Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest, and today we’re gonna go over six online side hustles that make me about $34,000 a month.

Now, normally I’ve tried to keep my income number private. But basically, Business Insider approached me again to do an interview on this exact topic, so I couldn’t pass it up. And because it’s already out there, I decided I wanted to make a video on this. Now entrepreneurship definitely has its ups and downs, they basically took the average of the previous three months since the article and figured out that $34,000 A month which was basically November 2021, December 2021, in January 2022.

Those are definitely good months for me. And because there are always ups and downs in this journey, I don’t know if it’s gonna go up or down, hopefully, we’re gonna keep climbing up because the goal is I’m trying to make systems which means I should be able to grow everything I’m doing and work on more projects. But yeah, I just wanted to put that disclaimer out there. I am so shocked by that number I never normally like calculate it line by line like that, but they really wanted me to prepare all the dots. And you know, hopefully I can keep that number up. Now in this episode, I’ll go into a little bit of my journey as well as kind of talk about each of the side hustles and the pros and cons.

So this has been like seven years in the making and actually booked a solo month longer trip six months out. So I decided to quit my job and travel the world for two years as a digital nomad, building passive income streams. But the transition was basically like I took multiple part-time remote positions at three positions where I was designing ads and managing them. And then I was also building my passive income on the side. The first one I attempted was Etsy. And I think I started making 50 to $100 a month, there wasn’t too much, but it kind of opened my eyes that like I could do this. And I could make this happen.

So I kept working more and more on these multiple income streams and then documenting them on my blog. So basically, I started with the Etsy shop, then I went to blogging, then I went to merch by Amazon, Amazon FBA. And then now kind of my personal brand, I’m not including real estate in this, I’m not including my day job in this right now. And this is all completely online side hustles.

The first one was Etsy, so I started selling digital products like Photoshop templates, and Microsoft Word templates on Etsy. And what that might look like are wedding cards, or photography mini session ads. And I just designed these templates and put them up so that people can purchase them and edit them the way they want to. Now if you don’t have paid software like Photoshop, you can even make Canva templates, which is free software, you can go to Canva.com, start making your different digital products. You can even use Google Sheets or Google Docs, if you have specific information that you want to sell or you know, budgeting templates or something like that, you know, you don’t have to have graphic design experience to start selling digital products.

I started doing this because I realized that I didn’t have to fulfill or ship the orders. Every time people purchase my listing, they’ll get the product automatically and starting an Etsy shop is actually free. And they just have like a little bit of fees on top like 20 cents per listing for three or four months or something like that, as well as some other transaction fees whenever people purchase the order. And then I started scaling more by adding more products, I usually recommend at least 100 products in your shop to really get it going and to start ranking your products on the Etsy search engine. So I would also conduct a lot of keyword research, try to optimize my listings by tags and title keywords.

I suppose the con is you do need to deal with customer support. So it’s not completely passive. So people will have questions. I still answer those questions. I haven’t touched my Etsy shop in many years. And it’s still cash flows for me, not as much as before, to be honest. So if you wanted to keep up those numbers, you usually need to generate more products, but I still make some money from it to this day. And essentially, you will need to do customer support. For example, for my Photoshop products.

Some people just don’t know how to use Photoshop really well. And they need a lot more hand holding. So sometimes I work with them so they can fix their issues or things like that. So when we’re talking pros and cons, I guess that is sort of a con but I don’t spend that much time on customer support, so it’s not too bad.

The second side hustle that I’m going to talk about is merch by Amazon basically with merch by Amazon, you put up designs on custom apparel. And whenever people purchase your listing on Amazon, Amazon’s going to print and fulfill your orders for you. And the great thing about merch by Amazon is it’s on amazon.com Like on that marketplace where you can sell amazing custom shirts, hoodies and things like that. It makes it really easy to get on the marketplace. And it doesn’t require you buying inventory again. So I love this method because it’s super passive. Again, I haven’t touched this income stream in many years as well. And this is even more passive than Etsy I would say because I don’t need to handle customer support.

Amazon does everything with that they pay you out in royalties. So it’s just very passive. And the reason I haven’t touched these two things mushrooms much is that I’m focused more on the personal brand. Like I used to have Amazon FBA as well. But I actually decided to stop doing that one and kind of close down everything with that, because it does take a little more active work. And the other ones that I still have with the E-commerce side, I’m just really focusing on building this personal brand right now. And I’m going to talk about that in a bit. Now getting back to it, when it comes to the pros and cons. Of course, I just mentioned, it’s very passive. But I would say the con is that you do have to do trademark research, if you do come across trademark issues, they may take it down, and you do risk your account getting banned or something like that.

You would think that was pretty easy to deal with. But actually, like I had a shirt that said lifeguard on it, and that got taken down. And I was just feeling a lot of stress. Because I was like, Oh, I don’t want to have to worry about this all the time. But as long as you do your trademark research, you go to uspto.gov and start doing the basic keyword research, you can avoid using trademark phrases so that you don’t get these takedowns. And they don’t have like a set amount of like, if you get this many takedowns you lose your account or something like that. I haven’t had issues with you know, losing my account or anything like that. But I would say this is sort of a con when it comes to this income stream. But just make sure you really do your research and do everything legit and correct. Don’t be you know, using things like Dragonball Z or Pope Juan or things like that, that’s like, obviously, you can’t do that.

Just think of your own shirt ideas, try to be original with it and design your own shirts, I would also mentioned that if you don’t have design experience, you could potentially hire designers that they are using their own original designs. But you just need to make sure that these designers are really doing their own original designs. And they’re not just grabbing some stuff on Google. So that is a risk there too. So yeah, these are some things to consider. If you’re trying to start a merch by Amazon account.

Number three, you can make an online course. So I would say anything, you’re passionate about anything or knowledgeable. And you can totally make an online course that lives on your website or things like that. So I highly recommend and use teachable. So if you guys want to try it out, use my link in the description below, you can use their free plan, I’ve honestly learned so much over you know many years of making courses, I’ve made three courses I spent a year on each of them, they do take a long time you really focus in crank it out, you could do it in less time, but I just wanted to make sure it was perfect. So I would say that could be a con but I would say that, you know you’re creating something that lives on your website, and anyone can reference it in the future. So even if you don’t get sales right away, it’s really cool to have something out there that people can reference to.

That’s how I feel when it comes to making courses. And make sure not to make some of the mistakes I made where for my first course launch, I didn’t announce that I had the course for my second course I felt like I made a product that people weren’t asking for. So these are two mistakes that I had already made. So just make sure to watch out for those and make sure you are proud of your product and really telling people about it, as well as serving what your audience actually wants. So that you make a course that people will actually buy later, I started gathering the courage to really announce my courses.

I get sales on my first course where I didn’t tell anyone about it before I started going on people’s podcasts and really talking about my course and kind of promoting it a little bit more on my channels. But then my third course remote rental riches with my husband, we actually have over 700 students now and it’s been an amazing ride. And it’s about out of state real estate investing, which was a topic that a lot of people are asking me to make a course on. So everything came together with that course, I would say so I did mention teachable for making your courses.

You can also check out Udemy where they have their own marketplace. If you’re concerned about not having a following or things like that, you can put it on Udemy where they have a search engine and they could possibly find you through search. I would say though, that the disadvantage with Udemy is that you can’t really price it very high, they usually do the site wide discounts where it only becomes like 13 bucks, and Udemy takes a large cut as well. So I actually recommend teachable a lot more because you can set your own pricing, you can price at what you think it’s really worth. And it lives on your own domain instead of someone else’s domain.

Next, I get ad revenue from my YouTube channel. So in order to get monetized you need at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours it honestly took me maybe over a year to get monetized I think even longer, possibly. So it does take time, you’re not gonna get automatic gains.

I would say this with all of these income streams that I’m talking about all these definitely take time. I think when people look at my stuff now they think, Oh, she has a big following. So like whatever. But it took me so long to get to this point, right? So everything takes time. And I would say all these are doable because I was in a situation where I had no income streams coming in back in the day. And then I really started building and it took me seven years to get to kind of where I’m at now. And I’m still trying to figure things out. So I’m still learning in the process. I would just say if you’re gonna make a YouTube channel, make sure you’re doing it on something you’re actually passionate about. It can be easy to burn out because you’re consistently making content every single week, usually.

So it does take a lot of time, you need to make sure that when you’re going into it, you’re thinking, you know, at least five to 10 years with this brand, don’t just make it out of like, I’m just gonna make this channel and not really think about like the long term trajectory of it, because you need to know is a long term project.

The next one I want to talk about is sponsorships. So I get sponsorships with my YouTube channel, my Tik Tok and my Instagram. And actually, I usually don’t pitch companies, they usually come to me and I say no to maybe 80 to 90% of the deals that come to me because I need to make sure it fits my audience and it can bring value to them. So one of the things is you can get into that trap of like, Oh, I’m gonna take every single brand deal and make a ton of money, but it feels inauthentic. And you need to make sure that you’re not hurting your brand in the process. And you need to make sure that you’re giving value to your audience.

When you’re building this personal brand. You’re building that trust with your audience, you want to make sure they can trust your words, right, I think it’s really important to develop a relationship with your audience, essentially, and build that strong community. So when you’re doing these sponsorships, just make sure you’re not just like totally doing for the money to help sell your soul essentially. And then I would say that, with sponsorships out of all of these things that I recommend, this is the most active work, everything else is more passive income.

In my opinion, yes, I am making YouTube videos every single week. But I would say that I could just leave it alone. And essentially, I would still get ad revenue every single day, it may go down if you don’t keep up with it. It’s kind of like the Etsy shop where I’m not continuously putting out products. And it does go down a bit if you’re not maintaining it. So that’s why it is good to be consistent with it. But technically it is passive income because it is ad revenue that you still get even when you’re not actively working on it. So that’s kind of the con with sponsorships, you have to work with them and make sure things are approved, you have to revise your scripts, and go back and forth with them a lot, and actually can take up a lot of time. So that’s why I also really care about just working on the ones that resonate with me and my audience, because it is kind of a good amount of active work, but with the side hustles it can be very lucrative for sure.

Now the last one I want to talk about is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is basically when you promote products and whenever people purchase through your unique referral link, you get a commission so everybody wins. Essentially you get a small commission, your audience gives value and the product owner gets sales. So I know some people make a ton of money doing affiliate marketing. And I think it’s really important that when you’re doing affiliate marketing again, you are building trust, you’re not spamming links, you are promoting things that you recommend or use and I think a lot of people also think that you need a huge following in order to make a lot of money through affiliate marketing but I know people who make a lot from affiliate marketing without huge followings because they have ranked pieces of content very well maybe on their blog or on their YouTube channel and just make comprehensive tutorials on it.

So whenever people search online, they’ll see that article or that YouTube video and then purchase right because their piece of content is ranked high and they talk about the product in a way where it builds trust and makes the audience want to purchase from it because it’ll provide value for them. So you don’t actually have to have a huge following you just need to make sure that you produce high quality content really comprehensive tutorials that get people from A to B so that might come in product reviews, product comparison videos, comprehensive blog posts or videos talking about how one tool has changed your business or has helped you make X revenue or has helped make you healthier person eat better you know there’s so many different things that you can talk about I’m sure you have a lot of products that you guys recommend if you want to check if they have affiliate programs you can contact the company directly and see if they do have affiliate programs or referral programs honestly a lot of them do so you should check that out or you can just Google online and check if the products that you care about do have affiliate programs so that’s what I usually do I don’t become affiliates for things that people just recommend to me and want me to talk about them when I don’t know anything about the product or recommend it so yeah that’s the gist of affiliate marketing all of these different things take time all of these things can take a lot of effort but the benefit is if you set it up right you can get passive income aside from the sponsorship sponsorships are more active board a lot of these things do take time to build so don’t expect any get rich quick scheme.

That basically sums up the top six online side hustles that make me money there are some that I mentioned in the beginning that I actually stopped doing so these are the main ones that generate revenue for me now I am more focused on the personal brand side and on my real estate investments, which I didn’t include in this list today.

If you guys have any questions let me know in the comments below and I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai