To make money online, you generally need 3 things:
There will always be exceptions to this rule, like the YouTube celebrities who don’t have their own site, but most of the successful entrepreneurs online (myself included) have figured out those 3 things.
An online business is a great asset; you can work from anywhere and serve people worldwide. Depending on how you have it set up, you can even earn money while you sleep. Ahh that elusive “passive income!”
The location-independent business models you’ll find here include blogging, podcasting, self-publishing, teaching online courses, and more.
If you’re not sure where to start, let me recommend this “Greatest Hits” collection:
As a blogger or business owner, are you using Amazon to generate new leads and reach more potential customers?
If not, I think you’re missing out.
Amazon is the 4th most popular site in the country (according to Alexa), which means there are probably a metric ton of potential customers searching there for what you know about.
Robert Brandl is a German entrepreneur now living in Spain with his wife and twin 16-month olds, but 10 years ago he was working full-time, wanting to travel, and was just trying to figure out how to get a blog online.
He did what most aspiring bloggers did, he turned to Google for answers. But was disappointed with what he found. Nobody was doing a great job answering his question and comparing all the different options.
With that, WebsiteToolTester.com was born.
This week I’m excited to introduce one of the hottest side hustles of the moment, and that is low-content self-publishing.
What is low-content publishing?
Let me explain — self-publishing has been around for a decade, and we’ve covered that quite a bit in both fiction and non-fiction — it’s one of my favorite and perhaps most passive side hustles. Write the book, hit publish, collect royalties for years.
Chris Ritter from RitterSP.com has worked as little as 8 hrs in a month, his target audience is swimming coaches, and he still grossed 6-figures in his first year.His biggest source of growth?He started a podcast for swimming coaches, by interviewing swimming coaches.
Kimberly Gauthier has been running KeepTheTailWagging.com since 2011, but things really started to take off when she niched down her focus to raw feeding for dogs.
Raw feeding is basically the paleo diet for dogs — attempting to mimic their ancestral diet.
Her blog had than 2 million page views last year — almost entirely from organic search in Google, and she’s monetized the traffic with a few different income streams.
A few years ago, a side hustler named Brock McGoff reached out to me with a guest post pitch.
The post detailed how he was making, at that time, $4,000 a month, from his blog about men’s fashion, on the side from his day job.
Since then, Brock has turned TheModestMan.com into his full-time focus, into a 6-figure income, and into a media empire that expands well beyond the blog itself.
In this post, I’ll walk through my complete podcast production process for The Side Hustle Show.
If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a top-rated and award winning business podcast with more than 8 million lifetime downloads.
I’ve been producing the podcast weekly since 2013, and though I know this process will continue to evolve, here’s what it looks like today.
Marc Andre made over $1.1 million dollars from his photography hobby.
But what’s interesting is that he never got paid to take pictures, he never sold any of his photos, and he never held any photography workshops.
So, what did he do instead?
Stacy Caprio from her.ceo was desperate – her words – to leave her day job.
She ended up doing just that after acquiring – and improving – a portfolio of mini online businesses, websites that make money from advertising in her case, and now earns a few thousand dollars a month.
As side hustles become more popular — and perhaps necessary — let’s take a look at some of the common options … and what you might consider doing instead.