Side Hustles for Mums: Trying to Make Money Like Everyone Else Online

I used to work for an escape room company which was so much fun. After having my son, I realised every day of my life is now its own escape room. I dodge toys and discarded toddler breakfasts to get across the room, jump over baby gates like an obstacle course, and try to do my business while a toddler wraps his arms around my neck asking to be picked up.

After a lot of consideration, I decided not to go back to full-time work.

It’s all good and well to make the decision to stop working, but those coffees won’t pay for themselves. Once my maternity pay ran out, I had to get creative about how to earn enough to fund my essential mum-fuel habit.

I’m definitely not here to tell you how to become a millionaire. I’m just going to share a few suggestions that have worked (or not worked) for me.

Online Surveys

I’ve been doing online surveys for years, even before my son was born. They can be a great way to earn a little extra cash — if you feel like spending hours of your day to earn $5. That doesn’t even cover the cost of my coffee! Some survey sites will pay straight to your PayPal account and some pay in vouchers — so once again, vouchers can’t always be used to buy coffee at your local coffee shop.

The problem I have with them, I’ll be working on a survey during nap time, then all of a sudden, I hear a voice saying “All done!” from the baby monitor to let me know nap time is over. Sometimes I can finish the survey before I get him, but sometimes I just have to leave it and come back. What I’ve discovered recently is, some surveys time out but don’t tell you. I’ll go back to complete the survey at a later time. Everything will look normal until I get to the end of the survey, where I get an error message. So now I’ve spent all that time on it for nothing.

The other issue I find is some surveys aren’t very well written and they assume everyone has a job. There’s no option for “stay-at-home parent,” so I’ll just go through the survey randomly clicking answers about my non-existent job, until it finally catches on —I DON’T WORK. Then I’m screened out again, but at least I earned a whole 20 cents for my time.

Collecting Recyclable Containers for a 10-Cent Refund

One day on my travels, I noticed a 10-cent recyclable deposit return machine at my local shopping centre —a kiosk that gives you a 10-cent refund for recycling bottles and cans. Awesome! It would be really easy for me to deposit any recyclables I collected on our weekly shopping/coffee shop trips. I started collecting straight away. I now keep all of our cans and bottles in one of the many empty nappy boxes piled up in our garage. We live in a newly built area and I quickly discovered that I could find quite a few bottles and cans left by the construction workers just by walking around our streets.

This morning, I went for a walk with my son and we collected three whole cans! That’s 30 cents. An iced latte at the cheapest café I know costs $6.10. 30 cents is 3/61ths of an iced latte. Move over Afterpay — at the rate I’m going, I only need to walk 12 hours and 53 minutes more to collect the 58 cans I need to earn enough to buy my iced latte. I think I will skip the caramel shot on that one, it will probably take me another 100 trips around the block to afford that!

LinkedIn? More like LinkedOut

I set my LinkedIn profile to remote work and I get email alerts with new remote jobs every day. One day I got an alert from a company looking for people with Australian accents to do voice recordings for AI voice recognition testing. The advertisement said I’d be asked to record 40 phrases and it would take about 20 minutes in total. I thought, “Great — this could easily be done during nap time!”

As soon as my boy was asleep, I got started on recording the phrases. I thought I’d hit the jackpot scoring the easiest job ever! I finished the recording and entered all my payment details and was told it could take 7 days to receive payment.

On day 8, I got an email to say my recording apparently failed their quality assurance check. They gave me some tips to fix the issues and I got to work again. This time, it took them almost 14 days to respond, only to let me know — once again — that my recording quality wasn’t up to standard. I was all out of chances to make this work. The email ended by assuring me that they would keep me informed about future jobs — no thanks!

So, actually, now I think about it, I didn’t earn any money from this one, it just cost me my valuable time. Lesson learned: If it sounds like a quick and easy way to earn money in nap time, it probably isn’t.

Are Digital Stickers the Answer? … I’m Guessing No, But We’ll See

This weekend I got my hands on a guide called ‘100 Digital Product Ideas’. It had 100 different products that can be created digitally to sell online. I scrolled through the list of options:

• Resume Templates — hmm I don’t even have a job; I’m probably not qualified for this.

• Wellness Journals — I’ve been sick for 4 weeks now, I’m not exactly a vision of health and wellness.

• Invoice Templates — I don’t have any money, what would I know about invoicing?

Then something caught my attention: Digital stickers. I thought it sounded interesting, but surely, it’s not a real thing, right? Some quick research told me I was wrong. Digital stickers are, in fact, a thing and lots of people use them for digital planners and whatever else you could possibly put a digital sticker on.

I’m in a Facebook group for working mums, so I posted a question to the group asking if anyone had advice on how to get started. Of course, that came with a million offers from graphic designer mums wanting to design my stickers. I don’t think they understood I’m trying to make money here, not spend money and help them grow their own business.

So it looked like I was on my own…with the help of ChatGPT of course. After writing my ‘Am I a Mother or a Character in a Scream Movie?’ article, I knew I wanted to explore the motherhood vs. survival horror theme further. I got started and quickly discovered that using an AI generator to create digital stickers is much harder than it sounds.

Even when you think you’ve got the perfect prompt, the sticker doesn’t always come out like you imagined in your head. You’ll ask it to make one small change to the sticker and then it generates something completely different. After several attempts, it starts to get confused and all the text becomes jumbled. The sticker in the image above wasn’t meant to have any text, yet somehow it got the text from three previous stickers on it. Eventually, I ended up with a set of stickers I was happy with.

Then I discovered the next challenge, Canva. I’ve never used Canva before and I’m not exactly tech-savvy. This came with its new set of roadblocks — which I seemed to encounter after every step. It took hours (actually, days) of yelling, swearing, and several coffees — homemade, of course, because I still can’t afford to buy them. I can now kind of confidently say I know how to make digital stickers and sticker sheets.

I was able to set up my shop on Etsy with only a few issues and now I’m sitting here waiting for the money to roll in!

It took a lot of time, effort, and sanity, but I did it! Looking back on the experience, I feel proud of myself for reaching my goal, even though I wanted to give up several times along the way.