--- title: '5 New Online Side Hustles for Students in 2026 (Watch This!)' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=2KJKayKlAsc' video_id: '2KJKayKlAsc' date: 2026-08-05 duration_sec: 1336 --- # 5 New Online Side Hustles for Students in 2026 (Watch This!) > Source: [5 New Online Side Hustles for Students in 2026 (Watch This!)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=2KJKayKlAsc) ## Summary This video presents five realistic side hustles for students that require minimal to zero upfront investment. The creator shares personal experience and provides step-by-step guidance for each, emphasizing practical strategies for earning income while studying. ### Key Points - **Introduction to Side Hustles** [00:15] — The video introduces five side hustles for students that are realistic and require minimum to zero investment. The creator claims credibility from past experience as a student. - **Side Hustle 1: E-commerce/Dropshipping Ad Creation** [00:40] — Over 28 million e-commerce stores exist, 27% are dropshippers, but 90% can't create ads. Opportunity: offer video ad creation services to these stores. Steps: learn video editing, find stores via MyIP.ms, reach out, and outsource to agencies for profit. - **Side Hustle 2: Newsletter Affiliate Arbitrage** [07:47] — Newsletters are valuable assets. Strategy: promote other newsletters for commission. Use platforms like Beehiiv to find affiliate programs. Promote via LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook groups, or YouTube. Potential earnings: $400/month from 200 subscribers at $2 each. - **Side Hustle 3: Influencer Marketing Manager** [15:41] — Influencer marketing is booming (BCG: $1 trillion by 2030). Role: connect brands with influencers. No special skills needed; find jobs on Internshala or LinkedIn. Remote/part-time, earning ₹1,000-₹30,000+ per month. - **Side Hustle 4: Cold Emailing Agency** [17:22] — Cold emailing is a high-paying skill. Help businesses book calls via email. Use tools like Hunter.io or Apollo. Charge $400-$800/month in US or ₹20,000-₹25,000 in India. Requires patience and consistency. - **Side Hustle 5: AI Image Editing** [20:08] — AI-generated images often have flaws. Fix them manually or with tools. High demand on Fiverr (₹1,300-₹1,500 per image). Use free tools like Photoshop. Potential earnings: ₹20,000-₹50,000/month. ### Conclusion The video provides actionable side hustle ideas for students, emphasizing low investment and realistic income potential. It encourages viewers to start with one and scale, while warning against unethical practices like fake subscribers. ## Transcript ? Well, the answer is yes, he can definitely earn. But for this you will have to choose such side hustles where you do not have to trade much of your time. So in this video I will share with you five amazing side hustles for students that are really realistic and require minimum to zero investment up front. But why would you listen to me ? Well, I don't have any side hustle right now. All full time businesses. But back in the day, when I was a student, I used to generate this type of income. Make sure you watch this video till the end. Otherwise, you will not understand many aspects in reality. But if it comes then you will thank me later. I promise. Let's get to the list. The first side is actually e-commerce or dropshipping ads drop servicing for US clients. Well, as of today, there are over 28 million e-commerce stores and about 27% of them are dropshippers. Ok? But what about this? Tell me one thing. There are so many stores but does everyone know marketing well? Everyone has good video advertisements to run? Not there. 90% of store owners are unable to create ads themselves and they are always looking for solutions. And that's where you come in as a problem solver. But you might be wondering how I know video marketing or video ads creation. Right? Well, you do n't have to come. You can also outsource. Not that you won't have to learn anything. You will have to learn enough to convince your clients. It should not happen that the client asks you what aspect ratios work best for my video ad. And you speak. Good question. You are a good question. Jokes Aside gives you experience in video editing and marketing about video editing and video aids. So the step is simple. Step One: First, gain knowledge and experience about video editing and commercial ads. it on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Observe them carefully and also learn editing. Step two, find e-commerce stores to which you can sell your services. I will explain this process in detail further. Step Three, Book Calls and Close Clients at a Certain Pricing. I will also give a price range for this later. Step Four: Find other video agencies and freelancers who offer video ads services at cheaper rates and fulfill your services. Why not drop servicing the task? Let's start with the first step. Well, learning basic video editing is not rocket science. If any of your friends knows it, you can learn from them. You can check out this playlist from Otherwise The Cutting at School. Now editing is fine but the important issue is ideas. Learning the software or terminology isn't a big differentiator. The big differentiator is creativity. And creativity will build in you only when you watch a lot of other video ads. So to fill this gap you have to create a new Instagram account and slowly create a new Instagram account and slowly ads or top performing organic reels. You have to observe them carefully and then slowly your field will be full of AIDS or AIDS. This gives you an idea of what type of ads brands or online services are running to sell to customers. You have to study everything. The entire AIDS psychology, what hooks are being used , what kind of background music, where are the calls to action coming etc. Now step two is to find e-commerce sites that you can reach out to for your services. Now how to do this? Very simple. First of all you have to come to Google and search myip.ms, the official site of myip.ms will appear in the search results. Well my ip.ms is a public IPP address database. Where you can check the data of web service and hosting. It is mostly used by cyber security experts, marketers and researchers. But we'll use it to find e-commerce stores running on Shopify. So you have to click on SHiffai from the search results and then a page like this will open. Now here you will find all the stores hosted on Shopify's IPP address. You can also select a minimum number of visitors if you want more high paying clients. The logic is simple. The more visitors they get, the more money they earn and select minimum 1000 visitors and maximum 10,000 visitors per day and I will hit search. And as you can see the list goes on and on and on. Over 20,000 Shopify stores I can reach out to for my service. Which can be a big number if you increase the visitor count to 500 per day. And the best part is that every e-commerce site has some competitor or the other. Isn't it? So you can always find five to ten competitors of every site. All you have to do is copy the URL of a site from your My ip.ms list. Then you have to come to SEM rush or SCM rush. Paste the URL. Have to scroll down a bit. you can easily find 10 or more competitors for each site. plus websites that you can potentially reach out to. Once you have a list of relevant sites you can reach out to. The third step is to find their contact details and actually send an email. Although there are not many technicalities in this, still I will give you a rundown of the process. So first of all you have to find the contact details. For the most part, you will find contact details on the website itself. If you don't find it, you will have to download an extension called hio. So if you do not get emails on any site, you can come to the site and click on Hunter and it will get you the emails. Now tools like hio are paid tools but they also provide free credits. So you can download multiple extensions of this type to make your work easy. Once you get the contact details. Then you have to start email outreach. And you can get the email script written by ChatJPT. So I come to Chat JPT and I can write something like I help e-commerce and dropshipping stores get more sales via video ads. I offer video ad creation services at affordable prices while maintaining quality. Write Me a Cold Email Script. As you can see, we have a well written script. Now customize the script properly for each client. Do not copy and paste and not copy and paste and send emails consistently to the sites without getting emotionally connected that man, I sent 400 emails and did not get a single response. You will get a response that will say yes I am interested. And when that response comes, you will feel something like this. you will feel something like this. [Music] coordinate a time, book a call, and then convince them. If they ask for samples, you will have to keep four to five samples ready. Or you can also give the client the option of force pay. Meaning you will get paid only when the client likes your work. And while negotiating pricing, you can either charge $10 per video ad or you can also offer a bundle like six ads for $600 and I would recommend you to keep the samples ready in advance so that you can take upfront payment. Once this is done the fourth step is drop servicing. If you do you may need to look for video ad creation agencies like Viral Ecoms. From such an agency, you can get a very good ad made with unique angles for $20 to $50. Or you can get ads created from freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork at affordable rates. If you want, you can also utilize local video ad creation agencies. So the math is very simple. If you are charging your client $10 per video ad and your cost is coming to $50 to $60 or even $80, you are saving $30 per video ad. Just as a mediator. Isn't that cool? One thing you have to keep in full attention to quality and provide the best service possible. Once again, get ads made that bring in sales and they will be made only when you study unlimited ads yourself. You can use the same model for Indian sites and Indian clients but take payment upfront. And there you have it. If you have any questions regarding this side Russell, please feel free to comment below. And with this let's move on to the other side, Russell. Now the other side Russell that you can start as a student is Newsletter Affiliate Arbitrage. And trust me, it's not as complicated as it sounds. Well, first let us understand what a newsletter is. Well in simple words newsletter is like a digital newspaper which people receive through emails. So you create a list of people's email addresses and then send them regular valuable content. Be it financial tips or business insights or productivity tips. It is in email format and people because they like your content. Meaning, when people subscribe to read your emails or join your mailing list, it is called a newsletter. And knowingly or unknowingly, Trust Me, you too must have signed up for many newsletters. And newsletters are the most valuable asset in the entire digital marketing industry. Why ? Because social media platforms or any other platform can be shut down at any time. Just like TikTok happened. But you always turn on the newsletter. And most people do not prefer to change their email address. So email list is one of the most powerful channels for marketing. In a Real World Scenario Let’s say you love writing about relationships. So what do you do? Come to sites like Bihak. Let's create our own newsletter. Both of these sites are useful for creating newsletters and make the process quite simple. And then you gain subscribers to your newsletter and send them weekly emails about relationship tips, mistakes, whatever. So in a way, it became like a YouTube channel, but through emails. Now there are so many newsletters out there that you can subscribe to and that need subscribers. And that is where newsletter affiliate Achraj's strategy comes into play. Well, when you bring subscribers for any other newsletter, then the newsletter gives you commission on every subscriber. And this is called News Letter Affiliate Abichraj. By the way, newsletter affiliate is not a term. I just coined it. Term is notent processes is. So for this side hustle, you neither need any investment, nor any serious skill set, nor a lot of time, nor any technical knowledge, especially as it is really necessary. So the process is very simple. First you find newsletters that need subscribers and are partner. Thirdly, you promote the newsletter on various platforms like Linkedin, YouTube, Instagram, etc. and the newsletter owner pays you commission on every validated subscriber. Very simple. You help people grow their newsletter. you would help a YouTuber grow its subscribers or if you help an Instagram page gain followers. Now let's go in-depth into the process. So let's start with the first step. Find newsletters that want subscribers and are willing to pay for them. And you will be shocked to realize that this is the easiest part. So first of all you have to come to a platform whose name is BHI. Now after coming to BHI, you have to create your account. Once your account is created, you have to click on Monetize and click on BHI Boost. As soon as you click on it, a new page opens where there will be many affiliate programs or campaigns of the newsletter. This is it. As you can see all these newsletters which publish content in different categories. They all want subscribers and are willing to pay for it. For example, if you bring US subscribers to this newsletter , they will pay you $4 per subscriber. Or this newsletter allows subscribers from all countries and pays $1.6 per subscriber. This newsletter again costs $2 per subscriber and so on. You have to click on apply here and convince these newsletter owners that you will bring them quality subscribers. For example, I can tell them that I will get them quality subscribers through Twitter or LinkedIn or through Instagram Reels, or through YouTube etc. You have to honestly tell the newsletter owners how you will bring in subscribers. And for the most part they will approve you if you are honest enough. And once you get approved you will get an affiliate link of this type. But I want to tell you one thing that if you want to join BI Boost then you will have to take their Scale plan. But a 30-day free trial of the Scale plan is available which is more than enough time for you to get some subscribers. And this brings us to step two which is finding quality subscribers for the newsletter. Now before moving ahead, I thinks that he will earn money by referring a lot of fake subscribers, then think again. Now since the process is very simple, many people will think like this but please do not cut your own feet or others' feet either. Back to the Topic So there are others' feet either. Back to the Topic So there are first is through Lindin, the second is through Instagram, the third is through Facebook groups, and the fourth is through YouTube. Let's cover Lindin first. Let's say you that creates content around startups, technology, and lifestyle. Now all you have to do is come to Linkedin and then after coming on Linkedin you have to then after coming on Linkedin you have to some examples of profiles. Now once your profile is created, you need to build a decent network by connecting with good people. So you will send connect requests to the type of people who are the target market of your newser. For example, you can search for startup tips on Lindin and then send a connect request to everyone who has liked the top post. Once you have 500 to 1000 connections, it is not very difficult on a platform like Lindin. You need to write consistent posts and articles around startups that bring enormous value. You can write posts. Can design carousels. You can write articles and slowly people will start engaging with your work. And in every alternate post you can push your BI newsletter. Lindin pe good content ki tremendous reach aati hai and people will subscribe. It's my personal experience. And Lindin pay newsletter culture is way too much anyway. So the successful post with 2000 views each and 1% sign up rate which is about 200 subscribers per month. 200 subscribers in $2 is $400 a month in income. Very very very realistic guys. And you can always get content ideas from Chat JPT. And on Lindin, I would create content like this. You know something like how X company scaled to $1 million in 5 months or 20 companies that crossed $1 million in one year and what you can learn from them. Now the second way is through Instagram. Now , post daily content and then promote your newsletter or you can work with an influencer. But for this platform you will have to choose your niche wisely. If you want Instagram subscribers, then you will have to want Instagram subscribers, then you will have to example, you can pick up a health, beauty, or relationship newsletter. or collaborate with influencers who have a decent following. But here you will have to invest somewhere around $50 to $100. Shout out. But your commission from lets is a subscriber at $3.2. As You Can See This newsletter is paying subscribers $3.2. And if you get even 50 subscribers, that's about $160 in gross revenue. So you can earn anywhere from $50 to $100 on influencer collabs. Now the third way is Facebook groups. This is also quite straight forward. You have to choose a topic and join a Facebook group and then gain subscribers by engaging in the group. However, nowadays the rules of groups have become very strict, so you will have to contribute a lot. Or you contribute a lot. Or you now the fourth way is YouTube videos. Make videos on your niche, build an audience and then gain subscribers. Very simple. And the good thing is that when you it is free and your subscribers also get a lot of value. For example, you made a good video on weight loss and then encouraged people to subscribe to a newsletter for fitness tips. Now the third side that you can actually start as a student is becoming an influencer marketing becoming an influencer marketing manager. If I tell you some numbers, according to a BCG report, Indian influencers will drive $1 trillion consumer expenditure by 2030. $1 trillion, that's right, and in this boom, more and more brands are eager to work with small and big influencers. As an Associate, all you need to do is be the connecting medium between brands and influencers. And how will you do this? It's very simple actually, just keep breathing. It's very simple actually, just keep breathing. you have to do as an influencer marketing manager is make a list of many influencers, contact them on behalf of the brand and then convince them for collaboration and for this side you do not need any special skills. All you need to do is find influencers' emails or DM them and secure as many collaborations as you can for a company. OK but for which company? Well, you just have to go to ncry.com, ind.com or lindin and search for influencer marketing manager jobs. And as you can see, so many marketing managers right now. So you have to apply for jobs pretty can also do an internship of one and a half months to understand the process better. And you can do this job from anywhere, remotely even part time. And you can expect anywhere from ₹1,000 to ₹30,000 plus per month. And with this, let's move on to the fourth side hustle which is cold emailing agency. Well, you must be aware of cold emailing. When you outreach to an unknown person, business, or company through emails to sell something or to land a job, that is called cold emailing. And cold emailing an agency is no rocket science. When you help other businesses book calls, etc., through emails, that's basically a cold email agency setup. Now a days many businesses have to send cold emails to get clients and customers. Be it a freelancer, website designer, a marketing agency, content writer, video editor or any service based business or business provider, not everyone has the bandwidth to send cold emails. Writing a personalized email and then sending it to people all day long and then following up is not everyone's cup of tea and not everyone has the time. So if you are a person who has a very good patience level then cold emailing is the way to go. But what exactly do you do in this ? Well, first you ? Well, first you you can benefit from your cold emailing service. Then you make a list of their potential customers and find their email addresses either through multiple tools or manually. And talking about tools, you can use Hunter.O or Apollo. And then send a personalized email to each potential prospect on behalf of your client to book an appointment or call. Well, cold emailing is a side hustle but also a very high paying skill. One thing I also think about automating in my business is cold emailing. And every business let's say I'm a website designer and I need clients. So what will the cold emailing agency guy do? On my behalf, I will reach out to potential customers who do poorly built website to see if they would be interested in a says yes, then they book an appointment with me through tools like Kenly. You can utilize this skill anywhere in India or US. So in this service or you can also sell an affordable monthly retainer. In the US, you can charge anywhere from $400 to $800 per month, or you can also charge $50 per qualified call. Which is very affordable as per the prices there. And in the Indian market, you can either ask for a booked appointment for $200 to $400 or ask for a booked appointment for $200 to $400 or make Rs 20 to 25,000 and there is bookkeepers, accounting firms, freelancers, writers, marketing agencies, real estate marketing firms et cetera. If you want a complete course on cold emailing then you can watch this video. And with this let's move towards the last side which is AI image editing. Well, you must have heard about AI Art. editing. Well, you must have heard about AI Art. generating great creative images these days with Chat GPT, Myth Journey, Lonado AI, Stable Diffusion. But there is a problem. The images look cool but are not perfect. At some places there are too many hands, fingers are broken , faces are blurred, the background seems off etc. Now it is not possible for everyone to fix this. And this is where a high demand side of real AI image editing begins. In very simple words, when you make any AI generated image better either manually or with the help of any tool, that is AI image editing. Now the question arises whether people pay for it ? Give 1%. Let's come to fiber and let me show you a fiber gig. So you can see this guy fixes the image. And he is charging anywhere from ₹1300 to ₹1500 per image. And it has 200 plus reviews. Seven orders are currently in the queue. Which indicates there is a lot of demand for this skill. And the funny thing is, I am not even a Photoshop pro. He just uses basic tools smartly. Talking about tools, you can use these tools for every work. The free plans of all these are enough. And to get clients for this particular work, you can either use Fiverr or Upwork. You can DM AI art pages, small brands, NFT creators on Instagram, or brands, NFT creators on Instagram, or and present your offering. And if you're curious about what types of businesses will become your customers, here's a list of them. And for AI image editing, you can also create an Instagram page where you will DM you themselves saying that I also want to get something like this made. You can charge anywhere from ₹300 to ₹500 per image. If you are fond of detailing then you can sincerely learn Photoshop or other AI tools which I shared in the screenshots. It's a very serious skill set that can support your lifestyle. And if you start seriously, you can expect anywhere from ₹20,000 to ₹50,000 per month. Well, these are some real world side hustles for students. If you like the video then make sure you subscribe to the channel, like the video and if you have any questions then comment down below. I'll make sure I resond. With this, see you soon resond. With this, see you soon in the next video and I will see you the pop.