100+ Best Side Hustle Ideas to Make $500+ in Your Spare Time

Every side hustle starts with an idea!

And because a lack of good ideas is an excuse I hear daily from readers and listeners, I put together this monster list of side hustle ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

No more excuses :)

The beauty of these side hustle ideas is that many don’t require a huge initial investment or even necessarily a highly specialized skill-set. And certainly, not all qualify as “business ideas,” but each has the potential to earn you money in your spare time.

These are worth anywhere from $50 to $50,000 a month — it all depends on your execution.

1. Notary Public Service

Notary certification is granted by your state and generally costs less than $100.

Once you’re certified, you can charge your own fee to notarize documents, or become a loan signing agent like Brian did and make $1500-2000 a month overseeing mortgage signings in your spare time.

Check out some of the training resources at Loan Signing System to learn more.

2. Food or Grocery Delivery Service

With services like Instacart and DoorDash, you can earn money on your own schedule delivering groceries and take-out orders in your town.

I sat down with one full-service Instacart shopper who made $10,000 in his first 6 months!

And you don’t have to worry about keeping your car spotless for passengers!

3. Rental Properties

Real estate investing is one of the oldest and most popular side hustles in the books. New platforms like Roofstock make it easy to shop for and buy income-generating properties with tenants and property management already in place.

I liked Austin Miller’s creative approach to building his rental portfolio, which was up to 17 properties worth $1.2 million when we spoke.

The kicker? They were all acquired “free”–without any of his own money.

4. Online Surveys

These won’t make you rich, but can be an easy way to supplement your income and you can do them in your downtime (waiting in line, watching TV, etc.).

If you love this stuff, check out:

5. YouTube Channel Host

Google (which owns YouTube) pays channel-owners to host their ads on their videos, meaning if you generate a lot of YouTube views, you can earn a lot of money with their revenue sharing program.

I’ve been dabbling a bit more with YouTube lately, and recently passed $900 in monthly ad income.

YouTube is an exciting platform because it’s both a search engine and a viral engine — giving you two ways to get discovered. You may not even need to be on camera yourself.

6. Blogging

Blogging is difficult to monetize but can be a fun outlet to practice your writing or build an audience around a particular idea.

My friend Jodi earns $5k+ per month from her part-time blog for girl scout troop leaders, and Katie Emery earns $6k a month from her gray hair blog.

Want to start a blog of your own? Check out my free 6-part video course on how to start your own site.

7. Customer Interviews

Many companies use customer interviews to get feedback on new products.

User Interviews and Respondent.io are a pair of cool services that facilitate those interviews that take place online and over the phone.

The best part? The average compensation is $50-150 an hour!

Here are some other companies that facilitate focus groups and paid research studies near you and online.

8. Flipping Items for Profit on eBay

The long-running marketplace can be a tough, low-margin, competitive environment, but that’s not to say there aren’t any opportunities left to make money on eBay.

My favorite eBay seller is Rob, the “Flea Market Flipper,” who built a 6-figure business buying low and selling high. He and his wife Melissa consistently earn thousands of dollars a month, flipping items part-time!

They put together this free training on how to get started and make your first sales in as little as 2 weeks.

9. Affiliate Marketing

Refer website visitors to buy products online and earn a small commission on each sale. This is actually how I’ve made the bulk of my living over the last 10+ years, so it definitely works!

Note: Please do me a favor and don’t buy into anyone’s sleazy affiliate marketing “program” or “system.” There are unfortunately a lot of slimy salespeople out there making their living taking advantage of newbies.

One effective affiliate marketing model is creating “comparison” content to help readers make a purchase decision. Following this strategy, a couple podcast guests reported earning $20,000 a month within the first year of launching their site.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to building your first affiliate website.

10. “Alternative” Investing

For me, alternative investments are vehicles like peer-to-peer lending, real estate crowdfunding, business lending, and even cryptocurrency.

This is one of my favorite side hustles because it’s automated and passive. Check out options like Fundrise, which allows you to invest in revenue-generating commercial properties for as little as $10.

Related: 79 Alternative Investment Platforms to Earn Stronger Returns, Build Cash Flow, and Diversify Your Portfolio

11. Bookkeeping / Accounting / Tax Preparation Service

Help other businesses with their accounting and finances. This can be a great option for people with an accounting background from school, your day job, or just for people who aren’t afraid of math.

Virtual bookkeepers can earn $60 an hour or more. Here’s a free training on how to get started.

12. Selling Printables

I’m a fan of side hustles that let me get paid over and over again from work I do once, and printables definitely fits that bill. By uploading digital files to Etsy, you can reach a wide audience of buyers without having to fulfill individual orders.

Rachel Jones reported earning $10,000 a month from her portfolio of Etsy printables. Examples might include habit trackers, meal plans, budget templates, chore charts, intake forms, and more.

13. Baking

Do people love your desserts? Maybe you could provide cake, cookies, or cupcakes to some corporate event in town.

A friend of ours has built a pretty serious following for her custom cookies — and sometimes sells out in minutes!

14. Virtual Assistant Service

Virtual assistants provide administrative support to clients from their home office, and generally charge $15-40 an hour. If that sounds like a fun side hustle you can set up shop on your own or jump on board with an established VA company.

To learn more about starting your own virtual assistant company, check out the free video training from my friend Abbey Ashley, who started her VA business on the side and shares:

• Where to find thousands of potential clients.
• How to make a full-time living working from home.
• What clients are really looking for in a VA. (hint: it’s not prior VA experience)

Click here to learn more about becoming a virtual assistant.

15. Losing Weight

Yes, with sites like HealthyWage you can actually get paid ($500 or more!) to lose weight. It works like a bet, where you put the money upfront and get paid out your prize when your hit your goal.

Check out their calculator to see how much your prize could be. For more, here’s our full HealthyWage review.

16. Raw Land Flipping

This sounds a little crazy, but my guest Mark calls his raw land investing business “the best passive income model” because he doesn’t have to deal with “problem tenants, toilets, or termites.”

More recently, I sat down with one of Mark’s students who’d built his land flipping business to $10k a month in his first year.

17. Book Flipping

Use the free Bookscouter app to scan barcodes and see what old books are worth. You can do this both for the ones collecting dust on your shelf and for the ones at garage sales or the library book store.

One Side Hustle Show guest reported earning up to $4000 a month flipping books!

18. Teaching an Online Course

Udemy is an impressive online education platform where students can connect with teachers from all around the world in any subject. You can create your own course around a topic you’re an expert in and set your own tuition rate.

I did this several years ago and have earned over $20,000 in (mostly) passive income from it!

Related: The 101 Best Udemy Courses for Entrepreneurs, Freelancers, and Side Hustlers

If you have an existing subscriber base to sell to, you might be able to sell the course directly and not have to worry about losing margin to Udemy. One resource with some great information on creating your own online course for “passive” income is my podcast with Ankur Nagpal, the founder of Teachable.

19. Mystery Shopping

Companies will pay you to verify their in-store or on-the-phone experience, or to spy on their competition. It’s possible to make over $10,000 a year being a mystery shopper.

We live near a place called the National Food Lab and I occasionally get called in for taste tests. They pay cash and it’s really easy; just answer a few questions and you’re on your way.

Field Agent is a free smartphone app that pays you to complete small tasks in your neighborhood, like photographing the inside of a store.

I found several of these tasks near me, from companies like Home Depot and Walmart, with the payouts ranging from $3-8 per assignment.

20. Tutoring

Put that education to use by helping students learn in a comfortable one-on-one setting. WyzAnt is one of the largest operators in the online tutoring world.

In this post, Matt Fuentes shared how he built his tutoring business up to $1000 a week.

21. Picking up Trash

Brian Winch has been doing this over 30 years and calls it “America’s simplest business.” He says you can earn $50,000-$100,000 a year for basically walking local parking lots and cleaning up the garbage.

Check out the interview I did with Brian to learn more.

22. Renting Out Your Attic or Garage

The Neighbor self-storage platform connects people with storage needs with those who have extra space. If you’ve got some excess storage capacity in your garage or elsewhere, list your space here to fill it and get paid.

According to the site, hosts are earning up to $10,000 a year running their own mini self-storage operations.

23. Reselling on Amazon

One of the most popular side hustles lately has been Amazon’s FBA program, in which you find bargain deals locally, and ship them off to sell on Amazon.

I recently sat down with a $1 million seller to learn how she sources profitable reselling inventory from local stores.

I even made a bit of money when I tried it myself.

24. Airbnb Hosting or Co-Hosting

If you have extra room in your house, you can earn money renting it out to visitors on Airbnb.com. It’s a pretty cool way to make money and meet interesting people from around the world at the same time.

With a little bit of traction, you could even cover your entire rent or mortgage by hosting guests on Airbnb. Have you tried it?

Co-Hosting

In addition to a small portfolio of her own short-term rental properties, Zeona McIntyre has built a side business in “co-hosting” other Airbnbs.

She essentially acts as the property manager, coordinating guest check-ins, maintenance, and cleaning, in exchange for 20% of the rent — with none of the risk.

Rental Arbitrage

A popular — but controversial — side hustle is known as rental arbitrage or Airbnb arbitrage. How it works is you enter into a long-term lease on a property, with the intent (and landlord’s consent) to rent it out on Airbnb.

One entrepreneur I interviewed reported earning almost $200,000 a year doing this, without owning any properties himself.

25. Private Labeling

In this side hustle, you identify hot-selling products and bring your own to market to compete with them.

There’s an art and science to this, including negotiating with suppliers (often overseas), but in this episode of The Side Hustle Show, 7-figure Amazon seller Greg Mercer shared his top 3 Amazon FBA product sourcing guidelines and tips.

26. Renting Out Your Car

In select markets, you can rent out your car on a daily or hourly basis to earn extra cash through companies like HyreCar.

The average car sits idle 22 hours a day, so this is a unique opportunity to capitalize on those idle hours. The rental companies handle all the insurance.

A couple friends used the Turo platform to essentially get a free Tesla!

27. Kindle Publishing

Selling ebooks on Amazon is one of the income streams I’m cultivating. I love the idea of having my work for sale on the world’s largest store!

From my very first author royalty check in 2012, I keep learning more about self-publishing and am hopefully getting better every time I put pen to paper … or fingers to keyboard.

I generated 20,000 downloads with my first “serious” book launch in 2014, and another title earned nearly $18,000 in its first year.

28. Part-Time Remote Work

With legit jobs ranging from entry-level to executive and freelance to full-time, FlexJobs is the leading work from home jobs site. At press time, there were more than 29,000 openings in dozens of career categories.

They charge a nominal monthly fee (save 30% w/ promo code FLEXLIFE) to access their listings, but you’ll easily earn it back and then some with one job.

29. “Software with a Service” Consulting

Consulting is an ambiguously broad field, but there are consultants for practically every area of expertise. What are you a relative expert in that others might pay for your advice?

One of my favorite angles is to piggyback on the popularity of a particular software tool, like Brad Rice did with Salesforce (earning over $200k a year part time!). As adoption of the software grows, so too does the demand for qualified support.

With platforms like Clarity.fm, you can get started very quickly and earn $60/hour and up.

30. Becoming an Adjunct Professor

You may need a graduate degree for this one, but it can be a fun way to share your knowledge with the next generation of students and earn some good money on the side — especially if you can teach online or with pre-recorded lectures.

31. Proofreading

Do you like to read? If you have an eye for detail you can set up shop on Upwork as a proofreader and bid on jobs large and small.

I actually offered this service on Fiverr for a while and made some decent money.

32. Ridesharing

If you’re free mornings, nights, or weekends, you can earn extra cash driving your fellow citizens around.

Sign up with Lyft or Uber to get started.

One cool “hack”: Both companies offer “Destination Mode”, which basically allows you to earn money on your regular morning and evening commute by telling the app which direction you’re headed and only accepting riders along your route.

If you don’t have a car of your own, HyreCar can help get you on the road.

33. Selling on Fiverr

Fiverr is one of the greatest sites in the world.

The basic premise was “what would you do for $5?” Over the years, they’ve gradually moved beyond that $5 starting point, but Fiverr remains an interesting “Buy Button” freelance marketplace.

Check out these fine Side Hustle Nation posts for more on how to make Fiverr work for you both as a buyer and a seller:

• How to Build a 6-Figure Side Hustle on Fiverr
• How I Earned $7490 in My First 14 Months on Fiverr
• $10 from a Single Sale … on Fiverr [Podcast]

I’ve used Fiverr for graphic design, book covers, website optimization, article writing, and even the old intro voiceover for The Side Hustle Show. I’ve experimented as a seller on Fiverr, starting with selling non-fiction ebooks.

Getting a little more adventurous with my gigs, I got featured on the homepage and was flooded with orders, ultimately earning $920 in 10 days.

34. Print on Demand T-Shirts

Teespring is a print-on-demand t-shirt platform, where you can custom-design your own shirts and sell them through the site.

On the podcast, my friend Benny shared how he built a 6-figure business on Teespring in under a year — even after a pretty discouraging start!

Another platform to check out is Printful, which has tons of print-on-demand products and lets you syndicate your listings to Etsy and other stores.

My wife and I have gotten into this ourselves lately, but we’ve been letting Amazon do the printing through their Merch by Amazon program. It’s awesome!

35. Your Own E-Commerce Store

Sell products online through your own store or through Amazon or eBay. In this episode, Will Mitchell walked me through how to find a profitable import product.

Next Step: Set up your shop with a free trial of Shopify, the leading shopping cart provider.

36. Niche Newsletter

One of the side hustles I’m most excited about right now is curated email newsletters. Could you source the best articles on your topic of choice on a daily or weekly basis?

These are super valuable for readers since you help cut through the clutter, and you can monetize with ads, affiliate offers, or your own products or services. Tools like Substack and SendFox make it super easy to get started.

37. Freelance Writing

With millions of websites all competing for attention, freelance writing is a service that’s constantly in demand. Someone’s got to create all that content, right?

Gabe Arnold even turned his writing side hustle into a full-blown agency!

38. Sports Coaching

School teams are sometimes in need of coaching help and