Side Hustles That Will Never Make You Rich

Side hustles are amazing, and there is no doubt about it. Side hustles give you the freedom to pursue a passion or something you’re interested in doing. If you find the right side hustle for you, you could end up with financial freedom and freedom within your life in general.

Profitable side hustles should help you achieve the financial freedom to do whatever you want. That can be quitting your job, fulfilling a passion in your time outside work, or just having some extra cash to do stuff you like.

Profitable side hustles should not:

Take up so much time that you’re earning less than minimum wage

Suck your happiness and energy

Require a huge audience to be profitable right away

If you want to have more financial freedom, think twice before trying any of these unprofitable side hustles.

Don’t get caught up in the NFT hype.

Yes, I too fell prey to the excitement about NFTs. Don’t buy into the hype.

The problem is that value from NFTs is both speculative (i.e. NFTs are not perceived as valuable in themselves, but rather buyers think they will hold more value in the future) or entirely subjective. Yes, buying an NFT work of art for $69 million means you hold the only original copy of that work of art, stored on the blockchain. But why would most people bother?

Most of NFT buying and selling activity is by people already deeply buried in the crypto scene. It’s unlikely to be meaningful for everyday creators like you and me. It’s a profitable side hustle for a very, very few.

YouTube is probably a bad idea

Yes, YouTube does provide thousands of content creators with salaries that support and sustain good lifestyles. However, you can look at a number in the thousands in many different ways. A number in the thousands is big, but when compared to the 37,000,000 YouTube channels out there(yes, 37 million) numbers in the thousands are tiny, extremely tiny!

I’ll break it down further. According to tubics.com, 230,000 channels have over 100,000 subscribers, 22,000 YouTube channels have over 1 million subscribers, 700 of which have over 10 million subscribers. 100,000 subscribers on YouTube is enough for you to get by, but what are the chances that you are one of the only 230,000 channels with 100,000 subscribers. If you do the math, .006% of all channels on YouTube have 100,000 subscribers

With 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute and millions of channels joining the platform(23 percent increase in channels from 2019 to 2020), YouTube is most likely too competitive of a field for one to succeed. Instead of clawing your way up the subscriber and monetization ladders, painfully, and mostly to no avail, find something that is easier, more doable, and more enjoyable.

Surveys from home are not the answer.

If you googled “how to make money from home.” If you do this today, you’ll see the same thing I did: surveys.

These surveys typically pay about $0.20 or $0.50 per survey. They usually take about 15–20 minutes. Before completing the survey, you actually have to take a pre-survey to make sure you qualify. If you don’t qualify, you may earn a small consolation prize of $0.05. I know this from a long and bitter experience, unfortunately.

They’re billed as a way to make money “anytime, anywhere” from the comfort of your own home and even in your pajamas (!). You can earn some money, sure, but it won’t be anywhere near even minimum wage. Surveys are not a profitable side hustle.

Affiliate Marketing From The Ground Up

Don’t get me wrong, affiliate marketing works great! Affiliate marketing earns a lot of money for little effort, but there is a catch to this. The catch is that affiliate marketing only works when you already have an established audience, a relatively large one that brings in tens of thousands of views a month.

Unless you have a big audience that brings in a lot of views and has somewhat of an interest in what you’re marketing, it is very difficult to start with a small audience when it comes to affiliate marketing. Don’t start affiliate marketing the moment you start growing your audience, this surely won’t work. The reason it won’t work is that building an audience takes time, and affiliate marketing won’t bring you success.

Product Interviews

As appealing and as easy as they seem, product interviews are simply not it when it comes to side hustles. Yes, you’ll make a few bucks here and there, but this is simply not scalable nor sustainable. The work is tedious, and you eventually reach a point where you can no longer grow with surveys or product interviews.

Besides, I don’t think anyone truly enjoys taking surveys or giving product reviews in front of people. To work for 15–30 minutes to only earn at most 5 bucks doesn’t make any sense. Spend this time on something more productive and truly effective in being a side hustle.

So what is a profitable side hustle?

In my experience, a profitable side hustle must be:

Enjoyable

Scalable

Valuable

This means the definition of “profitable side hustle” differs a little bit for everyone. For me, blogging is one such stream. Freelance writing is another. For you, it might be baking, singing, or posting artwork online.

But whatever you do, when looking for a profitable side hustle, make sure you know upfront what it’ll cost you in terms of time and energy, and what you can reasonably expect to earn right away.

A Place to Start

Try freelancing. Freelancing is an amazing place to start. Freelancing will let you find your side hustle. Your side hustle could grow out of freelancing for companies or online platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr. If you enjoy and are good at the website and graphic design, app development, and programming, freelancing is a great place to start since these are all jobs in demand.