Start Your Side Hustle

Introduction

Thank you for your purchase of this program. We need to cover a few quick things before we dive in.

This course and its creators are not attempting to portray ourselves as experts in any field. Therefore do not make any financial, legal, medical, or life decisions based solely on the information we provide. The work here is only the opinion of the creators and is not meant to represent anyone else.

We share our personal experiences with a variety of side hustles and what we have learned about them. This is in no way a complete and comprehensive work, given that; new side hustles are popping up daily, companies, earnings, rules, and payouts may change from day to day, and we have no way of anticipating exactly how current our information will be when you receive it.

That stated, we have done our best to present the most up-to-date, thorough information including links, estimated payouts, and sources to explore.

We have had personal experience with many side hustles and many companies. We have researched side hustles for years. We include our preferences and experiences to assist in relaying information. We make NO promises that your experiences in these endeavors will be better, worse, or similar to ours. You must take responsibility for your own decisions and your future.

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE GIVE REAL COMPANY NAMES THAT YOU MIGHT CONTACT. PLEASE DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE ON ANY SITE OR COMPANY THAT YOU CHOOSE TO WORK WITH OR FOR.

A legitimate, ethical company that had integrity when we explored it may have changed and no longer be a good match today.

We use the term “popular” when listing companies because we have not had personal experience with all aspects of each site. Please do not take our information as financial advice, medical advice, or business advice. We offer the information we have learned based on our personal experiences, others' shared experiences and our research. 

 Use your discretion.

Take the information that speaks to you and is helpful and leave the rest.

We wish you GREAT SUCCESS

Now let’s dive in:

Our goal is threefold:
1 To introduce you to the lucrative world of Side Hustles
 2. To provide you with the information you need to choose one or more that you want to do, and 
3. For you to succeed at your chosen side hustle

First, we will provide an overview of Side Hustles and the terms you need to know. Next is an overview of the major sites used. Then we will break down the more popular and lucrative side hustles by categories :

Online

Passive

Creative

Service

What is the “Gig Economy”?

The gig economy refers to a labor market characterized by short-term contracts or freelance work, as opposed to permanent jobs. In the gig economy, workers often provide services to clients on a project-by-project basis and are not necessarily tied to a single employer or company. Examples of gig economy jobs include ride-sharing and food delivery services, freelance writing and design work, and short-term contract positions in various industries.

The gig economy has become increasingly popular in recent years, in part due to advancements in technology that have enabled companies and individuals to connect and work together more easily. The rise of the gig economy has provided opportunities for flexible and independent work arrangements, allowing workers to set their schedules and work on projects that match their skills and interests.

However, the gig economy has also been subject to criticism, particularly regarding worker protections and benefits. Gig workers are often classified as independent contractors rather than employees, which means they are not entitled to the same benefits and protections as traditional employees. This has

led to calls for better protections and benefits for gig workers, as well as regulatory changes to address these issues.

Overall, the gig economy represents a significant shift in how we work and conduct business, and has benefits and challenges for workers and employers alike.

A side hustle can help individuals and families

A side hustle can provide several benefits for individuals and families, including: 1. Additional income: One of the primary benefits of a side hustle is the opportunity to earn extra income. This can help individuals and families pay off debt, save for a rainy day, or achieve financial goals more quickly. 2. Flexibility: Side hustles often offer greater flexibility than traditional jobs, allowing individuals to set their schedules and work from home or other remote locations. This can be especially beneficial for those with family or caregiving responsibilities, as it allows them to balance their work and personal lives more effectively. 3. Skill development: Pursuing a side hustle can also provide opportunities for individuals to develop new skills and gain experience in areas outside of their primary job or career. This can lead to personal and professional growth, and may even open up new career opportunities down the line. 4. Entrepreneurship: For those interested in starting their own business, a side hustle can serve as a stepping stone to entrepreneurship. By testing the waters with a part-time venture, individuals can gain valuable experience and insights before making a full-time commitment. 5. Sense of fulfillment: Pursuing a side hustle that aligns with one's passions and interests can provide a sense of fulfillment and purpose that may be lacking in a traditional job. This can lead to greater overall satisfaction and happiness in both personal and professional life.

Overall, a side hustle can benefit individuals and families significantly, including extra income, flexibility, skill development, entrepreneurship opportunities, and a greater sense of fulfillment.

A brief history of side hustles and their growing popularity in recent years.

The concept of side hustles has been around for centuries, but it has gained increased popularity in recent years. Historically, side hustles were often pursued out of necessity rather than choice, as individuals sought to supplement their income to make ends meet. This was particularly true in times of economic hardship or when traditional job opportunities were scarce.

Overall, the history of side hustles is a long and varied one, but their growing popularity in recent years can be attributed to the changing landscape of work and the desire for flexibility, independence, and financial security.

Benefits of Side Hustles:

Many can be done over the Internet remotely, offering the opportunity to earn money from the comfort of your own home.

They are flexible

Most have low start-up costs

There can be high earnings potential

You might develop new skills and network with new people

Equipment costs are usually very low.

As you review our findings, remember that the best side hustle for you is the one that: *you most enjoy * you feel competent to do

The best side hustle for you:

* earns you money. Any costs must be greatly outweighed by income 
* does not increase stress or anxiety 
* may provide you with intangibles that you desire, like socialization, a connection to a community, creative expression, or other desired outcomes.
 *You may also consider whether you want your side hustle to NOT interfere with your main job, OR whether you want your side hustle to BECOME your main source of income.

Based on the last few years’ trends and the current climate, these are our picks for
The Top Side Hustles

1. Delivery services: With the continued rise of e-commerce, delivery services such as Uber Eats, Postmates, and DoorDash are likely to remain popular side hustles. Food delivery has become a big business and retailers are joining the fray. Personal shoppers that are willing to visit multiple stores and even unload groceries into a home are becoming more in demand.

 2. Online tutoring and teaching: As remote learning becomes more common, there is an increasing demand for online tutors and teachers. Platforms like VIPKid and Teachable offer opportunities to earn extra income by teaching or tutoring students online. 

3. Freelance writing and editing: With the growth of online content and digital marketing, freelance writing and editing services are in high demand. Sites like Upwork and Freelancer offer opportunities for writers and editors to find work and build their portfolios. 

4. Pet services: As pet ownership continues to rise, there is a growing need for pet services such as dog walking, pet sitting, and grooming. Platforms like Rover and Wag! provide opportunities for individuals to earn extra income by providing these services.

5. Social media management: With the importance of social media for businesses and individuals alike, there is a need for individuals who can manage social media accounts and create content. Platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer offer opportunities to earn extra income by providing social media management services. 

6. Online reselling: With the rise of online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, there is a growing opportunity to earn extra income by buying and reselling products. Sites like Poshmark and Mercari offer opportunities to buy and sell secondhand clothing, while Amazon and eBay offer opportunities to sell a wide range of products. 

7. Product Development. More and more crafters are creating their products, whether digital prints or doggie outfits, and selling them locally and online. Etsy is the most popular site for selling handmade items but Amazon Handmade is challenging and other sites like Mercari and Faire are growing quickly. 

8. Affiliate Marketing. This is selling other people’s or company’s things for a fee or piece of the pie. With this, you do not have to purchase any inventory or invest significant money. You drive traffic to a site through a personalized affiliate link and any purchases are credited to you. you receive a fee, a percentage, or other cash equivalents like gift cards for each sale that uses your affiliate link. Amazon affiliates are the most popular but only pay out about 2%. High ticket affiliate marketing aka ghost commerce aka middleman marketing can be quite lucrative. 

9. Drop Shipping With drop shipping you find a drop shipping company, and you sell their items for a markup of your choosing. Affiliate marketing usually gives you a percentage of the sale. Drop shipping allows you to set the price. You choose a product that can be drop shipped, and you advertise and sell the product. When an order comes in, the money goes to you and pays out to the drop shipper. They fulfill the order and mail or ship it out to the buyer. You do not need to hold inventory at all but can build Shopify pages, ads, and videos selling the product at the price you choose.

Most drop shipper use companies like Alibaba in China or other sites which I will cover later in this category. 

10. Print On Demand. This is similar to drop shipping but in this case, the company takes the order and creates the thing you have advertised, then ships it out. Example- Printify and Printful are two very popular print-on- demand drop shippers. You join their site for a fee, pick the products you wish to carry your design, choose the products with the price and shipping time you desire, and send them your design. Then you advertise your product on Amazon, ETSY, FB, Insta, Tik Tok, Reels, YouTube, or elsewhere. When a customer purchases the product, the money comes to you and goes right out to the drop shipper. Then they create the product and ship it to your customer.

 11. Publishing/Writing/Notebooks/Puzzle books/ Drawing and Language Books. This is a broad category but there are so many things you can do in this field. From publishing low-content and no-content notebooks with clever covers to creating puzzle books, coloring books, writing practice books for kids, etc. Journals and log books are very popular too. You can sell these on ETSY, or through Amazon’s program called KDP- Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP is a fantastic program that will print and ship the physical book for you when you receive an order, like a printer, and drop shipper all in one. Many prefer to sell digital downloads instead so that they do not have to cover the costs of printing or shipping. In this case, ETSY and Gumroad are useful sites. 

12. Digital Products. We don’t mean books or journals. We mean the stuff that people use to create their products. Sell Canva-produced pages for the interiors of digital books, the designs used to create things on Cricut, the patterns for sewing, the recipes, and the blank recipe cards for foods. On Etsy, there are a ton of SVG files to purchase for downloading and using with a Cricut-type cutter machine to make cards, boxes, fabric pieces, quilts, and more. You can create patterns for crocheting, sewing, scrapbooking, etc. When you create digital products, you make the file that others will use to make their masterpieces.

13. Combinations. Most of the above categories become combinations. You might have a YouTube channel that Is gaining followers to earn advertising dollars. But in the meantime, it is feeding subscribers to your Shopify store. You store links to your FB and Instagram while selling Print on Demand T- shirts and drop-shipped products. And let’s include the products that have affiliate links to other products.

For an adorable example of this, look at the Instagram account of Kaarinjoy. She shows personally made crocheted products with links to a page selling those products, plus digital downloads of her patterns, and a link to her store that sells print-on-demand t-shirts. She previously sold on Etsy and now has her own websites. I do not know her but she has such a happy site! Kaarin Joy Crochet

Overall, the top side hustles of 2023 are likely to be those that take advantage of current trends in e-commerce, remote work, and the gig economy. However, the specific side hustles that will be most popular will depend on a variety of factors, including technological advancements, economic conditions, and shifting consumer preferences.

Terms to Know

Main hustle- the main way you earn a living. Usually a full-time (FT) or Part-time (PT) job.

Side hustle- a part-time or per diem way of working and/or earning in addition to your regular employment.

Gig- means a job

Upsell- Selling more than the original offer. Adding in other offers at checkout or usually for a limited time. Offering upgrades for more money.

POD-Print-on-Demand- A system by which orders are printed as they come in. In other words, garments or items are not printed in advance, eliminating overstock issues. They are printed by the printing company as needed to fulfill the order.

DS- Drop Shipping- Sending goods directly from a manufacturer to a customer. Printify prints t-shirts on demand and ships them directly to the customer. You as the merchant, do not have to receive and reship the item.

Middleman- a person who arranges deals between two or more people. As a middleman, you might take an order for a website to be developed, and arrange the details with a website developer. You are the go-between.

Keywords- The words that are most popular in searches for a product on a site. See Online for further explanation.

Affiliate Marketing- This is a marketing plan in which a company pays someone to promote their product. The pay is a percentage of the completed sale. The marketer does not get paid for his efforts unless a sale occurs.

Big-Ticket Affiliate Marketing – A marketing plan in which you market higher ticket items and receive high payouts for each sale that goes through your unique link. It refers to sales with over $100 payouts.

Ghost Commerce- be careful. As of this writing, this is a weird thing that might just be a scam. It seems to be a few people who invented this term to sell their own courses. it comes across in some cases as a pyramid scheme, where people make courses that teach you to make courses to teach others to make courses. One ‘ghost commerce’ seller charges you $27 then gives you a course and tells you to pay $4000 to join their group to learn the basics of affiliate marketing and you then learn to get others to pay you the same way for the same thing. AVOID!!

Affiliate Marketing- Affiliate marketing is a marketing plan in which a company compensates partners for business created from the affiliate's marketing tactics.

Sites 

These are sites you need to be familiar with. We will teach you how to use these sites in this course. 

Amazon

Amazon Affiliate Marketing Program

Amazon FBA

Amazon Handmade

Amazon KDP

Amazon Merch

Canva- we have Canva pro

Cricut

Etsy

Facebook

Facebook Marketplace

Instagram

Mercari

Pinterest

Printify/Printful

Reels/Tik-Tok

Digistore24/ClickBank

Creative Fabrica for designs

BookBolt for AmazonKDP

Smallpdf to merge files

Ilovepdf for all things pdf

Amazon- there are several areas within Amazon for you to work your side hustle Regular Amazon- you can post products to sell. Notice that Amazon Prime offers 1-2 days shipping whereas most home sellers offer 3-5 day shipping. And drop shippers have shipping times up to a month long. Some items are listed on Amazon but sourced from Alibaba or other Chinese sites. These products take 

quite a while to arrive. Consider whether you would like to save money by shipping from home or use FBA Amazon Affiliate marketing program. Amazon has a program for affiliate marketing. The pros are that you have a wide range of products to promote and most people have an Amazon account making impulse buys easy. One popular way of promoting is to make a long ad or a video of several items being used and include your link. For instance, kitchen gadgets are a fun category to promote and videos of them being used are engaging. The cons- usually you only receive about 2% of the price as your payout, and there is a threshold to meet to be able to get paid. FBA- Fulfillment by Amazon

This is a way of selling on Amazon in which you pay to ship your items to an Amazon warehouse and they fulfill your orders as they come in. They also handle the customer service aspects for you. The best part is that your product can be shipped by amazon prime. The downside is that they tell you how many to keep in stock, you pay to ship your products to Amazon, they tell you how to package them which you must pay for, and they may charge you to return unsold items or trash them- your choice.

FBA does seriously outsell items that are shipped from home or drop shippers. In faThe problem with drop shipping on Amazon is competing with their prime shipping times.

Always review the information provided by the website. Amazon has extensive info available from what is FBA and best practices.  Fulfillment by Amazon-FBA-Amazon

Amazon Home-Made. This is a direct competitor to Etsy. You can and should list your homemade shippable products here. 

KDP- we will get into more detail in the passive income section, but KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon has this amazing program where you load your book and cover into their platform, and they print on demand and ship it for you when an order comes in. There are many rules to follow, but it can provide a fabulous passive income and is pushed frequently by the gurus. 

Amazon Merch- We will cover this more extensively in the passive income section but for now, Amazon Merch allows you to upload your original designs to be applied to products like hoodies, t-shirts, mugs, etc. Amazon prints these on demand and ships them out when orders come in. so Amazon acts as your print- on-demand drop shipper. You receive a royalty for each item sold.

CANVA AND CANVA PRO

Canva is a great design tool and extremely beginner friendly. There is no limit to what you can create in Canva. There is a free version and a paid version called Canva Pro. Those who do a lot of creating opt into Canva Pro. A major plus of Canva Pro is the resizing tool. This makes it easy to make banners for FB, Ads for FB, Posts for Instagram, and more specific sizes for social media, advertising, and marketing products. Canva has thousands of editable templates and lots of tutorials. You just need to ask Canva how to, and they provide directions.

Canva offers you several ways to save and use your designs. You can save them as PDFs, JPEGs, or several other options. You can even save them with transparent backgrounds. This is a huge benefit over Cricut. A transparent background enables you to eliminate the white space around images for iron-on transfers, stickers, logos, and more.

CRICUT

Cricut is one of several cutting machines on the market. It is also a designer space. They refer to their customers as makers. Cricut is a great place to make packaging

materials. We have used it to make gift tags, price tags, and more for the Creative category of side hustles. You can also make printables and marketing materials. Cricut is probably the best-known way to cut vinyl. Vinyl designs are huge in selling on Etsy, Mercari, Amazon, craft shows, and local stores.

You can sell your original designs on Cricut to other makers. The machine is fun to use. Cricut design space shows aspirational designs. The downside is that you must pay $10 a month to access their site monthly.

Cricut is one place to use SVG files. You can make SVG files for sale to use on Cricut. Selling supplies to makers is lucrative. SVG files are “Scalable Vector Graphics” or graphic images used for logos, websites, infographics, or illustrations that do not lose their resolution when you change their size. Here is an easy way to create an SVG file in Adobe Photoshop:

How to create and edit an SVG file. 1. Once you’ve put together an image in Photoshop, click on File > Export >

Export As. 2. Click on the Format drop-down menu within the box that appears and then select SVG. 3. Select Export All and save the file. .

Always do your homework. Research what SVG files are selling well on Etsy. Study the pricing. Create your own similar SVG images and create some nice mock-ups for display. You might print out your SVGs to sample them and apply them to mugs, Tees, or signs for quality photos. Post your SVGs for sale in your Etsy marketplace.

ETSY- is a platform for selling handmade items. Their listing fees are low and their website is extremely user-friendly.

Is upfront with their fees   https://help.etsy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035902374-Etsy-Fee-Basics-?segment=selling

Charges are 6.5% of the total of your sale/ purchase. This includes the shipping cost! Which is weird but they get away with it.

PLUS payment processing fees- in the USA that is 3% plus 25 cents

What are Payment Processing Fees for Selling on Etsy? – Etsy Help

Etsy listings cost 20 cents each and last for 4 months. At that point, you can renew for another 20 cents for another 4 months. If you renew your listing for 20 cents at any time, it is boosted for more views for a few days.

If your listing is selling, renew it

If your listing is not selling, take it down and relist it. new listings are promoted for a few days to measure buyer engagement.

Opening an Etsy account is relatively easy. You provide your personal and bank information to open an account. Choose a short memorable shop name. Write a short bio of who we are- shoppers love these. Go through each section of the dashboard.

G

If you are selling homemade items: Prepare your items for sale and everything you need to package them. Purchase a postal meter for weighing your packages and a printer for the mailing and postage labels. Be sure to include a personalized thank you note and perhaps a small gift with the purchase.

If you are selling drop-shipped items, consider ordering a sample to check the size, fit, look, and layout before listing the item. Check the price of other similar items and try not to under or overprice yours.

I saw an ad stating that Etsy promotes you more for listing 100 items in the first 90 days. I cannot confirm that. But Etsy does put your ad in front of more people when you list it or refresh it.

Honestly, most people do not make much money on Etsy. Using Etsy keyword apps and updating listings weekly can drive up sales. The following tips may boost your sales: 

1. Take at least 5 excellent photos of your product. Many sites want to sell you tools to take better product pictures, from lights to backgrounds. Use a solid posterboard or sheet as a background. Then take the photos into Canva where you can erase the background and apply a new background from colors to textures to nature. OR use a mock-up site for gorgeous professional photos that sell. Consider Envato, placeit.net, or other similar sites that cost about $8-10 a month. If you used Fiverr to get designs done for you, have the designer give you mock-up pictures with your order. If you use a print-on-demand drop shipping company, check to see if they offer mock-ups. Printify currently has a free mock-up generator for its products.

 2. Fill out your title. Use as many characters as you can in the title. Remember that you are trying to match search terms here and with keywords.

3. Your ETSY sales live and die by your keywords. These are the words shoppers enter to search for items and this is how ETSY knows to show your items to shoppers. Many people subscribe to a keyword site like keywordtooldominator  ( Free Keyword Research Tool for Keyword Search | Keyword Tool Dominator) for free or multiple sites like marmalead (Marmalead) for about 15-19 dollars a month.

Our choice is Erank where you can get started for free: https://erank.com/

If you wish to go it alone, plan to update your keywords every few months or when your sales start to slow. Look at current best-seller products similar to yours and use their words. Use all 13 spaces for keywords. 4. Shipping is a large part of pricing your items. You can ship through ETSY. They provide a mailing label and set the price based on your measurements of your fully packaged product. Or you can try USPS or a multitude of shipping companies that let you buy postage online. You create an account and then print labels at home as needed. Some more popular shipping companies are Shipstation and Shippo. Searching for the best pricing on shipping can drive you mad!

Facebook Facebook has lost many followers but it remains a social media juggernaut and a great place to find customers. You can start a business page on FB and set it up with a credit card or bank account for financing. Always double-check your

campaign for the maximum amount of spend, and how many days or dollars you want the campaign to run for. FB walks you through running ads, there are several methods. Boosting a post ($2-5) can bring in followers but be prepared to ask all those that click like or comment to follow your page. There are engagement ads, getting views and likes, and conversion ads, converting a view to a click. Conversion ads cost more. Creating an ad allows you to pick your target market and FB will target them. They have age groups, gender, interests, and a ton of categories to sort through. Always choose the group that has made previous purchases. You place your link directly on your ad. This is great for affiliate marketers and those with Shopify sites. It doesn’t seem to drive much traffic to Etsy or Mercari sites. 
Short videos are found to be more engaging than pictures. The secret to getting followers is to engage with them and be funny, cute, and copyable. If this takes too much time- and it can- try an app like UseViral https://usevlral.com/ They give you real results. Businesses that are advertising locally do much better than businesses advertising to large groups. We never found FB ads to bring in business. We did find that boosting posts did bring in followers which gave us a better funnel. 

Facebook Marketplace

This is a great site to use to sell locally. Many prefer this over Craigslist.

You can list most objects but there don’t seem to be many sales for homemade items. It is more of a reseller site.

It’s hard to believe, but Facebook does NOT charge you for buying or selling items. There are NO listing fees. You can list items, offer services, or post job openings for free on Facebook Marketplace.

Facebook does not get into the financial transaction of your sale.

You have to figure out how to get paid- check, Venmo, cash, PayPal, Stripe, or other money transfer and electronic payments.

But they DO charge a fee if you select shipping as your delivery service. In this case, you will pay a small fee. Facebook charges a fee per product shipped

Facebook Marketplace has a fee structure based on the price of the item. If you receive $8 or less for your shipped item, Facebook Marketplace takes a flat fee of 40 cents per item.

So if your item sells for $6, you receive $5.60

If you receive more than $8 for your shipped item, Facebook takes 5% of the total amount. So if your item costs $100, you pay $5 and receive $95.

The amount that Facebook takes depends on how much money you received in payment: • If you're paid $8 or less, Facebook charges a flat selling fee of $0.40. • If you're paid more than $8, Facebook takes 5% of the payment.

In other words, when you sell an item for $5, Facebook will take $0.40, and your final payment will be $4.60.

In summary, with Facebook Marketplace, pick shipping and you are charged a fee. Choose delivery or pick up or none and pay no fee.

Instagram has grown in popularity in the last few years. It is primarily a social media platform where users post photos and short videos and write short comments. Instagram is a great place to gain followers and create a funnel- a funnel refers to the procedure of informing others about your brand all the way to them becoming buyers.

Instagram is a great site to post multiple engaging pictures and little posts to gain followers for a certain genre, then bring in your product ads for sales.

Mercari: Your Marketplace

Mercari is an up-and-coming site similar to Etsy. At Mercari you can sell your homemade items but they also carry resell items in just about every category. for selling handmade and also reselling items. It is easy to sign up and costs nothing to list items.

For each purchase/sale, Mercari takes 10% of the total price plus a 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee. They do not add the shipping cost to the total like Etsy does.

Mercari is a fabulous site with dynamic pricing. This means that when you list your item for $15 you are given the option of having the price decreased to about $12. When someone likes or spends time looking at your item, Mercari sends them an email or text with a slight drop in the item’s price. you can also allow them to accept bids on your item above a certain amount.

I bought a DVD player that dropped from $20 to $7. It did have the shipping charge added but I was happy to pay the total of $19 rather than $32 for the player.

It is an easy site to use and the dynamic pricing is wonderful, but has two flaws that we have found: 1. Just like Etsy, it is difficult to get your items seen. 2. Their shipping labels are way too expensive. The company lets you print shipping labels and deduct them from your profits but it is a flat rate of about $12 which is enormous for a little package shipped by USPS for $2.

OR you can pass the shipping cost to your customer. Sometimes it is worth it, sometimes not.

PINTEREST

Pinterest is a social network, a search engine, and a great business tool. Pinterest is free and is used by over 150 million people every month. Users browse and create boards that they pin with others’ pictures and links. They can bookmark ideas, recipes, DIY projects, articles, homemade products, links to buy all kinds of things, inspirations, or fellow posters. It is like social marketing for products instead of people and like a scrapbook of lots of different interests.

Research shows more people buy off Pinterest than any other site.

Pinterest is a fabulous site to use to promote your products. Post videos from 4 seconds to 15 minutes in length. Post picture ads. Post Canva-created pages.

Direct traffic to your website, Shopify store, blog, social media platform, or more.

Advertise your products

Post lots of pictures of a certain topic and add your ads. For example- you want to affiliate market artificial flowers. On Instagram, Tik-Tok, Reels, and Pinterest post lots of free photos of flowers. Get a bunch of followers by following others, engaging with any likes, etc.(called creating a funnel) then post your advertisements for your products.

NOTE- Be careful linking to Tik Tok. The current political climate wants to restrict Tik Tok use. Keep postings that include Tik Tok links separate, in case you need to take them down. In other words, link only to Tik Tok and nowhere else on a few postings. Link to your store, and include links to the others, FB, Insta, Reels, and Twitter on the same posting if desired

Printify and Printful for POD Print-on-Demand, DS dropship products

POD means Print-on-demand. That means you submit your design and choose the products that you wish to promote your design on. When an order comes in, the company prints that design on the product. They then DS or drop ship the item to the buyer.

You do not have to store merchandise or ship products. These companies do it for you.

PRINTIFY- You can create products in Canva, Cricut, or similar sites. Bring the design to Printify. Apply it to all the products you like. Price them all and note the shipping times. Create Mockups within Printify. Fill your Shopify store or Etsy shop, or Mercari shop, or post your products on Amazon. Run ads/promote your products. When an order comes in, you just collect the money. Printify prints and ships the item. This is a creative and passive side hustle.

Reels/Tik-Tok- Tik Tok may be banned soon in the USA so keep any Tik Tok videos in a separate account unlinked to other campaigns. TikTok is based in China and offers users aged 13 and up a way to share short videos originally of dancing. Once you get to 50,000 followers on Tik Tok you can get paid to promote brands. In that case, a brand will send you items to feature in your videos and pay you!

It has no fees, so marketers and salespeople started posting on Tik Tok and it has become a huge site for selling products. If you want to focus on Tik Tok or Reels, make and post 1-4 videos a day. Watch to see which ones get likes and engage followers. Then make more!

Reels are connected to Instagram and have a 90-second limit. This gives you a little more time to show that recipe or show the product you are selling.

Digistore24/ClickBank These sites offer larger ticket items to sell as an affiliate. Both pay regularly and are very upfront about earnings per sale. These sites are used by Big Ticket or Ghost Commerce Affiliate Marketers.

A few helpful sites:

Creative Fabrica for designs

BookBolt for AmazonKDP

Smallpdf to merge files

Ilovepdf for all things pdf

We will go through these as the examples arise.

Real-Life Example Here are some snips from a Guru ad.

They promote a video-making service called Bandsoff. This company is a good choice if you want someone else to make your video but costs about $55 for one video for your product.

You can do it yourself. Do not first create a Shopify store. Do your research first.

Find your product to promote and research that it has good sales, the market is not glutted, and you know who is your ideal buyer. Choose how and where you will promote your product to your ideal buyer. If you need to create a funnel, get started- find a way to gather a following of the buyers you are marketing and then sell the product to those followers.

Create a funnel-If you are selling sewing accessories, open an Instagram site and fill it with engaging pictures, start a Pinterest board, and post a ton of similar sewing stuff and your Insta content. Post pictures and short videos on Reels and Tik Tok. Gain followers, then present your product.

If you want to open a Shopify store, find lots of products to fill your store- look at the print-on-demand and drop shipping sections in this book.

And YES one product can make you 6-7 figures but it requires a lot of work or a lot of luck. It is more likely that 100 products can provide you with that income.

Choose to work smarter, the least hours for the most money. In this case, promote your sewing products on each site. When you see what is attracting interest, likes, and comments, sell them. Promote those products with paid ads.

Then build a Shopify store with lots of similar items, especially those that are print-on-demand or drop shipped so that you can manage it without getting overwhelmed with order fulfillment and shipping.

Remember this is your side hustle. If it takes off, you can always devote more time and make it your main income stream.

Notes

 Remember that Etsy only allows digital download size of 20 MB
 Check out Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash for free pictures. 
Always double-check that you can use them commercially. 
Consider keeping your font consistent among your products
 Make a logo and put your logo on everything you create
 Put a watermark on anything you post publicly so others cannot steal your work

Last and Most Importantly- We have found great success in having multiple income streams. We once had some bad financial luck and it was frightening. And Overwhelming. We never wanted to get into a position of financial insecurity again, so we started doing side hustles before they had a name. We found that it did provide income, stress relief, and security. It was good not to have all our eggs in the basket with the crazy manager or untenable work environments. We found that we wanted to try lots of different things. As a teacher and a nurse, it felt good to spread our wings.

We currently have several side hustles and each pays well. We do Amazon Merch, Amazon affiliate marketing, write eBooks, create homemade items for sale in local shops, and buy and sell items from Shein. We have an Etsy shop, a Mercari shop,  a booth in 2 different consignment shops, and a service-based side hustle that involves listening and counseling. We spend about 6-10 hours a week on our side hustles.