6 Side Business Ideas to Start Making Extra Money

In a previous article, I talked about the importance of doing what I call “active investing”. In other words, it means having one or more side businesses.

Today, I’m going to share with you some ideas for side businesses that I find interesting. They’re not original, but work and they can be done by anyone, as long as you put in the necessary work.

Flipping

I’m going to start with the simplest, and the one I’ve set up for myself. Flipping is simply buying goods and reselling them at a higher price to make a profit.

It’s pretty simple because it doesn’t require anything to set up. Indeed, to buy you can simply go to the local garage sale or the Internet and find everything, and to sell there are numerous platforms, notably eBay, which is very popular.

You can either buy from individuals, or you can also buy from wholesalers to benefit from the best prices, but this requires a certain amount of organization since you’re buying a lot of goods directly.

Personally, I buy clothes from wholesalers, which I then resell on the Vinted platform. It requires very little work, and even if it takes a while to sell because I buy clothes in batches of 100, everything goes.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a bit like flipping, in that you buy in order to resell at a higher price, except that you don’t have to take care of any stock — everything is shipped directly to the customer by your supplier.

Your objective is just to acquire new customers. It sounds simple, but it’s actually quite hard. It’s not easy to make a name for yourself and, above all, to convince people to buy from you.

On the other hand, with hard work and motivation, and possibly time if you want to make yourself known via web referencing, it’s possible to make a good income from it and above all to scale it quite easily.

For my part, I’ve already tried dropshipping several times. I only made my first sale after a year and 4 failed stores. I sold forehead thermometers during the Covid-19 period and quickly made a lot of sales, but that ran out of steam and today I don’t do dropshipping anymore.

If you want to start dropshipping, the easiest way is to use Shopify, a site that allows you to create your online store very easily. On the other hand, I’m not particularly a fan of Shopify, for my part I’ve always used WordPress and WooCommerce, so take a look there too. As for the supplier, everyone recommends finding one on Aliexpress, but to keep delivery times as short as possible, I’d recommend finding one in your own country, otherwise, your customers will grumble, and I can understand them!

Blogging

Setting up a blog is a side business that can be interesting and can open the door to many things as you acquire traffic.

On the other hand, it takes a long time to get results. If you don’t advertise, you’ll need at least 1 year to start getting traffic to your blog, depending on how you optimize your SEO.

However, it’s not too difficult to do, as it doesn’t require much work. Count on one article a week to acquire traffic and keep it, so about 1 or 2 hours depending on how you work and the subject of the article. If you take that out over a year, you’re looking at between 50 and 100 hours to start getting results, but once you’ve passed that hurdle, your blog can pay for itself with very little work.

On top of that, you can start monetizing your blog through advertising, selling products to your audience, publishing sponsored posts, etc…

For my part, I’ve already made several blogs, but I’ve never really maintained them. I still have one running at the moment (https://propython.fr) but I don’t publish much anymore, so let’s just say that my main blog now is Medium. It doesn’t give me the same freedom as if I’d designed my own blog, but it does make it easier to acquire traffic.

If you want to start a blog, the easiest way is to do it via WordPress, or even on Medium if you want to do what I do. On ProPython, I did everything “by hand”, I coded the site myself, but it was more of an exercise for me, it has no real use.

Offer your services

You can monetize just about anything by offering your services. Do you love music? Then offer music-related services: teacher, composer, performer, etc. If you’re a web developer, offer to create websites.

The hardest part of this side business is finding customers. If you have a good network, it can be quite easy to find one. If not, there are platforms like Fiverr or Upwork that let you either apply for freelance assignments or post your own ads.

The disadvantage of this side business is that it’s not really scalable and requires a lot of work. Alternatively, when you start to have a fair number of customers, you can outsource the requests and switch to drop servicing. It’s like dropshipping, except you’re not selling goods but services. But it has nothing to do with offering your services so I won’t detail it more.

As an example, I was once a freelance web copywriter. I was paid $30 per 1000 words, which I wrote in 1 hour. I was also once a home piano teacher paid $10 per half-hour. But I don’t do that anymore because I don’t have the time, and because with that, you have few levers to increase your income, unlike other businesses.

Start a YouTube channel

The principle is the same as that of launching a blog: you want to get an audience and monetize it. The only difference is in the format, which is audiovisual with a YouTube channel.

This means that the execution is different. You don’t need the same techniques to succeed with your blog as with a YouTube channel. And competition is insane on YouTube (for blogs too, but YouTube is more widespread than blogs nowadays in my opinion), so you’ll have to put in more work for the same result on your blog.

There are two strategies for success on YouTube. Either the “one shot” method, i.e. you make few videos, but each video is very well thought-out and trendy so as to get lots of views. The other method, which is simpler but requires more work, is the bombardment method. You bombard your site with videos, so one every two or three days, and this way you’re sure to acquire traffic in the long run. On the other hand, as you can imagine, making two videos a week takes time. And you can’t afford to neglect quality, as the competition is fierce.

However, one advantage of a YouTube channel over a blog is that it’s much more scalable. With a YouTube channel, there’s no limit to the number of views you can make. Whereas with a blog, if you get 50,000 visitors a month, you’re happy. Then there’s the snowball effect on YouTube. It’s all about the first few subscribers, then it grows exponentially on its own.

I’d have liked to finish with an example like the other sections, but I don’t have a YouTube channel. I made one 8–9 years ago (when I was 12) and spent 1 year on it. In the meantime, I haven’t continued to maintain it, which is one of my regrets today. To compensate, I’m planning to create a YouTube channel dedicated to the piano one day, hopefully, this year, but I’ve already got lots of projects on the go!

Trading

Yes, I see trading as a business. You have to manage your cash flow, you have to manage your risks, you have to invest your time, your money, etc… In fact, the people who don’t succeed in trading are those who don’t see it as a business, but simply as a hobby or a way of making easy money.

Trading has many advantages. First of all, it’s a fairly flexible business. There are many markets, each with its own specificities, schedules, and strategies. On top of that, there are many different types of trading: you can be a scalper, a day trader, and in this case trade every day, on a fairly short time scale, or you can be a swing trader or a positional trader, and in this case trade a few times a week/month and on longer time scales.

Another advantage of trading is that you can manage your risk as you see fit. Do you like risk? Or are you more conservative? It’s up to you to adjust your risk-management strategy according to your profile, unlike a traditional business where risk is generally unadjustable.

Then there’s the added advantage of scalability. Since your trading income depends on your capital, there are no limits (at our particular trader level). If you know you’ll make 5% a month, you’ll make 5% a month whether you’re trading with $10,000 or $1,000,000.

On the other hand, trading is a business where there are no barriers to entry. But those who enter it unprepared will leave broke for sure. You need at least 1 or 2 years of training to understand the markets, risk management, technical and fundamental analysis, etc…

As for me, I’ve been interested in trading for 3 years, and I’ve even created algorithms and automatic trading bots, but I haven’t yet managed to earn a cent from them. I train in demos because I don’t feel ready to enter the markets, even after several years. That doesn’t stop me from having a lot of knowledge on the subject and doing well in demo, but I still have a lot to learn.

Final Note

All the ideas I’ve mentioned here are ideas that I know well and that I know work, which is why I’m taking the liberty of mentioning them. I wasn’t going to make a list and throw 30 ideas at you without being able to go into a minimum of detail and without talking about my experience with this.

So now all you have to do is make up your mind and put in the work needed to launch your little business!

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