Intro
Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, introduced us to the cash flow quadrant, which shows the four ways we can make money as an employee, self-employed, business owner, or investor. Building true wealth happens when you move from being an employee or self-employed to becoming a business owner and investor. When you’re self-employed, sure, you work for yourself, but you still trade time for money and often pay higher taxes. But when you become a business owner, you create systems and delegate work so that you don’t have to actively work as much. As Kiyosaki says, business owners can leave their business for a year or more and return to find their business more profitable and running better than when they left it.
And investors, they purchase assets like real estate and company shares to make money work for them. It’s all about making money work for you instead of you working for your money. I started my journey with part-time gigs in high school, in college, and then I took my full-time job after I graduated college. But I quickly realized I didn’t want to be stuck in the 9-to-5 cycle forever. That’s when I started experimenting with side hustles and investing in real estate, which allowed me to eventually retire from the traditional workforce. Nowadays, we have more opportunities than ever to build passive income streams, especially with AI and automation tools that just didn’t exist a few years ago.
Side Hustle # 1
Side hustle number one is AI powered content creation. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney have completely revolutionized content creation in the last couple of years. Anyone can now produce high quality content at scale without being an expert writer or designer. So first you’re going to choose a profitable niche like personal finance, health, technology or productivity. Then you’re going to use those AI tools to create that consistent valuable content across multiple platforms. This could be in the form of blog posts, social media content and newsletters. The beauty is in the monetization options though. You can earn through affiliate marketing, sponsorships, selling your own digital products, or even offering content creation services to businesses.
The key is building an audience first on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, then monetizing that audience. I know creators making tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per month, and that’s after they establish their systems. The reason this works so well is that AI has eliminated the biggest barriers to content creation, and businesses are desperate for quality content.
Side Hustle # 2
Number two is one of my favorites. It’s Merch on Demand. So Merch on Demand is a service where you upload your original artwork and designs onto various products like t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and more. So then Amazon will handle the rest. Amazon’s going to print and fulfill your orders for you. The beautiful thing about Merch on Demand is there are no upfront costs. You just have to apply for an account. You don’t have to pay money to get one and you don’t have to buy, track, or prepare any inventory. So when someone orders from your design, again, Amazon prints it, fulfills it, ships it, and handles customer service. They just take their cut, and then you pay you in royalties.
I personally made over 60 grand on this platform. And the crazy part is I haven’t touched this in many years. It took a lot of work to build up to that point, but now it still pays me passive income even though I haven’t touched it. And it’s because I have some designs that rank well and sell consistently.
Getting Started
To get started, you’re going to create your merch on demand account. Then you’re going to niche down and identify your target audience. You want to think about current trends, your hobbies, specific themes like maybe birthdays, occupations, or popular sayings. Next, you’re going to create eye-catching and original designs, and you can use tools like Canva or Photoshop. Now, if you’re not comfortable with design work, you can also hire freelancers to do that for you. You can do that on Fiverr and Upwork. But when you’re doing that, you want to make sure they’re making original designs. They’re not taking stuff from sites like Freepik and then not crediting and all that stuff. So, you want to make sure they’re actually making them for you.
The key is writing compelling titles and descriptions for your listings and then optimizing them to rank well in Amazon search results. From what I’ve seen, people who consistently upload quality designs and optimize their listings are making anywhere from 500 to $5,000 per month or even more.
Side Hustle # 3
Side hustle number three is selling digital products on Etsy. Most people know Etsy for handmade goods, but they don’t know that you can sell digital products on Etsy and it’s way better than physical products because digital products are downloadable items that they will get immediately like PDFs, Photoshop templates, resume templates, wedding invitations. And when people buy your digital product, Etsy automatically delivers that file to them. So there’s no shipping, there’s no inventory handling, no physical handling on your part. I personally made over 30 grand on the platform before. And most of that is pure profit because I didn’t have to buy materials or ship anything. It still makes me a bit of passive income today.
Getting Started
Now, here’s how to get started. First, you’re going to want to research a popular niche and digital products already selling on Etsy. This helps you identify gaps in the market and understand what customers want. For example, if you love organization, you could sell digital planners and productivity templates. Next, again, you’re going to make a digital product through Photoshop, Canva, or even Microsoft Word and Excel because you could make spreadsheets for like property analysis calculators. We have one for real estate investing that people can purchase. So, you can create this through Excel as well. So, consider the layout, the typography, and visual elements that are going to make your product more appealing.
Once you do this, you’re going to open an Etsy shop, choose a shop name, and create your first listing. You can check my link below for my Etsy entrepreneur course in case you are extremely lost with this whole thing and you need some guidance to succeed. You want to have high quality photos, optimize your titles and descriptions, and then focus on really good products. Honestly, the quality of your product is going to be one of the most important things. If you’re consistent with it, you can make $1,000 a month to even six figures a year if you’re able to continuously make new products.
Side Hustle # 4
The next side hustle I want to talk about is podcast creation and monetization. We did touch upon social media creation, but I think podcasting is a little more specific. It’s a little bit different. Podcasting has really exploded in popularity and right now is a great time to start because of the tools. The beauty about them is they create a lot of income streams. A lot of companies want to put their ad in your podcast and this is a great way to make more money. It also is a great way to show credibility. So, as you are making these episodes, people are going to know you for that one thing.
With the monetization, you can earn through sponsorships and advertisements. Once you build the audience, you can promote affiliate products that align with your content and you can sell your own products and services to your listeners. This is basically the way to monetize through all the different content creation systems like YouTube, blogging, all these different platforms. These are some of the best ways to make money: ads, sponsorships, affiliates, your own products. You can even offer premium content or early access through platforms like Patreon.
The key to doing this is choosing a niche you’re passionate about and you can be consistent with creating content around because it’s so easy to burn out if you know you have to make an episode like once a week. You might get really tired of having to do it. So, you need to do something that you’re having fun with. This could be business, entrepreneurship, personal finance, but it could also be health and wellness, gossip ones, like reality TV ones.
There’s so many different ones that you could create. So, literally any topic that has an engaged audience. Platforms like Anchor make distribution a lot easier. And you can also hire virtual assistants to handle the editing and the show notes creation.
Recording Equipment
Now, you’re going to want to have basic recording equipment. It could be as basic as a USB microphone. But as you upgrade, you might want to consider doing something like the Heil PR40 mic. It’s a really good mic. And you can also use free recording software like Audacity. Then you’re going to want to plan your first few episodes and start recording. And you just want to make sure you’re consistent with this. It’s more important to be consistent than to be perfect in the beginning because you’re going to learn a lot along the way and your episodes are just going to get better and better.
And of course, if you are a successful podcaster, you can make a ton of money through podcasting because it just seeps into all different areas, all different income streams. It’s not just about the ads. It’s you’ve built that credibility and a lot of people want to work with you. A lot of people want to buy your products and all these different things.
Side Hustle # 5
Next, I want to talk about online course creation. So, with platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi, it is so easy to set up a course and sell it. The great thing about this is if you create that content, you create that course, you can sell it forever. It can be lifetime access. People just buy your digital products and then they can see all your different videos teaching them how to get from A to B. The great thing about these platforms, I use Teachable personally, you can create coupon codes. You can set up affiliates for your courses. So, if you want people to promote it for you, you can set that up through the platform. It also makes it really easy to create that curriculum because you can set up modules and lessons and you just drag the videos in there.
Getting Started
To get started without overwhelming yourself, validate your course idea, maybe with a small audience. You can create a free mini-course or webinar just to test interest and then create what I call a minimal viable course, which maybe has three to five core modules. Now, you don’t want to get caught up in trying to make something perfect when you’re just getting started. You could even use a simple screen recording. Because when you feel like you need it to be super perfect, super professional, doing it like this, doing it raw, makes it so they actually connect with you more.
They feel like more of your friend. So, I think it’s okay. Even if you don’t have the best gear, you don’t want to do all the editing, that’s fine as long as you get them from A to B. You’re teaching that curriculum. Once you have that course, you want to set up automated emails for marketing, send out newsletters to your list pushing it, and talk about it on social media. I don’t get into the specifics on exactly how to do it. But the key is you just need to get started, and you learn a lot from the experience.
I’m basically proof that you can make multiple six figures with this method if you sell your own course. And I think it’s a great way to create education because many people do want that lifetime access where they can revisit the course another day. That’s how having a Teachable course is really effective and convenient because you can access it at any time. You just pay a one-time fee. And honestly, I bought so many courses where I still haven’t visited them yet because I do want to learn those things. I just want it to be at my own pace, at my own time. So, I think this productized online education is just a great way to help people and it’s a great way to teach what you’re passionate about.
Side Hustle # 6
The next side hustle I want to talk about is selling your stuff and flipping items and it’s probably the most accessible one on this list because it involves monetizing stuff that you already have or maybe you find undervalued and then you just resell it. Let me share a couple personal examples. For example, I recently sold my Sony ZV-1. It’s this vlogging camera and I ended up upgrading to a different camera and that’s why I wanted to sell it and I sold it on Craigslist for $450. And the interesting part is I actually originally bought that camera for $400 used on Facebook Marketplace. So the great thing is I got to use that camera for a couple years and then when I wanted to upgrade I ended up selling it at a profit which is pretty crazy.
Another example: we had this TV that’s about 13 years old, and we wanted to get rid of it cuz it’s not a smart TV. It just annoyed us because it’s so big that it doesn’t fit in my car. So, instead of trying to figure out how to transport this massive thing, we put it on Craigslist. I put it on it for $50, like really cheap, and then people came over to pick it up. I got paid 50 bucks. And it was a win-win. We got to get rid of it. And I made some money.
So, first you can declutter your home, turn unused items into cash by going onto platforms like Mercari, Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Craigslist, eBay. Some of them you have to ship the items. Other ones you just meet in person to do it. And in order to find undervalued items, you might want to go on clearance racks and Walmart or Target. You might also want to check out garage sales, thrift stores, estate sales for items you can research and resell online. And the great thing is you can get started now and it doesn’t have to cost anything because you already have stuff you own. But then when you want to scale to a business, you probably want to start putting in some money to buy those items and then trying to flip it and make more money.
Side Hustle # 7
And then the last one I want to talk about is renting out your spaces and your assets. Let’s start with Turo for car rentals. It’s a peer-to-peer car rental marketplace where you can rent out your vehicle to people who need temporary transportation. I’ve used it before during my travels. It’s a great way to get around, but there’s also Neighbor for storage spaces. It’s like Airbnb but for storage. And we use that too when we travel for 2 years. We basically rent out a garage and put our car there. So, I know that this is a great way you can make money because maybe you’re not using a storage unit, garage, shed, closet. You maybe you have these spaces already that you can let people borrow.
And then there’s also even Swimply for swimming pools. So, if you have a swimming pool that you’re not using all the time, Swimply allows you to rent it out by the hour to people who want to swim, want to host parties, and things like that. The great thing about all of this is that these are things you own, right? You might have a garage, you might have a swimming pool that’s just being unused. This is a great way to make money with assets that you already have.
I think AI has really changed the game here and it opens up a lot of opportunity because it really saves you a lot of time and it’s almost like having hired help if you wanted to start your own content creation business or things like that. Things that require a lot of copywriting and stuff like that, especially or maybe strategy like AI can help you with that. Or maybe building out your strategy and organization. AI can really help you with all these different things.
