Side Hustles For Dummies. Alan R. Simon

indistinguishable from any other online retailer, other than the fact that she’ll be running her online boutique during evenings and on weekends when she’s not doing her day job.

      Sarah also has a thing for the latest fashions, and she’s also very interested in starting some sort of a side hustle. Just like Breanna, Sarah really likes the idea of building a website and selling products. Unlike Breanna, however, Sarah doesn’t plan to search for suppliers for what she plans to sell. Sarah started making jewelry back in college — initially just for herself, but eventually a piece here and there to sell to her friends. Back in college, she just sold her jewelry to friends at cost (basically, she didn’t make any money — she just charged her friends for the cost of the materials).

      Now, though, Sarah wants to turn her jewelry-making into an ongoing side hustle. She designs about a dozen bracelets, another dozen rings, some earrings, and some necklaces for her initial product offerings. She makes a couple of each item to have on hand and plans to custom-make new items as orders come in (at least for now).

      Providing information

      Miguel, the accountant in Boston, wants to do something related to bartending for a side hustle. Miguel isn’t interested in actually doing bartending, building a website to sell bartending supplies, or anything along those lines. He’s after Internet stardom! (Well, sort of… .)

      Miguel’s side hustle will be creating a series of short videos — each one about five minutes long — that he’ll post on YouTube, TikTok, or some other video site. Each video will show Miguel making some sort of unique craft cocktail (an espresso martini in one video, special margaritas in another video), tasting and rating the latest vintage of popular wines, or demonstrating new bartending-related items (cocktail shakers, glasses, wine openers, and so on).

      Miguel’s side-hustle aspirations involve more than just trying to become known as “that cocktail and wine guy” or a similar tagline. He wants to make money from his side hustle, just as Cindy will do from her bartending services. In Miguel’s case, he plans to earn money from:

       Ads placed alongside his videos after they become fairly popular

       Affiliate marketing payments from products he uses and discusses in his videos

Miguel’s coworker Mark also has the same idea: to create and upload videos that he’ll then try to monetize through ads. Mark, however, knows next to nothing about bartending. In Mark’s case, accounting not only is his day job, but will also become the foundation of his soon-to-be-launched side hustle. Mark plans to create a series of videos that he’ll publish on YouTube covering accounting do’s and don’ts for people doing a side hustle. (Talk about meta!)

      About a year passes, and Mark’s side-hustle accounting videos are doing fairly well. Every so often, someone emails him and asks if he has an actual course in accounting that’s available for purchase. Mark soon figures, “What the heck, I’ll try it!” He creates new accounting-related videos but now, instead of uploading them to YouTube, he packages them into a beginner’s course and an intermediate course that he publishes on Udemy. He sets a list price of $44.99 for each course, and before long, he’s earning a couple thousand dollars a month from his Udemy courses.

      

If your side hustle is going to involve creating content — say, videos — you have two main avenues available to you:

       Online courses that you sell to viewers who sign up

       Free content that you post on YouTube, TikTok, or some other video service that you monetize through ad-related revenue or affiliate marketing links

      

If you head down the paid-course road, you typically earn money in several ways. People can directly purchase your course, with the financial transaction being a simple, straightforward “they pay the price upfront, then they can watch.” Most online learning sites, however, also have some type of subscription service where customers pay a flat fee every month and get access to as many courses as they want during that month. If your course is available through a subscription service (like Udemy or LinkedIn Learning), the service will figure out how much to pay you (and all the other content providers) at the end of each month or reporting period. They usually use some sort of formula where they

       Calculate your course’s percentage of the total minutes watched for all videos during the month (or reporting period).

       Take the total dollar (or other currency) amount available for the courses during the reporting period, after they take their cut.

       Multiply your course’s percentage by the total amount available to determine how much money your course earned that month.

Different course hosting platforms may do their calculations differently, so before you point your own side hustle at a platform’s subscription host, make sure you’re crystal clear how your payments are determined, along with any “gotchas” such as whether the hosting platform is permitted to offer your course for free for some period of time with no payments due. Likewise, on the direct payment side, the hosting platform may be permitted to put your course on sale or change the price at any point without consulting you, reducing your earnings every time a course is sold. You may well make more money when your course has a temporarily reduced price because online learners often wait for sites such as Udemy to put courses on sale — and significantly more course purchases happen during these sales. Still, you’ll make less money when your course is priced less than it normally is, so be aware of what hosting site companies are and are not permitted to do with your content.

      Monetizing yourself

      You’ve probably seen videos on YouTube or Vimeo where someone builds content that is, basically, that person doing or saying something to grab your attention: singing (sometimes pretty badly!) or lip-synching popular songs, for example. Or maybe you’ve seen videos where someone shows off their latest expensive fashion purchases. And of course the Internet is filled with dogs, cats, and other animals acting silly or just looking adorable.

      All these types of videos, and thousands of others, are built around the premise of grabbing and holding your attention, and then getting you to follow or subscribe to the YouTube channel. Along the way, the creative people who uploaded that content can make money from ads placed along with their videos.

      Mark and Miguel, both of whom plan to enter the side-hustle game with videos that they hope to monetize, have another co-worker named Max who is also intensely interested in creating and uploading video content. But although Mark and Miguel both intend to create videos that convey information (small business accounting for Mark, and bartending for Miguel), Max intends to monetize, well, himself.

      Max decided that he’s going to record himself walking or biking all over Boston and sharing his observations about interesting people he notices, the buildings that he passes, and whatever else he feels like talking about. Will his videos build a following to the point where Max can make a little bit of money from them? He thinks so. Max is a pretty funny guy, and his running commentary will basically be a standup comedy routine — at least that’s what he intends.

      Monetizing an asset for your side hustle

      If you own real estate, you can turn that asset into a side hustle. You can also monetize other assets into side-hustle money:

       Renting your boat (anywhere from a fishing boat to a yacht!) to vacationers

       Renting your luxury sports car to someone looking to put the finishing touches on an extra-special occasion

      Cindy