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11 Unique Side Businesses You Can Start Now

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Monty Ledford

 

If you want to create a side income SaveYourBucks has multiple ideas and options to consider. There is no shortage of ideas, I have discovered the challenge for most new entrepreneurs is confidence, inspiration and motivation. Before you read another word, ask yourself, am I ready to take action? Self-motivation is a learned mindset, a habit, if you need help in the self-motivation category this website can help you.

Pure Motivation 

In this article, I am going to add to your list of ideas to create a side income. There are countless ways you can make money legally, legitimate ways to make extra money this year. This isn’t going to be the typical article that tells you to drive for Uber or sell on Shopify, or to start a Youtube channel to show people how to make money. However, there is nothing wrong with Uber, Shopify, or eBay. They are all great options, but I want to share with you some unique ideas that aren’t talked about much. 

I actually did a poll on Instagram just the other day to ask people what were some of the ideas they have, so we collectively broaden all the ideas together. I’m not some millionaire guru that is going to show you how to make some money, I’m just a random person on the internet and SaveYourBucks has allowed me to write this article for your guys. 

I hope this article stimulates thought, and you can find some value in it. I have not practiced all these ideas myself, but I have most of them. I think they are genuinely unique &  interesting ideas that you can make money with, so without further ado, let’s get started with this article.

Sometimes learning what not to do is just as important as learning what you can and should be doing. So if you are just getting started, learning how to make money online, the idea you see pitched quite often, and I suggest you avoid is…

Online Surveys (A Side Hustle to Ignore)

I don’t doubt that many saveyourbucks readers are making money with online surveys, so do I. But the real question is how much money and more importantly, how much time are you spending? 

I seldom watch TV, but when I decide to veg out on Netflix over the weekend, I am usually taking online surveys. If the TV is on, I am clicking and taking a survey. I make money, doing this, enough to pay for a pizza or two. If someone tells you online surveys can be your main source of income, they are not telling you the truth, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing them. 

Who makes a full-time income with online surveys? I don’t know anybody who has, yes you can make money, but online surveys should be an income stream you create when you can multitask. watching TV, waiting at the oil change facility, sitting at the airport, etc. 

If you could be focused on another income-generating idea, and you are spending prime time taking a survey I think that is a mistake. Perhaps the biggest waste of time; correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve yet to meet someone who is like “yeah, I’m a professional online survey taker”. I don’t see that happening. 

I also want to remind you that if you’re looking to make $500 an hour by clicking buttons, there might be sort of a problem there because in general, what we have to remember is you’re going to get paid for what you’re worth, you’re going to get paid for the value you’re providing. 

Anytime that you see someone saying that you can get a thousand dollars per day by just clicking your mouse and doing absolutely nothing but taking online surveys, that’s probably not the case and they’re going to steal all of your information and you’re going to end up pretty sad. 

The only exception would be a company called InBox Dollars, they give you $5.00 when you sign up. Many Saveyourbucks readers tell me they complete surveys passively while they watch Netflix and they make enough to go out on a couple of nice date nights every month.


1. Sell Study Guides, Class Notes, or Conduct Classes 


What I think is interesting, this is really for college students out there is to sell study guides or essentially just go to class and sell those notes at the end of the semester. I know personally that when I was in college, (I hope my mom is not reading this video right now) but I never went to class. Bad decision; I know. 

But what I would do is at the end of the semester right before exams, I would go to the study groups and they would charge $50 per study group and there was one before every exam. I‘d pay $50 because I didn’t go to class, so I would pay this lump sum amount of money, 100 to 150 kids in this classroom. 

Somebody is teaching you a crash course of everything you should be learning in the class over the semester, so $50, a hundred kids in the classroom do the math on that. That’s $5,000 in a classroom that the company was making from that. 

Now, this is at a big university at Penn State. So they had a lot of students available for this and they would have seven or eight classrooms going at the same time, so some days they were pulling in tens of thousands of dollars. You can do this on a smaller scale. You could simply just go to class and take some notes and then sell those notes at the end of the semester. 

I paid a lot of people for notes at the end of the semester when they post them to a Facebook group and say $20 a piece, I’ll send you a PDF with all of the notes and I was paying a lot of money for that and that’s because people are willing to pay whatever it takes to get a good grade in college, especially in today’s environment. So, if you are a good student, and you think about it, there are many possibilities.

2. Junk Removal 

The next one is to remove junk. Now look, I know everybody wants to make money from their laptop and just do absolutely nothing like wipe your butt and make 10 grand. But if you are willing to get your hands a little bit dirty, this is a business model that we’ve seen people make millions of dollars from. Look at it, I think it’s 1-800-GOT-JUNK. These people made millions of dollars from just picking up people’s crap that they have at their house.

So, once again, I hope my mom’s not reading this article because I don’t know about you, but I remember when I was a kid, a TV outside my parents’ house in the backyard.   In the yard, there were old tires and piles of junk stacked everywhere. We don’t know what to do with it. A lot of people find themselves in that situation. They have things like old appliances and crap everywhere. They have an old oven from a billion years ago in their basement. Their garage is filled with just crap. People need to get rid of it. And that’s why you could start a junk removal business.

The logistics of this depends on the son, how hard it would be to start this?  Obviously, you need to have a truck or you have a car that you can get a tow package to buy or rent a trailer and just remove junk for people and then literally take some of that junk and then sell it. Or you could take it to the scrapyard, make money from it. It’s a business idea, I think it is pretty interesting, petty straight forward, post those ads to Facebook or Craigslist, or your local newspaper if people still use those anymore and make some money off of that. 

This is a huge business. I know many people that remove junk, charge people a fee for the removal and then sell everything they can to scrap yards, on eBay, etc. There is a podcast from a friend of mine you may find interesting it is called Jeff Talks Junk. This is a $100,000 + a year income if you want to get serious about it, but if not, get an old truck, run some Facebook Marketplace ads and you can create a great side gig. 

 3. Green Business

So, the next one is a cool idea, and it’s to essentially make money by making something green. What I mean by this is to find something in society at the moment, and find a way to make it more environmentally friendly which can be a business model in itself. So this is a win-win situation. It’s probably like a feel-good business, but also you can make some money because you know at the end of the day we do need to pay our rent. Right?

And so for example, selling reusable bags instead of plastic bags, like, I can customize bags. 

There’s a lot of things that people can do to be more environmentally conscious and they’re willing to pay more money for that because they want something reusable. Like for example, hydro flasks, people pay like 40 or $50 for hydro flasks and they are generally better for the environment because you’re not using a plastic bottle every single day throwing it out wasting so much plastic. 

So, finding anything, and this is a broad idea, but I thought it was really important to include in this article, is to find something you can turn environmentally friendly, which is a lot of cases you can charge more money for it because people are willing to pay more. After all, they feel better about it. It’s overall a great business model in taking something and turning it green and making money off of it, is a pretty cool idea. This is a topic worth thinking about if you tend to be green. The number of products that are going to come green in the future is staggering, it is a trend that is not going to stop.

4. Property Manager

The next idea is to become a property manager. If you don’t have enough money to start investing in real estate or maybe you just don’t want to start buying properties, you don’t like the idea of it, you can still make money in real estate. I have a friend who is handy with tools, and he runs a small apartment complex, is the property manager/handyman man and gets a small salary and free rent.  He has multiple other side gigs going, but his job as a property manager covers all his living expenses. 

I have several friends who are real estate investors, for most investors when they start, they’re usually managing their property at first when they get their first couple of properties, which means that you have to think about all the little things that go into being a landlord or being a real estate investor. 

And so, being a property manager, what you’re doing here is, you’re working with real estate investors who might buy an apartment complex or they might buy some houses but they don’t have the time or the resources to go and show people their apartments to fill vacancies and find tenants, to make sure everything is running smoothly, to help people unclog toilets.

You can become a property manager and take a percentage or a fee from the real estate investor or whoever owns the land, the landlord, you can take a fee from whatever the tenant may pay them. This is something that I’ve seen people go from a few percent closer to 7 or 8 percent. I’m not an expert on this, so if you want to get into this just do some Google searches, read some books about it, talk to some real estate investors who they use as a property manager.

A lot of real estate investors who are big need a property manager to manage the property for them. And this is something you can do with not very much experience.  You just must have the right personality and patience for this type of side gig, I don’t, but you might?

Now, I don’t want to make this sound easy, by no means is this an easy operation, because it’s a business that people can scale for millions of dollars, but it’s something that doesn’t have a barrier to entry in the sense that you’ll need some type of college degree. This is something that as long as you’re willing to put in the effort and you’re willing to really think about how you’re going to make this a priority and make this a business, then that’s something that you can certainly consider perusing. Look into that if you’re interested in something like property management. 

5. Raw Land Flipping

The next one here is also actually tied to real estate, and I see people doing this not very often, but it’s a very lucrative idea, and that is to essentially, think about buying land wholesale and then selling it retail. 

The way we can describe this; think about Walmart. They’re going to buy products by the pallet, they’re going to buy products by the truck. They’re going to buy a shipping container of products, and then they’re going to sell those individually in the store and they’re making money because they’re buying it wholesale and then breaking it up and selling each one individually at a higher cost per item. 

You could do the same thing with real estate, and I’ve seen people do this with lots. For example, they’ll buy a plot of land and then they’ll split it up into 10 different lots and they’ll sell each one of those lots for a higher price per amount of acreage that they’re buying. So for example, if you bought a hundred acres for $100,000 and then you split it up into 10 different, lots of 10 acres, and you sold each one of those for $20,000 you could theoretically double your money. 

Now, it’s more difficult to sell more land than it is to sell actual houses or buildings, but it’s still something that I see people doing where they’ll buy big plots of land and then break them up into smaller parcels and sell those smaller parcels for a higher cost per unit or a higher price per unit. That’s what I want to share with you. 

If you don’t have the money to do it, there’s always sort of a workaround to do this. I know a lot of people who have money that they’re sitting on and they don’t know where to invest it, and they are looking for somebody to partner with who maybe doesn’t have the money, but they have the time or they have the motivation to go out and do these deals and then you get a percentage of that. So, you can find somebody who is an investor who’s willing to do this to put in the money, and then you put in the time side of it to make something happen. With a partnership like this; it happens all the time.

6. Selling on eBay

Well, you’ve probably already heard of this, but this is sort of a different approach, and that is by not actually having the products yourself or going out to auctions and yard sales and then buying them and then reselling on eBay or on Craigslist or Facebook MarketPlace and other platforms. However honestly, if you have never had a side gig before, I think buying and flipping on these platforms is the best place to start.  You can find a tone of “make money flipping merchandise” information here: Online Auction University.

<<<————— This DVD is the one that got me started, it got me out of my job and started my entrepreneurial journey. You can probably find it on Amazon or eBay, if not click here:  How to Sell on eBay Training. 

But, we’re going to put a different spin on this, and this is a different opportunity where you can essentially, sort of sell other people’s products for them, and then take a commission, take a piece off the top of whatever profit they’re making or whatever the sales are that they’re making. 

So, I was thinking back to the ways I made money when I was much younger when I was a teenager. And one of the things that I would do, I kind of feel bad about it. I sort of took advantage of my dad, but I would say, Hey, that you have this snowplow here, you’re probably not gonna ever use it, I can sell it for you for $1,200 I’ll take a 20% and you don’t have to worry about anything. And somehow he said yes to it. 

Maybe you just wanted to be nice to me and help me make some money. But from that, you know, if I sold it for $1,200, I can make 20% and make $240 profit for not having to worry about expenses, not having to worry about profitability. I was just making a percentage on the top of everything. 

There’s a lot of people who don’t know how to sell on eBay. They have a computer or their phone and they just don’t know how to sell it online or they don’t want to have to deal with selling it online. Maybe they don’t have the time to do it. And so you can become the person who says, Hey, I can sell that for you. I just got to take a piece off the top. And I think everybody’s going to be happy overall. A lot of people are willing to do that. So it’s a cool business opportunity for you. You can create a good side hustle just by selling other people’s items on eBay and other platforms.

7. Middle-man Strategy 

So, kind of going along with that last idea that we just mentioned, there’s another cool opportunity and that’s to, we’re going to call this old school drop shipping. What happens here, in this case, is let’s say that in your local area, you can sell firewood in a truckload or trailer load of firewood for say $300.

With that, if you could find a source from that where you could say, buy it for $150 a cord, make $150 profit, and then not have to go and do any of the work. This does happen. I know people who do this, and it’s pretty lucrative, pretty interesting. So for example, you can post an ad for a product or a service for a certain price. Then you get that customer, you send somebody else who you can buy for a cheaper price to go deliver it to that customer, and you’re essentially just the middleman here. 

So somebody, my family just last week was getting the roof repaired and they noticed that the person who gave the quote said, you know how much it’s going to cost to fix the roof and put a whole new roof on the house wasn’t doing any of the work. They just outsource the work to another company, to a bunch of other people and they essentially just sat there in their car and watched it happen without having to do very much.

Becoming the middle man here, this is the idea in this point is to essentially become the middleman and find a way where you can just buy something for a certain price, sell it for a higher price and just send those people to each other. It’s drop shipping, but an old school with services and things in the local area. You can do this with furniture, you can do this with TVs. You can just send people to other areas and become the middleman to make some money off the top.

What’s great about this is that in a lot of cases you’re not going to get left holding the bag with having products that you don’t know how to sell because you’re only buying them when you know that you’re about to sell them. 

That’s a cool idea that I thought of. as I write this article, it becomes more and more obvious that a big part of creating a side gig income is developing the right mindset, so you start to see opportunities and possibilities. If you have worked at a job your entire life, it will take a while to start thinking like a flipper or an entrepreneur, but if you are determined to make it happen, you will get there. I see opportunities everywhere.  However just because you can make a profit with a venture, does not mean that is the project you should take on. Your time is the most valuable asset you have, if you have not read the book yet, The 7 Top Side Gig opportunities that they offer here at Save Your Bucks, it is a great read and talks much more about putting your time into the right projects that make the most sense for your personal goals. Really if you haven’t read the Side Gig Opportunities book,  download it, like right now here TOP SIDE GIGS. 

8. Sports Official

Now this next one here, it’s not necessarily a business, but I thought I included it in this list because I haven’t mentioned it before. If you like sports it’s just a fun way to make some extra money on the side, and that is to become a referee, an official, or an umpire. 

My uncle does this and he makes $50 per game that he does for baseball. He’ll do two games after work. Like in the summer he’ll make $100 and it’s just some great extra spending money that he can use for vacations or use for other just fun things in his life that he wants to spend some money on but doesn’t want to tap into his pay from work. He wants some extra money on the side. Becoming a sports official is a great side gig. 

Honestly, I think he would almost do it for free because he just loves to do it. He loves sports. He loves baseball. So becoming an official for a sport, trust me, there’s a lot of different officials out there that are needed for high school sports or even, you know, older leagues. 

There’s a lot of different officials that are needed for that. So just look into that in your local area. You want to make some extra money. You’re not going to become a millionaire by being a baseball umpire or a football referee, but it’s certainly something that can help pay the bills. 

I have another friend that takes his profits from his basketball referee gigs and uses them to grow his Flipping Side Gig where is currently earning a few thousand dollars a month flipping yards sale, thrift store, and auction items on eBay and Etsy. 

So, if you want to eventually ditch your job and work for yourself, always think about how I can invest the profits from my side gig, to create more profits. Why I am thinking about it just let me say if you have never got into Robert Kiyosaki’s materials about creating cash flow, they are a must! 


9. Domain Flipping 

Honestly, this is one of my favorite side gig hustles, and it is almost completely passive for me. 

I own over two dozen different domains for certain categories and different businesses. I buy domains as an investment and some I build out websites on.  I am an armature, but I sold 7 domains last year for a total of $12,300.00. I originally bought those domains for $98, $14.00 each, so you can see why I am excited about domain flipping as a side gig. Some people are making comfortable full-time incomes just buying & selling website domain names. Godaddy has a domain auction area. You can buy domain names and then immediately list them for sale. 

NameCheap.com also lets you list domains that you have purchased through them as well. I have also sold some of my domain names on eBay and a website called Flippa, which primarily sells websites, but also domain names. 

Insider’s Secret 

I was in the middle of writing this article when I discovered what I am about to share with you. Honestly, I can’t even believe I am doing this 

I have a dude that attends a meetup group for flippers that I regularly attend, and shares with me that he made $397,000.00 last year flipping domain names. Honestly, I didn’t believe him, I thought to myself then why are you hanging out with flippers at this meetup that are trying to break the $100,000.00 a year barrier? 

Long story short, I saw his tax return and after I bought him a few beers at his local tavern I got him to spill the beans. He uses a special piece of software that sends him an email daily of valuable domains that the owners have let lapse. He then goes in and buys them for $14. Some of these domains have fair market values in the tens of thousands of dollars. I know, I know, but most people have no idea this software even exists. It is called FreshDrop obviously because it notifies you when domains are dropped. 

This is the basic info I pulled from their website

  • EVERYDAY VALUABLE DOMAINS BECOME available for some reason or another previously registered domain names are made available again due to expiration, deletion, or resale. Normally the public is not notified about this.
  • FRESHDROP GATHERS ALL EXPIRED, DELETED, AND FOR SALE DOMAINS INTO ONE CENTRALIZED SEARCHABLE DATABASE. With our market-leading platform, customers can search the entire spectrum of aftermarket domain names.
  • FRESHDROP SCANS EACH DOMAIN NAME TO FIND HIDDEN VALUABLE TRAITSEach domain name undergoes a thorough and rigorous analysis with analytics deriving from Google™, Yahoo™, Alexa™, Quantcast™, Compete™, MajesticSEO™, DMOZ™, Overture™, Wordtracker™, Verisign™, WhoIs, Archive.org, and many more…
  • MEMBERS SEARCH THROUGH OUR DATABASE TO FIND VALUABLE DOMAIN NAMESOur pioneering technology allows customers to accurately identify profit opportunities in the purchase of domain names in an efficient time-saving manner.
  • MEMBERS MAKE PROFIT: BUILD, REDIRECT, PARK, SELLOnce our members acquire the domain name, they use various types of monetization models to make a profit.

I became a Fresh Drop member 3 days ago. I bought 3 domains my first day, and have already sold the first one on eBay for a Buy Now of $700.00 (I paid $14.00) for it.  Another one I bought, the previous owner has already contacted me and wants to buy it back, he has offered me $500.00 but I have not accepted the offer yet.  Honestly, I am so excited about this, I am about to pee my pants. I am talking about can’t sleep at night excited. It was all I could do to complete this article but I promised the team at Save Your Bucks that I would meet their deadline.
Honestly, I feel like I have had my path to multiple six-figure paydays just show up out of nowhere from some random dude I met at a local meet-up. At the time of this writing, membership is still open, you can check out the Fresh Drop website by clicking here. 

I have to finish this article, but you don’t. You are looking for a great side gig so just do yourself a favor and go ahead and check out Fresh Drop now!  HERE IS THE LINK 

For those of you that are still reading, I gotta ask why? Please don’t fall into the trap that so many people fall into of consuming information, but never taking action on the information they consume. I have just shared with you the goods, and what is so crazy to me is at the time I started writing this article, I had no idea what I just discovered by accident even existed.

Ok, let me focus, and knock the rest of this article out.  In the domain game, make sure you don’t want to do any cybersquatting. There are laws on it where for example, if you bought McDonald’s.com for some reason, like their domain, expired and they didn’t realize it, he bought McDonald’s.com and you thought you could sell it back McDonald’s for millions of dollars, you probably won’t be able to do that because they own the rights to that, they have the trademark for it, so they could get it from you. But for example, if you had a website like coffee.com well you can’t trademark coffee.com and so therefore you could sell that for millions of dollars. 

As a general rule, if you plan on buying domains that you eventually want to sell, stay away from trademarked names. I know that one of the owners of Save Your Bucks also operates two websites I know of that have trademarked names in them. www.TwitterMarketingTips.com and  www.PinterestMarketingHelp.com. However, it is my understanding they have no plans of ever selling them and these websites were established just to do what their names indicated, help people marketing on Twitter and Pinterest. 

Some domain names have been sold for tens of millions of dollars, ones like casino.com or money.com, and a lot of these smaller, shorter ones. I’ve done way too many hours of research on this; buying domains for myself that I could potentially sell in the future. I spent a lot of time finding these domains and you can still find some really good short words, finding two combinations of words that people will eventually want to buy. 

You don’t know when someone’s going to open a business next year and they want that exact domain that you have and you can sell it for a lot of money. You don’t even have to do this with domains. You can do this with different types of social media. So Instagram handles, I know people who pay like $10,000 for an Instagram handle because they want this short little Instagram to handle. 

So, sort of being on top of the game, finding the next sort of gig social media platform and just taking up a bunch of the usernames and potentially selling those in the future. For example, if a new social media, the program comes out, or an app comes out and I can get the username just Nate or Bob or Mike, somebody down the road, if that social media platform becomes very large, is going to pay me a lot of money for doing that, for selling it to them.

That’s a cool opportunity. Just be on top of the game with that. So at the time of this writing, Tik Tok is a growing social media platform. I have a friend that controls 100 different Tik Tok accounts, not so he can put stupid video’s on them, but he plans on selling those aged accounts in the future.  So this domain flipping gig can also apply to social media accounts. 

10. Substitute Teaching

There are two more here that I want to share with you. One of them is not necessarily a business, it’s not even really a side gig. Also, it’s just kind of a part-time job, but it’s still pretty interesting. That’s by being a substitute teacher, very flexible with this on the days that you can do it. You just get called in whenever you have the opportunity to do it. You can make $100 a day depending on the school district that you’re in. 

It’s relatively easy to work, although I’ve never done it, so I can’t speak to that, but my girlfriend has. No, I probably shouldn’t say that. It’s easy. I think a lot of subsidies go through some pretty hard times, but, yeah, it’s definitely something that I want to just include on this list because it’s just a way to make some extra money on the side.  So if you have the qualifications, you may want to check this out.

11. Flipping Calculators

And the final one here is not one that’s going to make you millions of dollars. I don’t know why I saved it until last. I had a friend in college who would buy up students, grow our graphing calculators at the end of the semester, and then sell them on eBay for triple what he would buy them for. 

He would buy these expensive calculators, if you’ve taken calculus or any other type of higher-level math, you’ll know that in a lot of cases you’re going to need a pretty decent calculator. A lot of them are ones that are over a hundred dollars, you have to buy them for, and then he would just buy them off of all the students. 

For students who are graduating; he would go in at the end of the semester, and just pull up a ton of calculators from students and then flip them. And he was able to pay a good portion of his rent just from doing this very profitable side gig. And you can kind of expand this idea to find other opportunities like that. Graphics Calculators are just one thing in a long line of products you buy and things you learn that you will never need again after you leave school. 

Honestly, I just have to say it, if you know you want to be in business for yourself and be an entrepreneur, I know of no bigger waste of time than spending 4 years in college! There I said it, agree and disagree, that is my true belief. I was making more than my teachers when I was in high school, and I know none of my college professors had a chance of ever becoming a millionaire, but I KNOW I WILL.

A quick little bonus here before we finish this article, I want to remind you guys that the election is coming up in the United States 2020 Presidential election. It’s really big. Everybody’s watching it. This is a great opportunity to make some money. And I’ve talked about this before, so this isn’t going to be like one of the points that we’re making here, but there’s a lot of money in elections. 

There’s a lot of money flowing around the 2016 election. I was selling all kinds of different political bumper stickers from both sides of the political spectrum. I didn’t care. I was just trying to make money. I didn’t really like any of the candidates, but yeah, it’s an opportunity. 

You can make yard signs for political campaigns, talk to your local campaigns for state representatives for Congress and find out what they need. They might be yard signs, bumper stickers, apparel, all kinds of stuff. There’s a lot of money flowing into campaigns so, just look into that. 

I think it’s one of the best, coolest ideas every time that an election season comes up. I love politics. Okay guys, peace out. I’ll plan. Hopefully, everybody found some value in this article, and by all means, check out the EXPIRED DOMAIN SOFTWARE if you haven’t already.


Your comments, questions, and feedback are appreciated!