After perusing ChatGPT’s advice about side hustles, the ones that pop out at me are:
- eBay or Amazon reselling
- Affiliate marketing
- Freelance consulting in your area of expertise
- Blogging or content creation
My plan on bootstrapping my side hustles starting by selling some stuff around my house on ebay and then using money to pay for domains and hosting of some affiliate marketing blogs. I know next to nothing about affiliate marketing, so we are going to be learning on the job, and I will take you all along for the ride. A third bootstrap idea would be to use my programming skills (I work as a software engineer) to do some contract work (potentially on upwork?). So the components of the plan are ebay reselling, affiliate marketing blog, and upwork contracts.
Ebay Reselling
I am going to start by selling things around the house. I have some extra electronics and bike components lying around that should sell pretty well. I have never sold anything on ebay, so this will be a learning experience for me. When I run out of stuff in the house, I may try going to garage sales around town to find stuff to sell, but honestly this sounds like more of a hassle than it is worth. We’ll see how my initial experiences with it goes.
Affiliate Marketing
Based on the one podcast episode I listened to while washing the dishes, I need to find a niche and then do something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). My first impression of affiliate marketing is that it sounds pretty spammy, so I am going to have to think hard about a niche(s) that I can feel good about recommending products and services.
Upwork
Initially, I am wondering if upwork or similar platforms might be a good place to start since I do not have any interest in looking for contract work on my own, and I want to take on only really small jobs that can be completed in a few hours.
Is this Blog a Side Hustle?
I am not thinking of this site primarily as a side hustle, I am interested in giving you the real deal and documenting my progress in this experiment. However, if this site ends up getting a bunch of traffic I may try to figure out how to monetize this blog. I’ll be sure to let you know if/when I do!
This plan is subject to change as I dive into these and learn more!
Photo by Rohit Tandon on Unsplash
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