5 REALISTIC Side Hustles (Even if You Work a 9-5 Job)

[00:00] The internet is flooded with videos and content around side hustles and passive income opportunities that realistically aren't feasible for most people, especially videos like this that promise thousands of dollars a month in actual income. What if I told you that you could quit your day job

[00:14] and make as much as 8 to $10,000 per month from basically anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection? They're really nothing more than false advertising and just clickbait because these types of results happen for the rare few that were lucky enough to get an early or have been

[00:28] doing this full time for many years or have found some unfair advantage that's propelled their success. But the principle of having supplemental sources of income is sound, especially if you want other avenues to build wealth alongside your full time job. So in this video, I'll go over five realistic

[00:42] side hustles that you can do, what you can expect from them, and how you can sustain these new income streams to help you increase your wealth all while keeping your full time job. Welcome back to Daniels Brew where I talk personal finance and career development.

[00:59] So first things first, as a working professional, there are a few parameters or impediments actually that you have to address when you try to venture into a new side hustle. First and foremost is your lack of time. If you have a standard career, most likely you're occupied between the hours of 8.30

[01:14] a.m. and 5.30 p.m. on weekdays. And while on occasion you might be able to sneak out of work a little bit early or log off quietly before 5.00 p.m. typically you're bound to your desk between normal office hours. The second factor to recognize is that because you're working a full time job,

[01:28] you'll also likely be very tired at the end of the day. Between dinner and taking care of the kids if you have them, you might only have about one to two hours of free time in the evenings. And chances are you likely won't be in your fresh estate, both physically or mentally. This means any side hustle

[01:42] that you dive into must be something that can be set up and sustained with only a couple of hours of dedication each night and ideally shouldn't be too physically or mentally taxing. In other words, something like landscaping business or building an iOS app in your spare time, that might not be a

[01:57] practical side hustle in this case. So in this video we're only going to be looking at the side hustles that fit these criteria so that it becomes realistically feasible for you to start and carry this on without sacrificing your day job or your sanity. Oh and one last thing before I go on to the side hustles,

[02:12] none of these ideas are going to bring you thousands of dollars of passive income overnight. In fact, depending on how much time and effort you can expend on these side hustles, they may actually never get that lucrative. But the point here is not to be able to create massive sources of cash flow

[02:25] instantly that could potentially replace your day job. But the goal here is to simply create an additional supplemental stream of income however big or small that may be that can help to augment your income stream on a regular basis. Alright so with those caveats, let's get on to the side hustles.

[02:40] So the first topic I have for you today is to start a medium long. Medium.com is kind of like the YouTube of articles where you have writers and published articles into the medium platform for

[02:53] all medium members to read. To be a medium member it costs $5 a month and it gives members access to read any and all articles written by any medium writer on the platform. Topics range from trending tech news to entrepreneurship, personal growth and everything in between. And the cohort of writers are

[03:10] pretty well established as well. With many notable figures already on the platform including Katie Kirk and Gary Vee. But the beauty of this is that just like YouTube anyone can become a writer on medium and earn money from their written words. It's actually really simple to get started. You begin

[03:25] by registering an account, setting up your profile, and then entering the writing tool with the right story link here. This opens up a writing editor that functions very much like a WordPress site which has built in copy editing tools that you can utilize. You can specify headers, page breaks and

[03:40] even incorporate images into your work. Then when you finished composing your article, simply hit the publish button and the prompt will pop up and ask you if you'd like to select the cover image, label tags that are relevant to your content and ask you if you want to make this a free or

[03:52] member-only article. Meaning you'll get paid when a member reads your story. And that's it. You've published your own article on medium.com and as long as you satisfy the criteria to enter into their partner program, medium will pay you a percentage of the reader's membership fee in proportion to

[04:06] the time that they spend reading your work. For example, if last month a member spent 10% of their monthly reading time on your story, then you'll receive 10% of their $5 monthly membership fee. So in that scenario, you will have earned 50 cents for that month from that member. Now that's not a lot.

[04:21] But imagine if you had a small following of only 500 members that all spent 10% of their monthly reading time on your articles. That's $250 that month. And it's a volume game. So the more articles you write, the more there is for members to read and the more followers you get. If you have

[04:36] 2000 followers and they spent just 10% of their reading time each month on your content, that's an extra $1,000 per month. But the best part about this side hustle is that the lift to get started is very light. All you really need is a computer and a commitment to write a few articles a month. And once you've

[04:51] written and published your articles, then from that point on, the articles will continue to generate passive income for you as long as I get read by other medium members. On my medium account, I have a few articles that I've written about a year ago that are still generating a small amount

[05:04] of passive income for me. So this is definitely a feasible option for any of us that are full-time professionals, because even if you only commit to writing one article a week, in one year's time, that's roughly 52 published works. And that should be more than enough to bring you some sustained

[05:18] passive income over time. This second side hustle option involves this homemade meal marketplace called Chef. Chef is a really interesting online marketplace where local cooks make homemade meals and then sell them to their communities, all through the help of the logistics service that Chef

[05:33] provides. It's very much like purchasing ready-made meals that you can simply reheat at home. But unlike some of the mask-produced products out there, these meals are actually homemade from scratch, from a local cook in your neighborhood. Here's how it works. First, anyone can be a chef on the platform,

[05:48] but there are some safety qualifications that you have to pass. You start by registering an account which Chef, and then taking and passing an ANSI accredited food safety certification exam. This online certification exam ensures that you're educated on the proper food safety practices

[06:03] that commercial restaurants have to follow so that you can adopt them in your home kitchen. Next, you set your menu and the schedule of when customers can order your meals, which they'll do one day in advance to make sure that you have enough time to get the ingredients and prepare the dishes. And then,

[06:16] as the orders come in, you simply cook package and cool your dishes and drop them off at a local delivery hub in the morning of the actual delivery so that they can be sent out to your customers. And that's it. Your customers get an amazing home-cooked meal and you have a thriving chef

[06:31] business that brings in supplemental income. And the reason why I felt like this would be a really good side hustle for working professionals is that if you're the cook of your home and if you prepare homemade meals regularly for your household, then cooking up a larger portion of your family's meal

[06:44] each night and preparing them in to go containers shouldn't be a huge stretch and effort. You're cooking anyways and it would very much be like preparing a larger meal for your friends and family and then packaging it up for them to take home. You'd be leveraging an activity that you already do

[06:58] each night to bring in some extra income and that's one of the best ways to develop a side hustle. Oh, and let me just highlight one of the merit of the chef service. Chef has such a diverse cohort of cooks on the platform with about 85% of the chefs being women and 80% of them being people of color

[07:13] representing over 85 different countries. That means the variety of the meal options on chef is so vast that you'll get so many different flavors and ingredient options to make all of your meals interesting and dynamic. So even if you don't become a chef cook, it might be interesting to try out

[07:27] the service and get some amazing home cooked meals delivered to you. The third side hustle option is to start a rental business with a platform like friend with a friend with a.com is a simple peer-to-peer rental marketplace where you can list gear that you have lying around for other people

[07:42] in your community to rent. Getting started is easy. You simply sign up for a free account, list your gear and then when renters reach out to you, simply confirm the bookings and arrange a convenient location for pickup. But what's really great about this site is that they also provide the lender

[07:56] of the equipment, property insurance and liability insurance as part of their service for a fee. They have a lender damage guarantee program which provides coverage for up to $10,000 per incident in the event that a borrower damages or steals your equipment. They also have a lender liability

[08:11] guarantee program which provides liability coverage for up to $100,000 per occurrence in the event of third-party claims of injury while using your gear. From a lender's perspective, this gives me peace of mind that if I rent something out to someone, I'm covered in the event of a loss or accident.

[08:26] And again, this is something that you can set up without a lot of effort and time. And depending on the volume and equipment that you have on the platform, friends with a claims that you could potentially earn an extra $1000 through this service. But even if you don't earn that much, once you have your

[08:40] equipment listed, the upkeep here would be very minimal. So the income here would be mostly passive, which again is why this might be a good option for those of us that are full-time working professionals. The next side hustle on our list is to sell digital goods on a platform like Etsy. Etsy is

[08:54] typically known for selling jewelry, accessories and clothing. But did you know that there's also a thriving ecosystem of digital goods that exist on this platform? Do a quick search for checklist and you'll see thousands of different checklists that you can download and use on just about any subject

[09:08] matter that you can think of. Let's try another one. Let's do budget sheets. Again, you'll see hundreds and hundreds of Excel or Google sheets all tailored towards keeping a budget. And if you use the number of reviews here as a proxy for sales of any one of these listings, you can easily estimate the amount

[09:23] of revenue that anyone posting is made. This one budget spreadsheet, for example, has about 3,500 reviews. And so if we assume that they must have purchased in order to leave a review, that's 3,500 orders at least at a price of roughly $10 each, which equates to about $35,000 total for that listing.

[09:40] Now, I don't know how long, of course, this posting has been live. But even if it took a couple of years to reach this level of sales, that's $35,000 in the course of two years, which would be an average of almost $1,400 per month. Not bad for a source of passive income. And if you're a working

[09:55] professional, you're likely already proficient in productivity tools like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. And so if you decided to use these tools and dedicate a little bit of time and effort into creating a digital good, like a checklist or a template or something like that,

[10:09] you might find that there are people on the Etsy marketplace willing to buy your goods. Getting established here is easy. You simply register and account on Etsy, create your digital product, and upload your listing, specifying your price and download method. If you like, you can check out

[10:22] the Daniels Bruetsie store to see my collection of resume templates and other career resources available for purchase. And the last side hustle I have for you is affiliate marketing. Now I know there are tons of videos and tutorials out there about this, so I'm not going to go into the basics of what this

[10:36] is and how you set up affiliate links. But rather, I want to talk about one tactic that you can employ to ensure that affiliate marketing gains traction for you and become something that you can viably sustain for the long term. This single key factor in any affiliate marketing business

[10:49] is traffic. You have to get enough traffic to your links because it's a volume game and a certain percentage of your traffic will convert into using your links and ultimately leading to a sale. And one of the easiest ways to get exposure and drive traffic to your links is to utilize short

[11:03] form video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts. Check out some of these affiliate creators on TikTok. Amazon promo code is for July 31st, all 50 to 80 percent off.

[11:18] First deals for this no pool dog harness comes in multiple sizes and colors in originally 3499. And to this code here in your total will be only $7. Amazon promo code is for July 31st, all 60 and 90 percent off. First deal for today is this 3-1 women's purse. This is for $24.99. Enter this

[11:34] code to check out for a total of $7.50. Top deals on Amazon for July 30th and you can find these deals right here. Okay, first Hannah asked for a catch tree. I found this one right here. It's currently priced at $7.98 but once you're in that promo code it brings all the way down to $3.99.

[11:47] You see, they have a very simple strategy for how they do this. They simply search for enticing deals and sales on Amazon, share them with their audience and drive them to their Amazon affiliate links. If you're an avid online shopper you're likely searching for deals on a regular basis anyways.

[12:02] So aggregating the offers you find and simply sharing them on TikTok would be a very low time in effort engagement. And just doing this could create a small amount of passive income from an activity that you're likely already doing anyways. I'll link a few of these creators that are already doing this

[12:16] in my description section below so you can check out how they're driving their affiliate marketing and to see if this might be something that'll work for you as well. And that's it. Those are the top five side hustles in my opinion that you can easily do while

[12:32] keeping a normal nine to five job. If you found this video helpful then please make sure you like it and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this. And if you're interested in my other personal finance content then simply go to my modern finances playlist down below in the description

[12:45] section or you can just go to DanielsBrew.com. And with that, thanks for joining me today and we'll see you next time.