6 Side Hustles Students Can Start in 2024

In this video I want to break down six

side

hustle ideas for

students

, although I hope they apply even if you're not a student, but before we continue, I want to philosophize as usual about

side

hustles

because I think one way. to watch these types of videos I make these videos a bunch of other YouTubers make these types of videos one way to watch them is to just say oh I just want to click forward and I just want to see what the side idea is this magical way to make money, but there is no magic way to make money, the only way to make money is by providing value to people who can pay for that value, that is the first law to make money, but because many people are looking for this magic. bullet, they'll just jump forward, maybe if you want, there will be timestamps below, feel free to jump forward in this video, you'll see things, it'll be pretty basic stuff, you'll be like cool, yeah, no, this is No for me, I couldn't do this and you're still going to be broke because you don't understand how making money really works and the thing is that making money is a skill when you understand the skill when you understand the laws of making. money when you understand how they work, you won't need to watch videos about how all these different side ideas, instead you'll be able to apply the principles to your own skills in your own life in your own context, which maybe some of Now you might be making videos like this, teaching people how to make money online, so let's

start

with a big question, why are we talking about this?

I'll see. Every once in a while I see a comment on my video that says, "Oh my God." Alia Doll is so obsessed with money that the only videos she makes talk about side jobs it's like no, those aren't the only videos I make. I also make videos about productivity, health, sleep, relationships, dating and all that, but I enjoy making videos about side jobs and passive income, because side jobs have totally and completely changed my life and I hope that if you're watching this, then you're potentially interested in creating another source of income because it's really not about the money it's about the freedom that money can buy you and ideally you want your money-making mechanism to not be tied to a single source of employment.

A lot of people found out that they lost their jobs during the pandemic and this whole boom happened. in people who realize that, shit, relying on a single source of income isn't actually a particularly anti-fragile way of life, especially in places like the US, where your health insurance is also tied to your employer and now he has everything. more of these shackles attached to work and if you enjoy work and it brings you meaning and satisfaction and joy and you love hanging out with your coworkers and you look forward to Mondays, then great, fantastic, but you're in the lucky one percent. of people who have those boxes ticked when it comes to their jobs for most of the rest of us, yes we can enjoy our jobs and I certainly enjoyed my day job when I worked as a doctor, you might enjoy the job but still That's how you would appreciate it. 2,000 extra a month in the bank account, all this means that if you can get to a point where you have one, two, three or maybe a few additional sources of income in your bank account each month, you will simply unlock the ability to live the life on your own terms, you get the freedom to do the things you don't want to do and you get the freedom to do the things you do want to do.

In my case, I

start

ed doing side jobs when I was 13 years old. years with web design, that was my first side job that I did for about six years and that's how I made my first hundreds of dollars on the Internet. My second side job was private tutoring and helping people in real life. I was teaching. them math and science for their exams. I was making between five and twenty dollars an hour from the age of 14 to 21, when I was tutoring. My third business was when I was in medical school. I started a company that helped. people get into medical school, so I taught courses all over the country, and this side job that I did as a student generated about $40,000 a year in earnings for me personally, so that was how much I was taking. home now this was amazing because it meant that A I didn't have to worry about money while I was at university but B it also meant that while I was a student I managed to combine income because I had income with my brother who had a real job and we managed to get a mortgage for a flat and then my most recent side hustle was starting this YouTube channel back in 2017 and after three years of doing that, this YouTube channel started making over a million dollars a year while it was a side hustle. while I was a student while working full time as a doctor and the fact that the YouTube channel was making so much money and the business around it, which started as a side business, meant that I decided, you know what I'm going for. taking a break from full-time medicine and I'm going to do my best on this YouTube channel, so the reason I'm passionate about talking about side

hustles

is because they've really changed my life from the age of 13 onwards. until the age of 26 when I left medicine and I hope you think you know what I'm going to do to start some kind of side hustle because I want additional sources of income that my friends are going to get. tell me you are obsessed with money you are a greedy pig etcetera etcetera why do you need money why not just enjoy your job why don't you appreciate the simplest things in life and you will think that I do appreciate all those things, but I too I like the idea of ​​living life on my own terms and therefore I'm going to create an alternative income stream to my day job or my student life or whatever.

The main thing is that you're doing well, so that was why. behind the side businesses, let's now talk about the how, so we talk about the first law of making money: you make money when you provide value to people who are happy to pay for that value and I'm going to underline the word delighted because it's a good frame of mind to have when it comes to making money now there are, broadly speaking, three vehicles to provide this value one two three and we're going to say number one is Services, number two is products and number three is content , therefore, with a service. business: you are providing a service to someone who is willing to pay for that service, someone who is happy to pay for that service with a product. business: you are creating a product and selling it to people who are happy to pay for it and with content. business that requires a bit of both: you are essentially creating free content and then putting it on platforms where the monetization happens through the platform and therefore essentially the advertisers are the ones who are happy to pay for the attention you receive.

Now, in this video, we are generating secondary ideas through its content. We have two on the content side and we have four on the services side. I'm not going to talk about the product side. things in this video and I'll do it in a different video because products is an interesting type of category and then the bottom line is that generally when it comes to side activities, we want our side activities to satisfy three specific needs that we want. Our side jobs ideally give us flexibility, for example you probably don't want your side job to work at the local supermarket because if you do that's not very flexible, you're tied to a specific location and you're usually tied to a specific time, in Secondly, ideally we want our side activities to be fun, we want them to be things that ideally don't feel like work if you can find something that feels like play to you but feels like work to other people, you're much more likely to enjoy it, that it's much more likely to be sustainable and that we're going to see a much more likely chance of making a lot of money as a result of it and then the third f is obviously we want our secondary effort to generate some kind of funding, so we want the return of the investment should be at least reasonable in the long term, in general the side hustles that people like me would recommend and I still advocate for this are side hustles that are enabled by the internet because when you start a side hustle selling something digital on the internet in general or even something physical on the Internet.

You are benefiting from flexibility because you can work whenever you want. You're getting the fun because there are tons and tons and tons of ways to do things on the Internet. You can definitely find something that is fun and you are also benefiting financially because you can attract buyers from all over the world instead of just in your specific geographic area. I'm going to show you many examples of people who have done this type of work. The quick thing, the idea is not, hey, let me do exactly what this person did. The idea is that we learn from his example and discover what principles we can learn from what he did and how we can apply them to our own lives. and our own context and our own skills and our own enjoyment and how we can turn that into some kind of additional source of income.

With all that being said, I literally have no idea how long this video will be, let's move on now. to the six real ideas for

students

and we'll see how they fit into this broad framework, so let's start with idea number one, which is to be a writer, and this fits very well into the content branch of what we're on. What I'm trying to do here and the example I want to use here is a guy named Jack Reigns who has a fantastic newsletter that he started when he was a student and in fact I think he's still a student at Columbia Business School so a few years ago.

Two years ago, Jack decided to start a newsletter talking about finances, talking about travel, basically topics that he was interested in and at this point, now that he's been doing this for over two years, he has a few tens of thousands of readers on his blog and Every time you send out a newsletter, you can charge around fourteen hundred dollars per ad, so if you publish four newsletter issues a week, that's 1,400 times four, which is five thousand six hundred dollars a month writing on the Internet like a side job, but essentially what Jack is doing is following the classic content model of a writer, which is to write things regularly and, over time, build an audience of people interested in your work and then you can start monetizing selling sponsorships of his work to companies who will then be happy to sponsor his newsletter, for example, but Jack doesn't just limit himself to making money from his newsletter, he also makes money from consulting calls, which is why he has a little tab on his website called Consulting Calls and you can book a 45 minute meeting with him for 300 and honestly this is a really solid business model all in all this is how writers make money online and if you want to go much deeper into the five different ways to make a million dollars online as a writer, you should check out This video here, which is an episode of my deep dive podcast that I did with Nicholas Cole, and Cole literally wrote the book on how to make money as a writer.

It's called the art and business of writing online. How to beat the catch game. and keep your attention and one of the really great things about writing as a side hustle is that the barrier to entry is so low it's basically zero. You can create an account on substack or beehive completely free and you will get a website. You won't have to pay a single cent for it, all you need is a computer or a phone with an internet connection and you can start writing from anywhere in the world and you can reach an audience of people anywhere in the world as long as you have the content. is good and good doesn't necessarily mean you have to write like Ernest Hemingway or anything good, it just means that people get value from your content and to be honest, if you want to go down this route, here's an important tip if, for example , you want To contact Jack, what you could do is, for example, check out his blog, you could read the last 200 issues of his newsletter or however many there are and then you could send me an email saying: Hi Jack, I've drunk everything you have written and that is why I was inspired to start my own and have written 10 issues of my own blog.

Here's a link, but I'm stuck right now because I have questions that b and c would love to answer. Have a quick 20-minute call with you just to ask some of these questions. What do you say now? Something like that. If someone like Jack was reading this, he'd probably think this guy was cool. Hey, they've read all my stuff. you automatically know that this is filtered to basically all members of thepopulation because no one bothers to read, but secondly, you've shown that you're actually doing the work and therefore people like me, people like Jack, people on the internet who have done the work are much more likely to say yes to a meeting with you because, by the way, they know that you have done the work too.

In case you don't know, I also have a weekly newsletter that I've been writing for the past five years. half a year since April 2018 and I have been writing that each week is called Sunday Snippets. You can watch it completely free in the video description or you can go to alibabel.com on Sundays and that will allow you to sign up basically every week. I share some thoughts and some lessons I've learned and some books I'm reading and some recommended articles and stuff and people generally find it pretty useful. I think we have about 400,000 people getting that email so you know.

You will be in good company now that you have started making some money from these side businesses or anything else then you will need a place to invest it and that is where the sponsor of this video comes in and that is trading two one two trading212 is a fantastic app which allows you to invest in stocks, shares and funds commission-free and they have a lot of really cool features, which is why I personally use them to manage part of my portfolio. First of all, they have a great auto-investing feature and pies, so the Pi thing is basically there's a bunch of people on the Internet who do a lot of research on stocks and chairs and stuff and what they do is they create a pie that's kind of a basket of similar stocks and shares and funds and things and what you can do is look at other people's pies, you can see what percentage allocation they have in different stocks and chairs and you can just copy and paste it into your own account and then , the amount of money you need.

If you want to invest, you can invest in that specific pie and it will automatically allocate it to those assets and you can also create your own pie with your own asset allocation and then you can see how you are performing against other people and you can share that pie. with other people is also a really cool feature. They also recently added support for multi-currency accounts and this is really useful because if, like me, you invest a lot of your money in a US stock market index fund like the S P 500 then you won't be affected by the fees of foreign exchange you receive when you invest from Europe and if you have an investment account or Isa, trading with 212 will also pay you interest on any uninvested cash you have that is in pounds or Euros or US dollars now, if any this convinces you and you want to get a completely free action up to the value of 100 pounds, check the link in the video description and that will guide you through this page exactly. how you can set up the app and how you can claim your free share so thank you very much to trading212 for sponsoring this video and continuing to support the channel and let's get back to the video.

Well, idea number two is to be a content curator. Now, this is different from a content creator, content creator, I mean, it's all semantics, but a content creator, I would say, someone who creates content, whether the content curator is someone who curates what other people have already created, so there are a lot of interesting ways to do this and one example is this guy, Eduardo Morales, who has an Instagram account called pin Lord and basically decided to create a business where he curates and sells enamel pins. Yes, it's a little strange, and Eduardo grew his pin Lord Instagram account from zero to over a hundred thousand followers. on Instagram in less than two years and, according to this article, he makes three thousand five hundred dollars a month with this business he has now.

The first thing I want to say here is that two years is pretty fast if you're looking at this. and to think that it took you two full years to start making a full-time income, then you've got the whole money thing completely wrong, it's going to take time, especially if you're trying to do things in the content business or the product business that are businesses. of J curve, but I'll talk more about that in a second. It takes time to do these things. Take medicine, for example, which is a six-year degree and then a 10-year training route, at least in the UK, after that. be making 3K a month, 4K a month, 5K a month, so you can't have the audacity to say you want all this money and all this freedom and all this fun and flexibility and stuff without also working for a long time. period of time, but anyway I just want to read you a quote from Eduardo last month.

I made over 3,500 for my Instagram before starting pinlord, the forwarding account where I select and sell enamel pins. I had no experience creating a social network or online business. I'm not an influencer either. I'm not particularly social and I definitely don't have a fun and exciting life to show off on Instagram. I learned how to monetize my Instagram account by making an effort to understand how the platform works and putting in the work required to execute the right activities at a high level over a long period of time, believe me when I say it, if I can do it, anyone can now.

I'm not telling you this example to say, go, create an Instagram account and try it. and grow 200,000 subscribers by selling enamel pins that's not the vibe the goal of this video is to give you some inspiration and show you some different parts that you can use so you can apply them to your own context another guy that I follow is called Alex and books and has essentially created his own Twitter and Instagram and I think LinkedIn basically curates ideas and summaries of books that he reads and it's really good. I follow him for book recommendations. It's great that you post on Instagram.

He posts some highlights of books he's read but he's not actually creating anything which isn't a bad thing by the way Alex if you're watching this he's curating this is cool you don't need to be necessarily a content creator, you can be a Content Curator, but now you have a large enough audience that you can basically monetize through whatever you want and you've done that through content curation instead of content creation. content. Now there is a problem, there is a problem with content companies and that is that content companies. They are generally what we call J-curve businesses, which are that at the beginning, for an unspecified period of time, you are in a negative position because you have invested time and effort into doing this, so, for example, YouTube is a content business.

It took me 52 videos and six months to get my first thousand subscribers and I didn't even get monetized until 12 months into my YouTube journey, where every week I would make one or two videos and those videos would get a few dozen, sometimes a few hundred. even a few thousand views, but I wasn't making any money, it was pure investment of time and effort and Blood Sweat and Tears on this YouTube channel. It was fun too. I found a way to make it fun, which is my whole philosophy in my book. is available to feel good productivity, wait, where is it?

I want to show you my book, feel good productivity, how to do more of what matters to you. It will be linked below, feelgoodproductivity.com, if you want to check it out, but my The point is that this is a Jacob thing because it seems like a j, you're in the negative for a long time and then you hit a tipping point and hope is which then goes to positive, this is the same thing where Jack Reigns, for example, and also Alex and the books and any of these writer type people, you tend not to make money right away, you tend to have to invest in this period of money negative because you're investing time and you're not seeing the return and hoping to get a reward over time, that doesn't mean it's a bad way to start a side business, you just have to recognize the fact that it's a J curve and in the content game there really aren't any.

There's really no guarantee because your work also has to be good and it has to reach the right audience and you may not necessarily know it, but this is not a very quick way to make money if you want a faster way to make money . money what you're looking for is a business with no j curve which is, for example, let's say this is the time, let's say this is money and you're starting over here, you cut, you're looking for something that allows you to make money basically immediately. this is a non-jcove business and so it could be left like this or it could be seen like this, it could be seen as anything, but the point is that you don't have that period at the beginning where you're investing time and money. and maybe you put effort into it and you're still not seeing returns and non j curve companies tend to be service based companies, let's actually add some money here, so we have service, we have product and we have content, we have those three different types of businesses within service, product and content, you can have a J curve and you can have non-jco businesses.

The crucial determining factor is the type of friction of the sales process and shout out to my friend and mentor. Daniel Priestley, who we also had on the Deep Life podcast link above and below here and below to introduce me to this model of thinking in business, let's say you go to the local supermarket and you want to buy chocolate and then you go to At checkout, you buy the article and that's it. It's a fairly low-friction sales process. You just walk in, choose the item and walk out or, alternatively, let's say you want to buy something on Amazon again.

Very low friction sales process. You just continue. On the website you buy something and it arrives at your door. When you have a low-friction sales process, you tend to get a J-shaped business, so for example, a supermarket is a very Jayco business that you have to invest a lot of time and money into. You put a ton of money into building the facility, getting the stuff, getting the stock and everything and everything and everything, and then at some point you hope that the low-friction sales process means that a lot of people will buy from your supermarket, and eventually, you.

I'll start making money, but now imagine what a high-friction sales process looks like. A high-friction sales process is when a company has to try to convince someone to part with their money. So, for example, let's say I'm a web designer. and I need to get clients. I have friction in my sales process because I need to go out and find customers and I need to make a call with them and I need to see what they want. I need to understand your requirements and then once. I've done it, I can give them a proposal and then they can choose to pay me for my services.

There's a lot of friction in that particular sales process because someone is not just handing over their money for an easy product, it's a conversation and that brings We refer to this whole Services thing because service companies tend not to be curve companies. J and there are a few different examples here, so idea number three is to be a thumbnail designer, now again, the way we make money is by creating value for people who are willing to pay for that value or people who are delighted to pay for that value and one category of that type of people are YouTubers like me, we have money and we are happy to pay money because we know the importance of thumbnails etc.

If you can be a thumbnail designer for YouTubers, that's a very reasonable way to make money online in a way that's fun, free, flexible, financial, and all these kinds of fun things, and I want to share a couple of examples. here. this guy Dill Tomah and there's an article that talks about how this guy at the age of 19 turned designing thumbnails for YouTubers into a full-time job. He started making miniatures for gaming YouTubers when he was still in school and when he started he sold one of these miniatures to his clients for about 15 and then after graduating high school he was looking for opportunities and realized that other great YouTubers were really advertising a thumbnail designer and because he had the experience and the skills and had done the work.

He managed to get that job and now he charges over $250 for a single thumbnail and he has several huge YouTuber clients that he's making these thumbnails for and he's probably making a stupidly unbelievable amount of money, so this thing that started out as a side thing I hustled through school making thumbnails in Photoshop, probably a pirated version of Photoshop, not going to lie. I used Photoshop in the past too, but probably started this as a side job and can now make several thousand, maybe. ten thousand dollars a month doing miniature design as a service. The other example here is one of my part-time YouTuber Academy alumni.

His name is Matt Brighton and he is now a YouTuber, but in the past he made money on Fiverr designing thumbnails. and in this article he talks about how he earned moreten thousand dollars designing thumbnails for other YouTubers. That doesn't mean you should become a miniature designer, but rather it's an example of a service you can provide. Someone who is willing to pay and who is happy to pay money for that service. I've mentioned this topic of thumbnail design a couple of times in videos over the last couple of years and now we've had a lot of people email us saying, "Hey, me." I have redesigned your thumbnails, what do you think of this, what do you think of that? and I appreciate the hustle, for the most part, they are not very good if you want to get a YouTuber client as a thumbnail designer, just recreate some of their thumbnails and do a better job than what their current thumbnails already are, keep in mind the type of vitality and the brand they are trying to create and if you can do it you are basically guaranteed to get a job to this day we are still looking for miniature designers and to this day every time someone sends us a email and tells us, I've redesigned three of your thumbnails, what do you think we look at them and decide if we want to hire this person or not?

The answer is usually no, because they're usually not very good, but the opportunity is there and it's definitely a skill anyone can learn. You just need to put in some time and effort to learn the skill because as we mentioned, there are no free ways to make money that you have to provide. a skill that you have to provide value and sometimes it takes time to learn how to provide that value. Well, idea number four for students is to be a research assistant, so the first example here is this guy named Drew Bernie, so this guy was a student in a PhD program and I managed to get a job as a research assistant for Mark Manson and here's a clip where he talks about how he did it.

He actually he was in my PhD program. I was taking this class that was really, really hard. I sat down for a study session with a group of students and we were waiting for some people so I decided to open my laptop and see what Mark had been up to because I hadn't checked in for a while and right there are big letters I'm hiring they rise up in my throat and I'm like, oh, he's hiring again what and I read the description and it's like I need someone who can do research, I need someone who can write, you know, I need someone who's an entrepreneur and everything that I'm it's like oh this is too good to be true you can't it can't be you know at that moment similarly there's a friend of ours named Billy Oppenheimer who is Ryan Holliday's research assistant and he got that job through an email cold.

This is the cold email Billy sent to Ryan to get that job. Now I recommend that you pause the video and read this in its entirety because there are many lessons you can learn. learn from this cold email about how to send a good cold email and this email makes it very easy for someone like Ryan Holiday to say yes and Billy has been working with Ryan for I don't know how long, but it's been a while. and similarly, we have people who do this type of research assistant, he writes things on our team, we have NS, we have Alex, we have Mike, they do some different things, but essentially any great content creator and especially Any author who writes several books will always need some kind of help when it comes to research, so if you are the type of person who can research on the Internet, who likes to read books, who likes to read scientific articles, you can understand them, you can extract ideas from them which is an incredibly high value skill that you can provide as a service to people who are very willing, very capable and happy to pay for that service.

Well, idea number five is to be a remote sales representative, it is one of the new fads in the world of making money online, but it is actually quite legitimate. The idea behind being a remote sales representative is that there are many companies that need someone on Zoom calls and on the phone in order to sell their product to their customers and if you can be the person to answer those phone calls or zoom calls to be able to talk to customers, be able to explain the process to them and educate them on whether the product is right for them, then every time you sell the product, you will get some type of commission for that product, that's what a representative does remote sales and this is a great example of this type wuter Tui toy Nissan.

I don't know how to pronounce that and this guy was 20 years old. student in the Netherlands who tweeted Sean Puri basically giving him some free advice on thumbnails and then Sean loved the free value he gave him so he offered him an internship at his company and now this guy sells Milk Road ads daily and He has sold 250,000 in ads in 60 days while studying full time, he is basically a remote sales rep. This is not really a traditional remote sales rep job, but it's enough that we use it as an example and also because you've talked about your story, which is just a good example, but essentially you're selling all of these sponsorships in this newsletter and you're probably getting a portion of some of the sponsors that he sells, so if you're the type of person that likes to talk to people, if you like the idea of ​​picking up the phone or doing Zoom calls and selling things to people and creating you might be good at it, you can make tons and tons of money as a remote sales rep and this video won't teach you how to do it.

There are a lot of other videos on YouTube where people specialize in being a remote sales rep and they really teach you the ins and outs of how to do it, but it's a cool way to make money if you think you might enjoy that kind of thing and then Finally, the idea Number six for students or anyone else is to become a web designer. Now this is really old school, but it's still ridiculous how few good designers there are and how much new companies are willing to pay for designers like me. At this business conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the guys I met runs a $100 million startup and was saying we're trying to hire six designers, but we literally can't find anyone who's good, so there is so much demand. for designers, I think I know someone who hired a web designer and paid him four hundred thousand dollars a year just to be a full-time web designer for his startup, but if you initially want to do it as a side hustle, then you have to learn the skill and be good because you know that money is an exchange of value and once you are good it is very easy to find people who will be happy to pay you for that service as long as you are good and as long as you find the right tool for people and example Here's this guy named Chris Mrreck about six years ago, Chris went through a breakup with his wife, which obviously had a big impact on his life relationship-wise and also financially, and he decided he was going to teach himself how to code and learn how to create websites, so he used the free tutorials on Codecad and once he learned how to create websites, his first clients were friends and family who he worked for for free and then I went to Upwork to find several clients and now apparently He earns more than three thousand dollars a month.

I don't know if this is completely up to date and I'm pretty sure Chris could be making a lot more than three thousand dollars a month if he went on Upwork and he and he tried to find clients directly because I don't really like the idea of ​​advertising services on a freelance platform like Upwork or Fiverr because there is too much competition and it is quite difficult to stand out. The path I would take is the one my friend Henry took, where he decided that he was going to learn how to design websites in webflow. He spent six months learning the skills and then became so good at designing websites that he designed his own personal portfolio website with it. he became big on Twitter, he started interacting with all the web designers on Twitter, they also started respecting his work and then he managed to get a bunch of high paying clients including me where I paid him a lot of money to design the website . my book feels good, productivity.com and for Henry this started as a side job, he had no coding experience, he had no web design experience and with dedication in practice for six months, he taught himself the skill to the point where people were paying him over ten thousand dollars every time he designed a website for them.

Now, if you go to the end of this incredibly long video, I'd love it if you could leave a comment, what did you take away and in particular, what's in it? What is the action item that you are going to take as a result of watching this video because you have watched it for a long time? Most people who clicked on this video would have shut down within the first minute when they saw me philosophizing, so The fact that you are here and watching this means that you have perseverance that is probably in the 90th percentile of at least people because I suspect only five ten percent of people will get to this point in the video, but I think without an action point, things like this are actually totally useless, like there's no point in watching this video if you don't you're going to take some kind of action, so I'd love to hear it in the comments.

It's a responsibility for you and me because it's helpful for me to see what people are doing so you know if it's still worth making videos like this. What is the action item you are going to take as a result of this video now once? You already did, in this video we talk about content and services as a way to make money, but we don't really talk about products, so in this video I'm going to break down some different product ideas that you can use. to make money online, the passive income side drives all that fun stuff that will be there, thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video, bye.