It is safe to say that you are really in need of a side hustle, that is why you clicked on this article. I mean, we could all do with a little extra cash.
So, if you are working a 9-to-5 job, you can also benefit from a side hustle. Considering that your savings and your job earnings are not always enough. Also, add the rate of inflation in the economy, and we are all coming to terms with needing to go out of the box to make extra.
Although engaging in side hustles takes your investment of time, effort, and hard work to successfully do it. But that investment creates for you a stream of repeated income for achieving financial freedom.
So, in your quest to liberate your finances, we will unravel some underrated side hustles you could engage in. They may seem off from the usual you have seen in blogs, but they can make you cool cash with little time invested.
Let’s get into them and discover which you may want to get involved with.
Top 15 Underrated Side Hustles To Earn Extra Cash In 2024
Seeking ideas for side hustles means your finances are no longer as reliable as they used to be. There is no harm in seeking a solution to get off the hook of insufficiency. So, now that you are ready to get started with a side hustle, you should scan through the following ideas. Learn how you can begin an online business or make extra money with your skills.
The best way to make the most of a side hustle is to engage with an idea that fits your interests and skills. Let’s dive into these best side hustle ideas.
1. Monetize a YouTube Channel
YouTube is a thriving social network. This platform has accumulated over 2 billion users. These users are actively engaged in the platform, as reports state that users watch about 250 million hours of videos each day.
So, building a big audience you can profit from through YouTube ads is one way to take advantage of the platform. But this takes a lot of time.
So, it is better to find a way to make money from YouTube instead of relying on ads. Thankfully, there are many ways to make money using YouTube. For example, if you already have a target audience, begin by creating relevant content that your audience can relate to.
Remain consistent with this, and your follower count will increase. As it grows, you can consider making your channel a paid channel. Then, sell paid subscriptions.
You can also make money by doing paid sponsorships and making goods you can sell online.
2. Sell Your Own Designed T-Shirts
If you have a passion for designing and you need to try a business, print-on-demand is one way to begin as an entrepreneur. Creating and selling your own shirts is a fun business to do. It also is a business with low risk.
With our online world making things seamless, you can take advantage of several platforms to make your business go smoothly. Some apps like Gelato or Printify enable you to upload customized designs on the t-shirts. These t-shirts are then shipped at the point of purchase.
A platform like Shopify has the resources you might need to start your business all in one place.
3. Package Delivery
If you have time on your hands and access to a car you can drive, delivering packages is something you can do. You can then go ahead and sign up on Platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats, Caviar, Amazon Flex, and so on to deliver packages.
This is a good way to earn extra money in your spare time. It has a flexible working schedule because you have the choice to deliver as many as you have time for. store
4. Rent out a Spare Room in Your Home
As a homeowner, you likely are spending some money to maintain the house. Why not turn your home into an asset. Instead of taking money from you, you can make it to help you earn more money. This is one underrated side hustle that only a few homeowners utilize.
Earn extra cash by putting a spare room out for rent. More than just making extra cash from the rent money, it has considerable potential. You can go ahead and collaborate with brands that sell home items. This way, you sell their products to your guests.
As you promote the brand product, you earn a commission. For example, a brand’s product you are promoting may be bathing soap. So, as a way of promoting, you can keep the soap with a QR code in the bathroom where your guest is renting. This way, you give your guests an opportunity to buy the soap if they like it.
So, go ahead and take advantage of this great potential to make more money. Airbnb is a popular way of renting your home out to guests.
5. Voice-Over Work
Voice-overs have become very common. They play a significant role in documentaries, gaming, announcements, and applications. So, this has resulted in a vast selection of job opportunities that have a complete voice-over requirement.
A lot of voice artists began in this line of work without qualifications. But as this service became very popular, it grew to be very competitive. Now, you need to up your game if you want to get noticed in the field today.
So, if you have a great voice and some equipment, you can use it to record. With this, you can provide voice-over services for animations, audiobooks, and adverts. A voice-over talent typically charges around $20 to $100 or higher per hour of work. The kind of work and the size of the work can also change the amount you charge.
6. Dog Walking Service
Dog walking services help dog owners walk their dogs. If you have a passion for dogs, you can consider this side hustle idea. Typically, dog walkers work with the time dog owners fix for them to walk their dogs. As a dog walker, you pick up the dogs from their homes and drop them off later when you are done with the scheduled walk.
The responsibility of a dog walker is to walk dogs safely and provide clean water and food when they need it. You will also be required to clean the dog’s paws after each walk. When the dog becomes sick under your care, you will be liable to take the dog to a veterinary doctor.
So, if you want to be successful in this side gig, you should be able to walk multiple dogs. Also, ensure that you abide by the client’s special requests and that their dogs are well taken care of.
7. Freelance Grant Writing
As a grant writer, you are a valuable asset to Non-Profit agencies. So, a lot of these agencies are looking for a skilled grant writer. This can be a satisfying side hustle option if you can write convincing essays.
In case you don’t know what a grand writer is or what they do, we will enlighten you. This will help you decide to go this route if you have a talent for writing persuasive content.
A grant writer puts the documentation together and fulfills the requirements of funding bodies. They officially source funding on behalf of their agency. The majority of non-profit agencies rely greatly on grants from different funding organizations and foundations.
These organizations are their main source of funding. Individual donations from people sometimes make a considerable contribution to the capital of non-profit agencies. So, the work of a Grant Writer is to provide the biggest, most regular chunk of funding for the agency.
As a grant writer, you must be good at researching to find funding organizations that can give grants that fit with their non-profit. You must also be an intelligent writer who can write appealing content that will convince the funding organization board.
8. Provide Digital Marketing Services
Many businesses are taking their businesses online in a bid to take advantage of the online space. So you find a lot of businesses online out there. With the large number of online businesses, there will always be a need for people with particular skills. Business owners often source for skillful freelancers who can help them do a lot of things concerning their business.
They require freelancers with skills in content creation, running social channels, optimizing a website, and many more. So, you can put up your service online through various freelance sites or gigs and create a simple website where you can add your work portfolio.
You can also make extra money by building a digital product. Creating and selling online courses to people who are interested in learning your skill can make you more money.
9. Virtual Assistant
This is another side gig that you can engage in, which you can do on your own time. Virtual assistants are basically responsible for offering work-from-home assistance to business professionals. They interact with clients on behalf of their employer. They also conduct research, organize data, and sort out documents.
This is a good side hustle because it affords you the opportunity to complete jobs from home. To land this side gig, you may need to have a high school diploma to understand and carry out instructions accurately. Some businesses prefer a bachelor’s degree.
10. Local Tour Guide
If you are fit, healthy, and have a lot of energy and confidence, this is another way to earn passive income. Take advantage of your area if it has many tourist attractions. You can render customized tour services to tourists. This is a fun way to earn cool money while sharing the beauty of your town with visitors.
So, as a local tour guide, your work is to show tourists around. The attractions in your town should be your focus. Provide the tourists with background information about the town as you show them beauty spots, eye-catching landscapes, and historical monuments to help them enjoy their visit.
At times, tour guide work may require you to have language and transporting skills. This kind of work is seasonal, and it’s a decent side hustle you can easily combine with your other job. You don’t need a degree for this job.
But having a qualification in national vocation or degree in an applicable course like travel, tourism, leisure, or languages. Experience gained from tourism or hotel can also serve as an added advantage.
11. Dropshipping Business
Consider starting a dropshipping business if you are more interested in marketing and operations. Dropshipping is a kind of online business where you only need to set up a store, put a price on your items, and market the business. This online business involves a third party producing and shipping existing goods for you.
This is a low-risk venture because products only get shipped after they are bought. This opens more room for making a profit, as long as you don’t have unreasonable marketing expenses. You can dropship on online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon so as to reach larger customers. This is among decent and easily underrated side hustles to make a lot of money.
12. Have Your Own E-commerce Store
This is among the side hustles that have steady high demand. So, setting up your own eCommerce store is a huge advantage to making money online. There are several ways to begin this business, from selling on Amazon to creating an Etsy store.
As we have different events happening every few weeks, people always have a reason to buy something fast online. This is something you can take advantage of if you are an online store owner.
Online stores are wide, and they provide the availability of products that can’t be found in conventional physical stores. So, building an online business is easy to do. Your online store enables people to find products they are looking for.
Focusing on a niche market and understanding products that are trending are ways you can be unique from the competitive market and make profitable sales.
13. Social Media Management
Suppose you have a passion for social media and know how to interact with people effectively online. In that case, you should consider this as a side hustle. As a social media manager, you will be handling the company’s social media accounts. Your competence in this role will determine how well the business can showcase the value of its brand online.
So, you are responsible for promoting and establishing the company’s online presence and brand value. You basically use videos, images, and text posts on the platforms. Your usual day as a social media manager will revolve around planning and developing social media operations, constructing persuasive content, and posting on all social media accounts of the business.
You also interact with business customers on various networks and stay ahead of the latest social media trends. If you have experience in content management or copywriting, it can serve as an advantage for you to get the job.
14. Lawn Care
This is a good side hustle idea for those who enjoy mowing lawns. But the difficult part of this hustle is that it is difficult to get clients. You can easily engage in this short-term job during your free time. So, if you are up for it, you can find numerous lawn care jobs available through services like TaskRabbit.
15. Podcast Editing
As podcasts become more popular, podcast creators often need help with editing their recordings, which can be a great niche if you have the technical skills. So, as a podcast editor, your main job will be to transcribe a podcast and create an article out of it.
You will also be responsible for making SEO-friendly content and using SEO best practices to make the article rank high on search engine result pages.
You will also work with a team of graphic designers to include illustrations and pictures in the article so it can be more user-friendly. Having experience in editing is a major requirement to be effective in this job.
How To Start Any Side Hustle
Engaging in a side hustle is a great way to make extra money. But it requires a lot of time and effort before you can get going. One way to enjoy your side hustle is to choose one that matches your lifestyle. Because it is easy to get overworked when you are doing a side hustle that doesn’t fit your lifestyle.
Also, a side hustle can take up all of your personal free time. This can go as far as you not having time for your usual social and family time. But, this can be a good problem if you choose to turn the side hustle into your personal business.
Let’s examine the following steps it takes to start a side hustle:
– Do research for options
The few options in this article are great ideas. Dive into some of the options that catch your interest and discover if you can make money with them in your free time.
– Set out your plan
Planning is essential to carry out a successful side hustle. Find out if you need any special training or license. Sign up for the useful apps that have relevant side hustles you can find. Then, draft your hustle to your calendar so you can know how much time in a week you can commit to it.
– Have a set goal
Goals help you to stay on track. So, make a specific goal to help you stay on track on the side hustle. A goal like “having extra funds” is not specific. Your goal can be something like “make extra money enough to pay my student loan” or “earn enough money to buy a new car.”
– Market your products or services
This one depends on the side gig you choose to do. If your side hustle involves selling things online, you should advertise and let everyone know what you are doing. You can do this by investing in eCommerce search engine optimization or setting up a house listing on a selling site like Airbnb if you are renting out a spare room.
– Level up or not
A lot of people begin side hustles just to maintain them that way. They are just okay with the extra little cash that keeps coming. But you can level up if your idea blooms and your product or service is now in high demand.
Things To Note In Side Hustles
If the side hustle ideas stated in this article do not resonate with you, you can search for more online. There are a lot of blogs that have been written on different side hustles to be discovered. Most of them are considered underrated due to the low attention they are getting.
When trying to search for side gig ideas, have in mind some key things to look out for to help your search process be effective.
Some warning signs you could experience when trying out a side hustle
- It consumes your time, leaving you with less time to focus on your main job.
- You don’t enjoy it
- It demands a lot of time but has low returns.
Suppose it happens that you are experiencing any of these signs. In that case, they are warning indicators informing you to get another side gig.
Some positive signs you may experience when trying out a side hustle
- You have enough time and energy to continue.
- It is enjoyable
- It gives you the potential for growth
- It is profitable
So, if you experience a side hustle that gives you all the above, this could be the perfect side hustle for you.
Conclusion
Making extra money online requires a unique skill. One of the less-appreciated advantages of side hustles is that they can serve as an environment where you learn how to make cool money online. But with conventional jobs that many of you rely on, making money online doesn’t feel natural. A side hustle is a great way to test-run a small business idea and try it out in public.
With a side hustle, you can learn useful skills and help yourself grow. It offers you a big opportunity to turn your passion into a career. Engaging in any of these underrated side hustles listed in the article is a crucial step toward gaining financial freedom.
