With the cost of living is going nuts, and many of us looking for ways that we can earn an income outside of the old 9-5 grind, side hustles are becoming a hot topic of conversation.
Often we think about side hustles as something we do alongside our main job. A little business that we run on the side selling our crafts, selling our patterns on Etsy for a bit of extra income, or maybe a blog that pulls in a little side income through affiliate marketing.
But can a side hustle (or a series of side hustles) create a full time income? I believe that it can.
Side hustles have huge potential to replace your income. In fact, many (even possibly ALL) super sucessful businesses that we know of started out as someone’s side hustle.
The exciting thing about side hustles is that there are so many of them out there, and so many of them are things that you can do around your day job until you scale them to something that could replace your day job.
Side hustles are also super cool because they provide you with an opportunity to make the most of some of the skills you have that perhaps you don’t get to use in your day job. Often my side hustle ideas have come out of hobbies that I have which people have then said to me, oh you should sell those!
I’ve had a side hustle or three in my time. Some have worked well, some not so much. But because I’ve had a few side hustles, I have some pretty clear ideas in my head of what works well as a side hustle. Particularly, if you’re like me and you need your side hustle to run alongside other work.
What is the six-figure side hustle challenge?
Ryan and I have this plan to take some time off to travel the world with our boys. But, to do so we need to be able to have an income stream coming in to replace our day job income. We’ve got our rental property business, and that will most likely provide a good chunk of the income we would need (through rent income) once we have sold some of the houses to pay off the mortgages. But, I think we’ll still need some more.
So, I have set myself a challenge, starting NOW. I want to see if it is possible to replace my income with side hustles that we can do from anywhere in the world. That would be awesome because it would take away the need for me to continue with my “day job” once we hit the road.
However, given my past experiences with side hustles, I’ve decided that the side hustles I choose need to have some rules around them.
- They need to be side hustles that we can run from anywhere in the world over an internet connection.
- They need to be side hustles that aren’t hours for dollars.
- They need to be scalable
The first one is fairly obvious, but whatever options we choose they need to be something that we don’t need to be there in person for if we’re off travelling the world.
The second one is because anything that requires you to do hours for dollars isn’t easily scalable. I already have a job I can do remotely that is hours for dollars, and it might be that I actually do continue to do that work while we travel, but that does mean setting aside some hours each day to sit down and do that work. Of course every side hustle would require that to some extent, but if you’re having to spend lots of hours each day working then you’re more limited.
Scalable side hustles are things that can make you money over and over again while you’re sleeping, or on safari, or swimming in a tropical lagoon! They’re not completely passive of course – nothing is. Of course, even scalable side hustles take some work to promote. But something like an ebook, for example, can be sold over and over again on Amazon to people all over the world without the need to take any physical action. Yes, you’ll have to do some marketing to get it noticed, but once it is on there and ticking along you can literally be making $$$ while you are sleeping! How awesome is that.
Rule three is pretty similar to rule 2, except that there is a slight additional point I want to make. I’ve noticed that there is a lot of hype about side hustle incomes from things that are unscaleable. These include, in particular, things like like surveys, polls, and reviews.
I’ve looked at quite a few of these survey type programmes as a side hustle option, and I’ve spend a fair amount of time in survey sites trying them out and sumitting surveys. What I’ve found is that there is an extremely low return on the time invested in doing the survey. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I would think that in many cases the amount you would get paid for the time invested would be well less than minimum wage. In addition, you’re often not even getting cash for the work you do, but credits and vouchers. In this way surveys are very unscalable.
So, while some people might love survey side hustles, they’re not the kind of thing I am going to look at doing because I feel like there are far better uses of my time. I believe in most cases you’d be much better off selling an hour of your time as a freelance [insert whatever you do here] rather than clicking for hours through surveys.
What side hustles will you explore?
I’m going to go through with you all of the different side hustles in more detail with you in a separate post, but here are the side hustles I’m exploring to start with…
• E-book sales
• Print on demand book sales through Amazon
• Affiliate marketing
• Online course sales
• Selling photos on stock photo sites
• You Tube videos
If you want to follow along withe journey make sure you follow us on Instagram!
