Tips To Side Hustle While Keeping Your Job
Believe it or not, there are many people out there who love their jobs. There are teachers who love teaching. There are fire fighters who love saving people’s lives. But just because someone loves their job doesn’t mean they love their income.
A great way for people who love their jobs to have their cake and eat it too is to have a side hustle. A side hustle is where you work a freelance job, on a project as a contractor or run a small business.
In fact, there are many people out there that make more money on their side hustles than they do their current job. But again, they keep their job because they love it.
There are literally a thousand things you can do as a side hustle. To help you narrow it down, here are some tips on how you can leverage your current situation into something that generates a nice income on the side.
1. Spin Off Your Current Skills
It’s easy to think that you have to learn some brand new skill set or learn an entirely new industry to have a side gig. That is not true. Most people with successful side hustles have gigs that are related to what they already do.
For example, if you’re a teacher, you can make extra money tutoring students in the evening. In fact, there are online platforms now that will connect qualified teachers to tutor students virtually all over the world. If you teach English as a Second Language at a public school during the day, you can get on Skype in the evenings or early mornings and tutor English for kids in Asia.
If you’re a police officer, you can contract to sit in a church lobby on Sundays or roam the parking lot at your local mall. If you’re a sales person at a local boutique clothing store, start an eCommerce business selling apparel online.
Try to leverage the industry you’re already in and the skills you already have.
2. Spin Off Your Hobbies
You may love your job, but have other hobbies and interests. You can spin off your hobbies and turn them into side hustles.
If you’re a fitness buff and you’re a barista a Starbucks during the day, you can be a personal trainer at night. If you’re a salesman for an industrial parts company but love working with troubled youth, you can be a motivational speaker for youth events on nights and weekends. You’re using the same communication and persuasion skills you use on your job and translating it to convince kids to work hard and stay in school.
There are many creative ways to turn your interests and hobbies into a nice little side income while still doing something else you love. Now you have two jobs you love!
3. Side Hustle an Online Business
Many kinds of businesses don’t work well as a side hustle. You can’t be a receptionist at a dental clinic and own a food truck business. That doesn’t work. But you can own an online business and still have a day job.
There has been a huge wave of new online business entrepreneurs entering the market in recent years. That’s because there are tools and platforms now that you can start and operate a very successful online business without an office, retail store or warehouse.
eCommerce is a great example of this. There are many eCommerce platforms like Shopify Plus or Big Commerce, where you can sell products online without a storefront, warehouse or even your own website.
In fact, you can setup a store at Amazon, curate products from Alibaba, have them shipped directly to an Amazon warehouse, have them via their Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program pick and ship your products as orders come in. All you have to do is curate, buy and market the products, as well as handle customer service requests.
As you side business grows, you can even outsource many of the functions. Globalization has allowed small businesses to hire cheap highly skilled labor from overseas.
If you don’t have time to field customer service requests during the day because of your busy job, you can hire a quality virtual assistant who lives overseas a modest $1,000-$1,500 a month to be your rep full time.
Even with eCommerce, you can spin off your interests and skills. For example, if you’re a cook at a BBQ joint, you can curate a bunch of BBQ equipment, gear and ingredients to sell online.
Online businesses is where there are many millionaires who still keep their current low paying jobs that they love. Overhead can be really low and you can outsource just about every function of the business.
Keeping a low paying job you love doesn’t mean you have to live like a pauper. There are many creative ways to make a great living without giving up on your dreams.