“Did you know you can actually make money online? yeah that’s right, and all you need is a computer or phone with internet access and you can make millions……”
How often have you heard this line? I know I have heard it countless times.
Chances are you clicked on my blog because you want to be able to make money online but you don’t know fact from fiction. Well, neither do I, but my mission is to find out. What exactly am I talking about…..making money from side hustles.
My Mission
My intention is to test out as many side hustles as I can, show you how I did it AND most importantly, I am going to show you the financials on each side hustle I will be evaluating. I want to know which side hustle works so I can stop wasting my time and yours.
The following is how I intend to evaluate each side hustle
- Identify the side hustle.
- Follow mostly what the “guru’s” say to do. If I know a better way I will use that.
- Map out what the process looks.
- Discuss each step in the process.
- Test it out
- Finally, I will show you my financials.
But before I begin, I’m going to share with you a little bit about my story. I am 47, yep, old in the grand scheme of trying to get rich quick. I have been married for 7 years to my beautiful wife and have 5 kids that keep me honest. Without them, I don’t know what I would be doing. They push me to be better.
Many years ago now, I spent just over 6 years in the Air Force and when I got out of the military I went to college where I graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biology. After college I worked for a few years as a Microbiologist, realized that was not for me, then moved on to the Environmental Health & Safety realm where I have been for the last 16 years. One thing to note, I was able to purchase a few rental properties over that time and have enjoyed that aspect of my life. I will speak more on this in a future blog.
I guess what I am trying to show with my history is that I am just an average Joe trying to get to retirement like everybody else and would love to figure out a way to retire as early as possible. I do believe in order to retire early I am going to have to do this online money making thing. That’s where this website comes into play.
OK! Lets jump right on in. What tall tale should I evaluate first?
Drumroll…….My first evaluation on how to get rich and retire early is THIS blog (I’m sure you figured that out). I have heard so much about people making money on their blog that I am almost convinced it will work. The only problem, its going to be difficult to find the time to do it AND I am not a writer. Oh, and I know absolutely nothing about how to blog or how they work. I am starting from scratch.
Personally, I believe blogging about something you really like can be fun OR in the case of this blog, it allows me a forum to test out the different methods of making money in a way that is hopefully inciteful to my readers. I love the idea of testing out these side hustles so other people don’t have too. It really excites me.
It will also help further develop my passions by allowing me to dive deeper into topics and learning about specific niches and sub niches that I have always been interested in.
Finally, I am hopeful this will allow me to become a better thinker and writer by condensing thoughts into the written word for other people. We shall see.
Why a blog?
Why do the experts in the industry say blogging is the way to make a large amount of money and how true is that statement?
The number one reason I hear about being a blogger is it makes good money passively. Is that true….Passively…..Really? What exactly does passive mean anyway? For me to understand this, I first broke down what Active and Passive actually mean.
Investopedia explains Active Income the best. Active income refers to income received for performing a service. Wages, tips, salaries, commissions, and income from businesses in which there is material participation are examples of active income. Its most commonly explained as income received in the form of a paycheck from an employer. I currently work at least 40 plus hours a week to get my paycheck.
Now Passive Income, Wikipedia’s definition is good enough to answer this. Passive income is income that requires little to no effort to earn and maintain. It is called progressive passive income when the earner expends little effort to grow the income. Examples include earnings derived from a rental property, limited partnership, or other enterprise in which a person is not actively involved.
To me, passive is not the word I would ever use to describe income from a blog unless you are having someone else write your material. Now, rental income is super passive or should be. I have rentals and I rarely put in more than 60 minutes a month of work. That’s mostly to drive to get the rent checks and deposit them. However, I have put in a significant amount of time getting my units to a point that I don’t have to do much to them as far as maintenance.
I answered it already but I am going to repeat it, is blogging really passive? Well, heck No!! You have to spend hours and hours writing the blog. That alone is Active, I am already tired from writing this blog and I have only been doing it for an hour. Then, you have to make sure people find value in your blog.
With that said, there are various areas within a blog that are Passive such as affiliate marketing or marketing ads. And this is where you make your money……Supposedly. I am going to be talking about affiliate marketing and how effective it is in another blog. But while I am on the subject, I am going to be an affiliate marketer for every item I speak about on the blog…every…single….item. Hopefully its not to annoying. If it is I will figure out what an appropriate amount of links I should have is and modify my methods. I am not sure that is the right approach but I am going to try it out.
How did I start my blog?
First, what I have determined is there is a lot to building a blog. I mean A LOT!!!! Below is a (Visio) diagram on the various areas that I used to build a website through writing and publishing my first blog (this blog). I am going to speak on each topic below and what I did exactly to make it work. Essentially, this is the outline I will be using to write my first 10 blogs series.
The first step for me in creating this blog was to find a domain name. Simply put, the domain name is the address of your blog. For example, some domain names are youtube.com, google.com, and my favorite domain name itestsidehustles.com.
Here is what I have learned when choosing a domain name. These are in no particular order.
- Be memorable – This was a difficult one for me but worth mentioning. What is memorable for one person may not be memorable for another. I tried to look at the keywords for my material and then tried combinations of words that made sense to what my message was. I think itestsidehustles.com is memorable but that’s for you to decide.
- Easy to spell – I specifically didn’t use any words that were difficult to spell and I did not use any numbers in the name just to be safe. The last thing I wanted was for someone to inadvertently mistype my name and never find me.
- Make it easy to say – I chose words that I thought were easy to say but I did test them by calling several people and had them repeat my name and to spell it for me. And everybody was able to spell it and say it without any problems.
- Easy to remember – This is a little different than memorable to me, the fewer the words there are the easier it is to remember. When I hear something on the radio, I only remember it if it is short with very few words.
- Easy to type – I tried several iterations of my domain name and then I tried to type them all out and I chose the easiest one for me to type. This was an oddly beneficial step for me. I didn’t realize how difficult some of the words were when typing them versus saying them.
- Keep it short – 4 words or less is best- I mentioned this one earlier but you want to keep it short. You don’t want a 5, 6, 10 word domain. I almost chose one that was longer but again went with the easy to type, to remember, and used the only four words or less philosophy.
- Avoid numbers and hyphens – Everywhere I read said that hyphens confuse people and to avoid them so I did.
- Use keywords in your domain name – I did a keyword search on my topic which is essentially ‘side hustles’ and the one I settled on ended up being a suggestion from the site I was on and it just so happened to be available. Many of the ones I really wanted were not available but I am happy with what I chose.
- Research it so its not copyrighted, etc. – It’s important to put your domain name into Google and see what pops up prior to purchasing it. You don’t want to infringe on anybody’s rights and end up with one of those nasty cease and desist orders.
- Use a ‘.com’ – Most of the research I did said the most used suffix is .com. People know it and are extremely comfortable with it. So unless you have a niche product and really want to be unique then you should use .com.
- One last thing I would suggest, spell out your domain name on a piece of paper just to see if it spells something inappropriate or weird. I almost chose Sidehustlesexplored.com but in the name was a word I would rather not be remembered for.
Below are some of the names that I was going to utilize but in the end I chose itestsidehustles.com. To me the name captures my intention which is to explore each of these side hustles and determine which ones are viable. It was four words or less, easy to type, and somewhat memorable. Plus it was available. Surprisingly, so many names are taken that it was hard to find one that actually worked.
- MostLegitsidehustles.com
- Sidehustlesexplored.com
- Testedsidehustles.com
- Sidehustlesevaluated.com
- Findlegitsidehustles.com
- Sidehustlessummedup.com
- Sidehustlestested.com
- Summedupsidehustles.com
- Crediblesidehustles.com
Hostgator has a great article titled Domain Name Suggestions: 13 Ways to Come Up With Website Name Ideas
Now that I have my name it was time to figure out who is going to be my web host provider. I am going to cover that in my next blog and I hope you are looking forward to me finding out what the best side hustle is for you and me. Until next time………..enjoy the moment, its about the journey.
Blog for money (1 of 10)
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