I wanted a side hustle online; something I could pick up and drop around other work. Not only that, but I wanted something with potential too. I wanted something which was better than what I already had! This was going to be a challenge!
I started looking to the internet for answers to my sketchy employment history. I was out of work more often than in it! I had to turn that to my advantage! So I did! I used my computer to find a side hustle online. This is my story!
Side Hustle Online – eBay
I started with eBay back in the 90’s. eBay had only just arrived in 1995. Back then I had a dial up connection. It wasn’t the greatest when I was putting in a bid for an item in the last few seconds. My dial up connection would time out and I’d lose the item! It was pretty frustrating. But then I discovered some software which put my bid in for me in the last few seconds. This was auctionsniper.com. It lets you snipe other bidders – you get the item at the last minute without pushing the price up and joining in a bidding war. Anyway I digress!
1. My First Side hustle Online – Buying and Selling on Ebay
The strategy I first used was simply buying and selling. You can use eBay to do your selling for you and buy from charity shops, other auctions, pound shops and car boot sales. If you’re into antiques, you can pick up antique items and flog them on eBay.
It’s a great little side hustle online. As long as you can make a profit on something, it’s worth buying. You can even check eBay itself before you buy, to see how much something might sell for. See my article selling products from home ideas.
2. My Second eBay Side Hustle Online
After a while of this, and having learned a lot about what would sell and what wouldn’t, I found an eBook which taught another strategy. The idea is to find badly listed items on eBay and sell them back on eBay with a better listing. By finding items which are incorrectly spelled, you can get things for far less that their worth. This is because there’s far fewer people who bid on those items.
People can’t see them when they are searching (because of the spelling error). Once you have bought your cheap item using the bargain checker website, and auctionsniper.com, simply re-list your item but with the correct spelling, more pictures, detail and more keywords. Also you should place a low starting bid to encourage more bidders and bidding war.
Checkout my full article on this simple and profitable strategy.
3. Another Side Hustle Online
So there’s two side hustle’s online which anyone can use. Despite a certain success with the eBay strategy, I was still not sure I was doing my best to use the internet and my time to their fullest capacity. I was spending a lot of time finding bargain items, bidding, waiting at the post office and re-listing items and emailing customers about various problems or queries. It seemed like I was tied in and I spend many hours working away, without really making enough money to justify all the work I did.
After purchasing the eBook which explained the above ‘system’, I realised there must be a better way. The eBook which taught the above system, was an automatically downloadable book. I purchased it from eBay itself through a listing. It struck me as the perfect business model because it was automated and could be used again and again. The book was a digital product and could be sold and re-sold without the owner having to lift a finger! Call me lazy, but that sounded to me like the perfect business model!
This idea led me to another business model – affiliate marketing. After some unsuccessful attempts at selling my own eBooks online, I decided to learn how to sell digital products online.
Why Digital Products Are The Future – Side Hustle Online
Digital products are the future because of the ability to:
- Sell them globally
- Earn higher commissions on their sale (Typically 40%)
- Deliver the over the internet
- Scale up the sales without limitation
Anyone can learn to sell digital products over the internet. The business model is know as affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is basically a performance based kind of referral marketing. By recommending products and services over the internet, affiliates can earn commissions based on the sales. Because the sales are then either automated, or delivered by someone else, the affiliate marketer can focus on marketing.
Digital products can be sold over and over again through the same platform. This makes them very scalable. With global products it also means you can sell them anywhere. As long as someone has a laptop and an internet, they can download digital products.
Why A Digital Business? – Online Side Hustle
A digital business can give anyone the ability to work from anywhere around existing employment and learn the best strategies for building an online business. You can:
- Earn while you learn
- Work from anywhere
- Scale up your business
- Start without any experience
- Build an income which surpasses your current employment (disclaimer: income is never guaranteed)
Anyone can get on the path to becoming an affiliate marketer.