Let’s say you want to make an extra £500 (or $500). It might seem like a big call but break it down. 500 a month means about 125 a week. Or 25 per weekday. Which if you took as an hourly rate you could condense into around three hours, just two nights a week. More do-able?
You can even break it down further. You don’t have to just do ‘one’ extra thing – what if you found two things each bringing in £65/$65 a week? Here are some ways to do just that.
5 simple “on the side” ideas
- Go on elance.com or peopleperhour.com and rent out your services. Yes, if you put yourself up and do nothing more then you’ll get no clients. So take the time to look at the top people on there and review how they got rated like that. Follow what they did. There’s generally no need to reinvent the wheel – hack into their process instead. These sites are first port of call for more and more people looking for professional services/random assistance: this week alone I heard from two people this week alone who paid for someone on guru.com (one hired a lawyer, another hired a designer).
- Sell your time directly to clients, based on the skill you have. What can you do from your work or personal life that is marketable? Important principle: If you can get a job in it odds are you can offer it at cut price to a few people/businesses on the side too.
- Make stuff and sell it to a business (or an individual). For example, I spend disproportionate amounts of times in cafes during the day and have been surprised how many of them accept freelancers’ cakes! At least twice this month I’ve seen someone come in and get an agreement to supply cakes baked in their own kitchens. That’s the sort of simple thing you can add to the mix.
- Teach something. What do you have to teach? Find people. Do that. At first this will return nothing. Then £100 a month. But stick with it and soon you’ll be at £500 extra at least. You can up your return (and lower costs) by doing small groups, and you can definitely up your rate by knowing how to position yourself. For example, I know of school tutors who make almost as much on the side than they do in their salaries. You don’t have to be a tutor – what do you know a bit more about than most people? What do people come to you for help with already? What do you have to share? Teach that.
- Rent out your spare room on AirBNB.com. I know people who essentially live rent/mortgage free by renting out their room on AirBNB for a certain number of days a month – and AirBNB make it stupidly easy to start by sending over a professional photographer to photograph your place for free! Their insurance policy is also insanely good – AirBNB is the safest way I know of to rent out a space. To get the best results go to their website and follow their guidelines.
My hint as a regular user: reviews are king. AirBNB is a community and reviews are how people pick you. You don’t need the highest end property, if you are well reviewed you can consistently book out. So, launch below market rate for the first several guests to get as many good reviews as you can fast. And describe your place honestly : this is not a real estate advertisement, you want people to arrive surprised and delighted at how accurate/better than expectations your places is, be open about any flaws so they don’t get a surprise – that leads to way better reviews!).
Of course not everyone has a spare room. If that’s you, rent out your couch. Really. If you’re housesharing and don’t even have the option to do that go sleep at a friend’s place and rent out YOUR ROOM (assuming that’s an option – which it might be).
