Side Hustles I Have Tried to Make Extra Cash
Since April of 2020, I have been trying to make extra money with a few side hustles. This is all in the pursuit to be financially better off and to give my family anything they could ever want. I don’t know if you have noticed, but I’m on the bigger side. So I was trying various diet trends and whatnot with little to no results, that’s when I saw a friend selling Herbalife so I decided to give it a try. The shakes were ok and the “plan” was pretty easy to follow, two shakes a day and a healthy meal at dinner. But after the 30 days, I didn’t really see much of a difference. So since it didn’t really make a difference for me, that would not be the diet or side hustle I would try. While I was doing Herbalife, I had noticed one of my good friends kept posting about something called Arbonne. But I wasn’t really sure what it was about, so I sent him a message and asked him about it.
That’s when I got into my first side hustle. After talking with my friend I decided to try the Arbonne 30 Days to Healthy Living Challenge. This plan came with two different types of protein, some greens mix, and a mineral booster. Along with the supplements, there was also a FaceBook group you could join, where you can download recipes and talk with others that are doing the challenge along with you. After the 30 days were up, I had lost over 10 lbs and felt great. I was sleeping better and I had way more energy than I had before. After discussing it with my friend I joined his team and set off to work. But I’m not very good with the MLM concept. I had a hard time reaching out to everyone in my Facebook feed or my Instagram feed. I would post lots of pictures of me enjoying the products, which I truly do enjoy. But I just struggled to make enough sales to make it worthwhile. That kind of business takes a special type of personality to make it thrive, and I know several people that kick ass with that business, but I was not one of them.
So several months go by, all the while I have been researching online ways to make extra money. I was taking surveys and trying to sell some of my old things on eBay, but it wasn’t really lucrative. And everything else I kept seeing would cost you money upfront to possibly make money on the backend. Then while bored at work, I decided to join the Tik-Tok trend and download the app to see what it was about. There are lots of funny videos, don’t get me wrong, and you can really lose yourself watching all of the videos on it. But there are also financial advice channels and a few of them seemed to be just up my alley.
But before I tried any of them I did some online research, what I came to is most of them are crap, but the one that did seem the most appealing was the possibility of starting this blog. While there is the potential to make some money off of it, those earning would be several years in the making. But the thought of just having an outlet to post my thoughts and maybe help someone else along in the journey of parenthood and adulting just sounded like a good idea to me. That’s how The Overthinking Dad came to be, as an outlet for me to talk about the ups and downs of life and my new baby boy. And since the blog wasn’t really a moneymaker in the short term I have tried a few other side hustles, and so far they are not going so well either.
The biggest and easiest side hustle I have recently gotten into is Merch by Amazon, at first it was to get some Overthinking Dad Merch made, but then I started really getting into designing shirts for dads. But you are limited on the number you can sell at a time depending on which tier you are in. When you first start you only have 10 slots, and then once you sell 10 shirts, you will move up to the next tier. The next tier is 20 shirts and so on, so it doubles every time, and once you sell the tier amount you will move on to the next. I am still stuck at the first tier and have only sold shirts to myself and my family.
Another side hustle I have tried is something called Text Broker. With this, you send in a written sample and then wait for it to get a star rating. Once you have a rating you can choose different articles or guest spots you can write and get paid for. The Tik-Tok people suggest you get a mic and do speech-to-text through Google docs. This can pay various amounts, and it all depends on the length of what you are writing. And sometimes, if you are rated high enough, people can hire you to write for them directly and that has a bigger payout. I was rated at a three-star and so far have made a little over $3 for about 300 words. But there hasn’t been much to choose from to write, and I have been spending most of my time on this blog, trying to make it something worthwhile.
These are just the few side hustles that I have personally tried and don’t get me wrong, people do make a living off of these outlets. But like I said before, it takes a special kind of person to thrive at many of them. And some may take a good amount of effort to get it off the ground. I also can not say it enough, make sure you do your own research before trying any of these yourself. But with effort and maybe a little money upfront you can gain your own financial freedom with a side hustle of your own.
Drop a comment and let me know if you have ever tried a side hustle and if they ever worked for you.