So you’ve decided you want to make some extra money and not sure of where to start.
This guide will surely be of help to you. Infact, it is the best thing you will read today.
Here you’ll learn:
5 small business ideas (#4 will blow your mind)
The exact steps you need to get going
Free workshops to improve your skills
Why start a side hustle or small business?
So, you can start for any reason.
For most people, it’s the need for some extra money.
For others, they’re tired of their 9-5 and in search of something that can eventually be a full time job.
Whatever the reason, you can definitely succeed if you put your mind to it.
Nothing good comes easy though.
You need to give it your 100%.
Even if you have only one hour a day to dedicate to your small business.
Give your best in that time.
I can assure you that you will see results.
My Etsy small business started 3 months ago and has brought in this amount of sales.
Not a lot by some people’s standards.
However, I spend less than 1hr a week maintaining my listings, so this is pretty good sales in my opinion. It’s a print on demand shop by the way if you were wondering.
The only difference between you and I is that I did not just read about print on demand and walk away. I actually set it up and guess what, it paid off and will continue to.
You can too.
If you’ve tried a business that has failed in the past, I understand your hesitancy.
But I’m sure there were lessons learnt and that this time you can try even harder to make things work.
Just follow the steps in this guide, and leave a comment if you need more information or further guidance.
With all that out of the way, now let’s jump into the awesome ideas I have for you today.
The first thing to do when you want to start a small business is to take stock of your skills.
What are you good at? What can you do without great effort.
Are you good at writing? Can you create a design to save your finances? Or Would you prefer to sell your old stuff for money?
First Let’s go over what you can do if you like writing.
1. Writing small business ideas
Offer your writing services as a freelancer.
Many businesses, websites, and publications are in constant need of quality content.
You can write articles, blog posts, website copy, product descriptions, and more on a freelance basis.
You can also write video scripts or help job seekers write their resumes.
Platforms like Upwork, Freelancer, and Fiverr can help you find clients and gigs.
Flexjobs is also a great place to look.
You can also search for writing jobs on problogger.com.
Ultimately you choose what you want to write and when you want to write. Writing is a very flexible small business.
Your action plan: go and sign up to at least one of these today and create a profile (Fiverr, upwork, Flexjobs or freelancer).
Then join Facebook groups for bloggers to see if you can find potential bloggers who need to hire writers.
What if you are fantastic at designing?
Small business ideas for a designer at heart
Now you have a number of options but we’ll focus on the options that can make more money.
Your two options are Print on demand or creating digital products.
Let’s go over print on demand first.
2. Start a Print on demand side hustle
If you have a passion for graphic design, combining it with the print-on-demand model can be a fantastic way to monetize your skills.
The concept is simple.
Here's how you can make money with print on demand as a graphic designer:
1. Think about a product you can sell: The most popular Print on demand items are t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, home decor items, and more.
2. Now create a design for it: This design doesn't have to be anything serious. It can be an inspirational or sarcastic text or a simple flower. See below.
credit: Etsy
Protip: Use Everbee for free to spy on high selling products on Etsy.
3. Choose a Print-on-Demand Platform: Sign up with a reputable print-on-demand platform such as Printful, Printify, or Redbubble. These platforms handle the printing, packaging, and shipping processes for you, allowing you to focus solely on designing.
4. Set Up an Online Store: The best place to start is Etsy if you’re new to online selling. An Etsy store is super easy to set up. You get charged $0.20 to list a product, but you make it back in no time. Add compelling product descriptions and high-quality images to showcase your designs effectively.
5. Market Your Products: use Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest to market like your life depends on it.
Have you heard that people only buy from a brand after the 5th to 7th time they see or interact with it? So get Posting! Post your designs online especially on Pinterest.
Why 'especially on Pinterest'?
Because 250 million people come on Pinterest to look for inspiration.
Why would you ignore such amazing source of traffic?
For Pinterest, use relevant hashtags. You must have heard about search engine optimisation (SEO).
Without using hashtags and the right keywords that people search for, you’re making sure people don’t find or buy your designs and we don’t want that.
If you have a budget, consider running targeted ads to reach potential customers.
Print on demand in a nutshell:
Credit: ecommerce CEO
Take action: Think of what you want to sell > spy on competitors with Everbee > Create a design in Canva > Sign up with Printify or printful to handle printing, packaging and shipping > list your product on Etsy > give marketing your 100%.
3. Selling Digital printables on Etsy as a side hustle
The next option to make money if you are slightly good at design is to sell digital printables.
What exactly are printables?
Printables are digital products you make once and people can print and use. Here is an example I created for myself.
You can make serious money selling these sort of templates. Planners, habit trackers, budgeting templates, printable challenges, meal plan templates do really well on Etsy. We know people that are making $4000-$8000 by selling these printables.
For this business you can even succeed without any experience by using fantastic templates from Gold city Ventures.
Julie from Gold city ventures offers loads of great templates you can buy, modify to your liking and resell as your own.
So this means you can get started with this today!
Action points to start
Pick a niche: pick a niche that sells
You can never go wrong with niches like weddings, baby showers, self development, bridal parties, and seasonal items i.e Halloween, Easter and Christmas. This free workshop can help you identify other highly profitable niches.
Do your research: Once you’ve picked a niche, then you do your research to see what is actually popular or selling. You can check Pinterest for ideas.
I also use Everbee for research. With Everbee you get to see the revenue, number of sales, and listing age of any item selling in Etsy.
This will give you some inspiration on what to create and sell.
Speaking to Julie, she made her first 5 figures selling Bachelorette scavenger hunt templates she designed using Canva and Adobe Illustrator.
I’ld recommend you use Canva for your template design. Canva is ideal for beginners. You can use it for free, but you certainly get more out of the paid pro version which is around $12.99 a month.
Sell online: Once you create your printable, you’ll put it on Etsy for sale. You’ll need to write a good description and title that includes the actual key words that people type into Etsy to search for your product. For example if I was selling a daily habit tracker. I would have keywords such as productivity, daily habits, self improvement in the title of my product and in the description.
Promote: You should promote your template on Pinterest, Instagram or Facebook. Social media is a great way to get your items in front of people who will buy.
There’s a little bit more to nailing selling on Etsy.
Julie also offers a free workshop and course you can sign up to if you’ld like to learn more.
4. Make money online with ai ( ChatGPT!) <my favourite side hustle>
By now you must have heard about Chatgpt, the artificial intelligence chatbot that can create anything.
Some even refer to it as an assistant.
You can ask it any question and get an answer. Entrepreneurs are taking full advantage of this gold mine.
See a simple example below.
I asked Chatgpt to give me 7 ideas I can write about on my blog. See below.
Another day, I also asked Chatgpt to write a code for a savings calculator I put on my website. It did it.
I embedded this code on my website. See what it looks like here.
If you’ve never used Chatgpt before, you should spend some time there and it will blow your mind!
So how can you make money with chatGPT?
One of the common ways is to get ideas for a blog like I do. With your blog you can make money by selling digital products, or through affiliate marketing and eventually ads. This is how to set up a money making blog if you’re interested.
The next option is to create and sell e-books.
Your book could be anything. From children’s books, to short romantic stories for teens, to recipe books.
Using romantic short stories as an example, i'll demonstrate how you can create an ebook using chatGPT.
I can start by telling Chatgpt to write me a romantic short story about two teenagers whose love for gaming brought them together. I will specify that I want a happy ending.
And it will! A lovely story, not plagiarised.
I can simply take this story as it is, get it into a book template on Canva, add pictures and list it on Amazon kindle to sell.
I can also edit it a bit if I want.
And if I want Chatgpt to write more, I can simply type in “add more to the story”. And it’ll keep writing.
P.s note that these examples are basic illustrations. You can give Chatgpt more refined prompts. A prompt is an instruction. For example, you can tell Chatgpt the writing tone you want, if you want a witty or conversational tone or if you want to sound like “Michelle Obama”. Yes you can! You should explore Chatgpt more and know that the only limit is how far you can imagine.
Once you’re happy with your book, you need to get the cover page. You can ask a graphic designer to create one but that might cost you a fortune. So we use ChatGPT!.
You simply tell it to describe what the cover of this story book should look like so you can get an ai to create it.
Something like this:
Now I can take this description to Midjourney, another fantastic ai that converts text to pictures, and ask it to draw this book cover for me. See below.
These are completely AI generated, no one else has a book that looks like this.
I’ll go ahead and choose the cover I like the most, which is this one!
Pause for a minute. I just created a book and a cover.
Now Imagine all of the things you could create and sell with Midjourney and Chatgpt.
These tools create things in less than a minute, so you can create and test as many products as possible until you find what works for you or your audience.
Check out my post on other things you can create including coloring books for children or adults which sell like crazy.
The best way to get sales for your books and anything you create:
Take advantage of trends - halloween, back to school, Christmas, Easter.
Do Keyword research : I use Keysearchco and Everbee to find out what types of books are people searching for. You can also use semrush or neilpatel.
Sell on your own platform as well as on a third party market place like Etsy
Advertise on social media platforms. A must!
Use a blog if you like.
Sell to your email list- read here to learn how to create an email list
Create a YouTube channel, if you don’t mind being in front of the camera. Although faceless YouTube channels are also a thing.
These are all great ways to get your products in front of the right audience.
To use Chatgpt you simply create an account here. You can use it for free. There is a paid version but I haven’t found any need for it yet so I have continued to use the free version and so can you.
To use midjourney ai, you can sign up here. It is not free, but you can imagine why. It’s such a great resource tool.
5. Start a drop servicing business
Last on the list. If you absolutely do not want to do any work but you think you'll be great as a middle man. i.e connecting clients to freelancers, then dropservicing is for you.
The concept is simple. Identify a service people need a lot e.g video editing. Create a professional website or landing page to offer video editing services. Find freelancers on Fiverr who do video editing, try them out and choose the best. If the freelancer on Fiverr charges $50 per video, put the price on your website at $100.
When you get an order, outsource to your trusted freelancer and keep the profit $100-$50= $50.
It’s a really simple model with potential to make huge profit. You don’t get to do the work, all you need to do is market the service and find customers. There’s more to nailing dropservicing. This post will help you get started.
Final thoughts on the 5 best side hustle ideas.
So there you have it, 5 great ideas to start now if you need money today. It doesn’t matter how much you need, $500, $1000 or $5000. These ideas all have the potential to be scaled up to a full time income.
What’s even better, most of these only require the initial effort and can become passive income streams for you. Your book and templates can carry on selling over and over again without you doing any more work. Likewise your print on demand designs.
I hope this post has inspired you to start a small business today! It is a lot to take in, so pin this post so you can come back anytime you need it.
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Have you checked out our popular post on 64 ways to make extra money?
Do you really know how to save the money you already have? Check out these 25 solid ways to save the money you make!
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