Is A Side Hustle For You?
- 17 Ways To Leave Your 9-5 -

My #1 idea – Blogging.  Starting a blog or a website allows you the freedom of creating a business at home in your PJs.  You can blog about something you enjoy, whether that’s gardening, travel, baking, dog training or building bookcases. 

It also allows you to live the laptop lifestyle – taking your ‘work’ with you wherever you go.  If you want to be location-free then this is a great option.

Yaro Starak has done exactly this and offers a free download of his viral guide to setting up your own profitable blog – Blog Profits Blueprint.  You can download your own free copy here. (Affiliate link)

If you're more of a visual or audio person, you can register for one of Yaro's free Platform Launch Plan training webinars instead and get your Free Fast Start Handout too. (Affiliate link)

Airbnb Host. If you have a spare room and want to meet interesting people from around the world – this is a great way to make money without having to really do anything because the level of service is up to you. 

Nowadays Airbnb has become a lot more sophisticated offering almost mini hotel-like services.  But there’s still room for the pure ‘come and stay with a local’ type of accommodation too. Get details here.

Airbnb Experience Host.  Love the area you live in?  Like meeting new people and sharing your town or city with them?  Become a tour guide showing visitors the ‘real’ side of your area. 

This can be a lot of fun, and, depending on where you live, can be quite lucrative. You can get details here.

More and more people are looking for authentic experiences when they travel like this – hence the success of Airbnb which started as people offering their spare room to visitors. 

Airbnb Online Experience Host.  At the time of writing this we are in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic - so what better way to start your own small empire than by hosting an experience online?

You can do anything from teach people how to cook your grandma's famous apple pie, to leading a virtual tour or hosting a yoga class. In fact pretty much anything you can imagine. To get some ideas take a look here, and then find out how to get started!

Dog Walker.  An oldie but a goodie!  I can personally speak about this as I had my own dog walking business for 5 years.  I started from scratch, built it up client by client and even at my busiest I started at 8 and was home and finished by 3 the latest.  I had time to do other things and had my weekends to myself. 

This is perfect if you have your own pooch who you would normally walk at least once a day anyway – but works just as well if you don’t. 

Pet Sitter.  You can combine this with dog walking, or not.  Pet sitting is really staying at people’s homes to look after their pets while they're away, so a variation on house sitting but being paid a fee to do so. 

But many people actually only want you to ‘pet visit’ – go to their house once a day to feed, water and play with their pet. 

I used to do this alongside my dog walking.  But I only accepted jobs if I could visit twice a day, as I don’t believe it’s fair for the animal to be left for 23 hours on its own.

If you're interested in learning how to set up your own pet care business with no experience - register your interest below:

Animal behaviourist – Another service that you can take anywhere in the world.  You can specialise in specific animals (cats, dogs, horses…. chickens?). 

There are lots courses nowadays that you can do online, and only do the practical side of things as a once off training day. 

You will initially need to spend time doing the course, and offer some freebies to clients to build up your hours. 

But if you love animals and are interested in what makes them tick – this could be the perfect full time gig or side hustle once your training’s over.  

Freelancer.  Freelancing can be pretty much anything that you have some kind of experience or skill in, or not.  You may be great at creating excel spreadsheets for example, or setting up a WordPress blog, or admin work.

But it can be something you haven’t done before, but can easily handle.

Nowadays you can do pretty much anything online – I had a few different gigs that fell into this category. 

• I helped a language teacher by arranging her lessons, 

• I helped a busy CEO with a personal task, which involved sorting out his domestic worker’s unemployment benefit payments that had got into a bit of a mess. 

• I researched, analysed and compared the loyalty bonuses of every credit card and set it up on a spreadsheet so my client could choose which one he preferred. 

None of these jobs were in areas I had previous expertise, but with some common sense they were pretty easy to accomplish.  I used Upwork to find these opportunities.

Some companies employ part time virtual workers – here in Australia many insurance companies have home based client care teams. 

Lots of entrepreneurs prefer to have a virtual team rather than set up an office and have to be there every day themselves.  Watch the blogs you follow – are they hiring?  That’s how I got my current side hustle which takes the pressure of my blog bringing me a consistent income. 

If you’re worried about not having a lot of experience, start off with small gigs on Fiverr or Fivesquid and work up to charging better rates on Upwork.  You can also set up your own website if you have multiple skills and showcase your talents and your testimonials from past clients.

You can even do some pretty creative things, especially on Fiverr, such as sending postcards from where you live to people in other countries, or taking them on a virtual tour via your cellphone.  If you don’t believe me – check out these Fiverr gigs. 

Virtual Assistant.  This is like a PA (Personal Assistant) except you work from home in your pj's or by the pool, or actually anywhere you want to be.  The limit is your imagination.  You can assist other business owners from all kinds of industries to manage their 'behind the scenes' tasks. 

Martha does just that and moved her family from the UK to Spain. 

Michelle is still travelling the world with her family and making money at the same time.

If you want some fantastic free training on how to set up your own VA business just click here.  

Writer.  If you can write well and enjoy it, there are plenty of people looking for good writers.  You can write blog posts or articles, copy for sales pages or advertisements. 

If you have the ability and the desire, you can even ghost write other people’s books for them. Again, this is something you can do virtually. 

Tech support.  Totally out of my league!  But if you have technical knowledge you can set up a business helping other people with the backend support of their blog or website. 

You can even contract to bigger companies, for example Apple employ tech support people who work remotely.

You can also search for remote tech support jobs on sites like We Work Remotely or Pangian.  (Actually there are more than just tech support jobs on there - you can find non-tech customer support jobs, writing jobs and more).

Website designer.  Similar to tech support, for new start-ups you can help them with their website needs.  So many people use WordPress nowadays – you could specialize in that, or you can cover all platforms.

Services Arbitrage Business.  This is a really innovative business model where, instead of fulfilling the service yourself, you find other freelancers to do it.  You’re simply the middle (wo)man who handles basic client care. 

You can eventually outsource the client care aspect as well, so you have even more time freedom.  This option allows you to have location freedom as all you need is your phone to send and receive emails.  

You can run this part-time very easily - making a full time income from only personally investing a couple of hours a day.

You can subscribe for a great free training series here. (Affiliate link)

Handyman/woman.  If you love DIY – this is a great side hustle.  You can do it on weekends, or smaller jobs in the evenings.  I had a friend who started a handyman business on weekends, before he knew it he was inundated with people who wanted him to fix their kitchen cupboards, edge their lawns, hang their pictures.  The best thing was – he loved all that stuff!

Gardener/Landscaper If you love the outdoors and being surrounded by plants and trees, combined with a creative flair, this is a great side gig to have. 

Admittedly as a side gig you will only be able to take on smaller jobs depending on the time you have available – but as you build it up, if you go full time you will be able to branch out into larger areas. 

Selling Anything – in his book $100 Start Up Chris Gillebeau tells the story of the redundant sales executive who in desperation bought a batch of unwanted new mattresses and sold them through Craigslist from an old car sales showroom in Portland, Oregan.

It went so well he now runs a business selling mattresses and if you cycle to the shop you get free delivery – by bicycle!

Personal trainer.  If you’re a gym junkie who knows their stuff you can earn money being a training buddy or even a coach, or go the whole hog and become a personal trainer. 

Personal training can be done at the park in good weather, at other people’s houses or at the gym – depending on your preference. 

You can also specialise in moms losing baby fat, or 50+ year olds getting fit, or in a specific activity like running or cycling for example.

House-sitter. This is not really an income, depending on where in the world you do this (in some countries it's customary to pay housesitters), but it cuts down on your biggest expenditure – your rent or mortgage. 

If you rent, obviously, you don’t need to do so with this suggestion.

If you own a house (or are paying off a mortgage/bond) then you can rent it out and house-sit while someone pays your mortgage for you. There are plenty of sites offering this service around the world.