow a methodical, step-by-step process that will help you narrow down thousands of different side-hustle ideas into a small subset that matches your interests, abilities, and goals. Specifically, you need to consider and evaluate

Various topical areas available to you to focus on for your side hustle

How to flesh out and add substance to your initial topical area

Various venues or formats through which you can enter the side-hustle game

How your side hustle should relate to your full-time job or career or possibly other side hustles that you already have underway

Financial considerations on both the moneymaking and money-spending side of your side hustle

Time considerations, including the highly valued — and often misunderstood — concept of “passive income”

Whether you need special skills, training, or licensing for your side hustle

You can then mash the results of each of these areas together, and — presto — that overwhelming list of hundreds or thousands of side-hustle ideas is now magically narrowed down for you to make your final side-hustle decisions.

Cooking!

Photography!

Fashion!

Baseball cards and sports memorabilia!

Gig-economy work, such as delivering takeout meals, providing rideshare services, or shopping and delivering groceries or other items!

Sports and exercise!

Travel!

Finance!

You have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of different topical areas — think in terms of “subjects” or “focal points” — available to you for your side hustle. Before you even think about making other critical decisions such as whether you should try to actually sell products or services versus make money from free content accompanied by online advertising, or whether you should do your side hustle on your own or partner up with somebody else, you first need to decide what topic or subject you want to use as the foundation for your side hustle.

Ask yourself some very basic questions:

What am I interested in?

What do I know a lot about?

Is there something that I know only a little about right now, but would like to learn a lot more about and maybe make some money from that new knowledge?

Besides what I’m interested in and know, is there some sort of generic activity that I can spend time doing just to make some extra money?

In general, side hustles fall into two major “buckets” that you should consider:

Side hustles built around an area of interest to you that you’d like to monetize (make money from), at least to some extent

Side hustles that aren’t necessarily interesting or exciting to you, but that still present a way for you to earn extra money beyond what you earn from your full-time job or other side hustles that you already have going