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WHAT IS A SIDE HUSTLE?
A side hustle is any type of employment undertaken in addition to one’s full-time job. A side hustle is generally freelance or piecework in nature, providing a supplemental income. Side hustles are often things a person is passionate about, rather day a typical day job worked in order to make ends meet.
One thing many people usually fail to understand is that the best time to start a side hustle is when you are still a student.
at this stage, you have all possibilities to start a sucessful side hustle, and that is why i decided to come out with this 10 profitable side hustles ideas to start as a student.
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LIST OF SIDE HUSTLE IDEAS TO START AS A STUDENT
1. Tutor
This one can be easy since you don’t have to leave campus to do it. Think of a subject you excel at that you can teach to underclassmen – it can be your major or another subject you do well in. Your university’s student or career center should have more information on becoming a tutor on campus. Remember that your grades will need to qualify and you may need a teacher recommendation. Advertising on Craigslist or hanging up fliers on campus, or at local high school or elementary schools, will get your services noticed.
2. Sell your stuff and skills online
One person’s trash can be another’s treasure. If you’ve got anything from old clothes, books, CDs, going the eBay or Amazon route is always a tried and true method of earning some extra bucks. Of course, if you’re the crafty or creative type, Etsy is the perfect online venue for showcasing and selling your wares. It’s a creative outlet for creative types, and who knows? Set up shop, and it might turn into something more profitable than you imagined.
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3. Become a campus brand ambassador
It’s not even really a hustle, since you’re basically getting paid to wear a company’s clothes while you go about your business on campus. One inventive, yet easy, side job idea is to become a campus representative for a company with a big college-age customer base. Brand rep opportunities are often posted on your college’s career board, so keep an eye out. Of course, if you’re out shopping at the mall, don’t hesitate to ask if the brand has any college-related opportunities.
5. Make money from social media
A good side hustle – particularly for the budding entrepreneurs and marketing majors out there – could be to leverage some of your social media savvy and make some extra dough from it. Think about a hobby, skill or special interest of yours that could make a good online consulting business on the side. You might even take our tutoring suggestion a step further and offer online consulting to other underclassmen on campus, coaching them on everything from maximizing study time, to hacking it living on campus for the first time. Start by reaching out to student groups and organizations via Facebook and Twitter, or see if you can advertise through your campus career center.
ALSO READ How to Choose the Right Marketing Strategies On Social Media.
6. Fill out online surveys
If you’re not the entrepreneurial type for blogging, consulting or social media, you can still make money from the Web on the side. Becoming an online survey taker gets you compensated for taking short surveys, so you don’t need to leave your dorm room or the computer lab to squeeze in a few questionnaires.
7. Take up some odd jobs
Sign up for a site like TaskRabbit or Fiverr where you can get paid to complete small tasks for people and get paid for them (here’s how to get started). It could be babysitting, pet sitting, dog walking, snow shoveling, pool cleaning, car washing, assembling office furniture, cleaning an office/apartment/house/dorm, gofering, or making grocery runs. Agent Anything is mostly tailored towards employing students, so all you need is to create a login, view the task and agree on the price. If you’re more the strapping jock type, many moving companies employ college students looking to do some heavy lifting. But if you’re the absolute autonomous type, sign up on a site like Postmates.com to deliver goods or food to residences and businesses; the site, in particular, pays up to $25 per hour.
Here are 10 cool Ways to make Massive income as a Photographer.
8. Become a mystery shopper
If working at Starbucks or the food court isn’t your thing, becoming a mystery shopper allows you to rate their customer service and products. Sneaky? Not when you’re getting paid to see if franchises and companies are giving the best service. If you’re a regular visitor to the mall, you might as well be compensated for it.
9. Work in catering
The good thing about working for a catering company for big events like weddings or graduation parties is that they often hire on an as-needed basis, so you can work one or two as a server or on the wait staff, and sign up again when you have the time, like during weekends or on spring break.
10. Rent out your apartment with Airbnb
When going home for holiday and summer breaks, you may want to consider renting out your home while you’re not there. Airbnb makes it easy for you to put your home up online for rental at any time — just make sure you’re complying with your local laws on subletting.
11. Become a tour guide
If your college or university is in a major city, metropolitan hub, or even just an historical location, there’ll likely be an influx of tourists who need to be shown around. If you’re more than acquainted with your school’s town, why not give tours as a side hustle? You might even take it in another direction and become a docent for the local museum or historical society, some of which pay a small stipend.
REASONS WHY YOU NEED SIDE HUSTLE
PROTECT YOURSELF IN CASE YOU LOSE YOUR JOB
If you still think that your job is safe, think again. Today, technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace, and it is disrupting more and more industries and making many jobs redundant.
PAY OFF YOUR CREDIT CARD DEBT/BANK LOANS SOONER
A side hustle gives you extra income every month.
So, imagine that you could make $1,000 a month on the side, that is $12,000 a year on top of your salary. If you have a credit card debt of $10,000, you can easily pay off your debt within the year and save you a lot on interest.
For example, freelancing on the side is the fastest way to make money on the side because you don’t have to build a website or even create a name card first. You can start getting your paying clients right away after you have figured out what service you can offer.
I started out doing service arbitrage with no experience whatever. And I got my very first paying client 3 days later and made my first $1,000 two months later.
So, what is service arbitrage? And how does it work?
It works in a similar way to a business model where you buy physical products at cheap wholesale price and then resell them at higher retail price.
But for service arbitrage, you resell services instead of physical products.
So, here’s how I did it.
First, I identify services that are already being offered by freelancers at cheap price on freelance websites. Next, I market these services to people who need it at a higher price. Once I get a sale, I will hire the freelancer to do the work for me.
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IT GIVES YOU THE OPTION TO QUIT YOUR JOB IF YOU EVER WANT TO
Having a side business also gives you the option to quit your job if you want to. If you feel stuck at a boring 9 to 5 job, you know that you can leave your job without having to worry about paying bills.
The bottom line is that we should never waste our life working at jobs that make us feel unfulfilled or suffocated. Life is too short for that. One year from now, you don’t want to regret that you never started today to move closer to doing the work you love and living the life you’ve dreamt about.
YOU CAN SPEND ON YOURSELF OR YOUR LOVED ONES GUILT FREE
With the extra income from your side hustle, you can afford to spend on yourself or your loved ones without feeling guilty. Maybe it is buying the bag you’ve always wanted to buy. Or maybe it is taking your husband and kids for a nice vacation. Maybe it is just treating your friends to a nice dinner.
You can now do all these because your side hustle can pay for it. And the best thing is that your side business can continue to pay for these things year after year.
This is because once you have learned the skills to make money on the side, it is skills for life and no one can take that away from you.
YOU CAN PUT THE EXTRA MONEY INTO INVESTMENT OR YOU CAN USE IT TO BUILD YOUR EMERGENCY FUND
If you are financially savvy and looking to build an investment portfolio for passive income, you can put your extra cash in dividend stocks.
An investment platform like Trust Trade Finance is a good place to get started with investing in stocks and stuff.
Besides putting into investment, you can also use the extra income from your freelance business to build your emergency fund just in case something unexpected happens.
Single points of failure are bad.
A single point of failure is another way to describe the weak link in a chain. One break and the entire system is broken. Your body understands this…you have two kidneys, two eyes, two lungs.
Employers understand this too, which is why they tend to have multiple people who can handle any given task. Even the military gets this, baking redundancy into the skillsets of elite fighting units.
So why is it that most individuals have just one income? A single income means you’re trapped. You have fewer options, you’re in a weaker position to negotiate, and you’re in bad shape if that main-stream income happens to goes away. Granted, employers typically want it that way, because it puts them in a position of power.
But it’s not in your best interest to keep yourself in this position. The smartest investors mitigate risk, and the most wealthy people have multiple income streams. Think about this, you should have the multiple streams, as well.
Your time is worth more on your own.
As an employer, you’re lucky if your time is worth $30-$60/per hour. Even top notch programmers in the Bay area are lucky to be making $100/per hour to $150/per hour. But many, many people with side hustles are making $250/per hour to $500 per hour on those — some even $1,000/per hour and up.
It doesn’t take years and years of experience to make that amount of money. It just takes expertise in a niche field. Of course, it can be hard to expect your side hustle to make the same total amount of money as you can make being an employee, even if you make more per hour at your side gig. Which is why it’s called a side hustle, and not your day job. At least at first.
It’s an awesome education.
As an employee, you typically operate in a narrow range of tasks and obligations. You probably have people telling you what to do, setting deadlines and so forth. With a side hustle, it’s all on you.
In many ways, you could think of a side hustle as a real-world MBA. You’ll learn aspects of business and life that could otherwise be difficult to learn. With your side hustle you’ll know how to manage selling and marketing, and how to negotiate just about anything.
You’ll figure out how to write and read a contract — you’ll especially recognize contracts where you could get screwed over. You’ll learn how to set-up an interactive website quickly, run a webinar like a pro, and design a logo with all the components of a fine graphic designer.
A side hustle gets you out of your comfort zone, and helps you broaden your skillset…which in turn actually makes you more and more valuable to any employer anywhere in the world. Win-win.
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CONCLUSION
Don’t feel limited in the side gigs you can pursue just because you’re a full-time student. First, ask yourself, What am I good at? Is there anything I can do on the side that I’ve worked part time at before? Or, something that allows me to get paid going about my day-to-day routine?
Once you identify the skills that can translate into a side hustle, the beauty of it is that you’re essentially your own boss – you don’t need to quit one job, interview for another, and tie yourself to one crap and all that.
Don’t ignore the career benefits that a side hustle can later bring you, either. List them on your resume or LinkedIn page so future employers can be impressed with your diversity of experiences – and never forget that once you’re in the post-college career world, a side hustle is always there waiting for you to take.
