5 Best Side Hustle to Start during COVID-19

Side Hustle in the Covid-19 Pandemic era – How does that work?

In 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak was declared to be a pandemic worldwide. Governments implemented various measures, such as social distancing, quarantine, and lockdowns, to minimize the spread and effects of COVID-19 in different countries.

Medical personnel seemed like the only active workers during this period, alongside the press who were ensuring to keep us updated and abreast with the happenings worldwide. But in reality, did this mean every other business and organization folded up and stopped being in business? Absolutely no. Paularoloye.com started his online SEO business to help out businesses during these hard times.

A more conventional method of working remotely was gradually introduced and adapted to, even by companies who appeared to be stuck in their traditional Modus Operandi.

In as much as this was a perfect way to move forward with some full-time jobs, one thing we would all agree to is that bills and expenses weren’t put on hold as every other thing seemed to be on hold, in fact, they ostensibly increased the more we stayed home. And this brings our focus to the increased need for that side hustle to earn that extra income to pay these bills.

This in a way also means, as our expenses were running, someone out there had a business that was steadily cashing out. Take, for instance, Zoom. During this period, Zoom generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2020, a 317 percent increase year-on-year. This in turn means an average of not less than 200 million paid subscriptions for Zoom account to stay connected with virtual meetings, conferences etc. despite the lockdown.

How much more, constant orders via online stores and food outlets leveraging on the No-contact delivery option during this period. Obviously, money-making opportunities abounded, you just had to stay afloat the overwhelming information on COVID-19 and look for solutions to issues arising.

To successfully get that side hustle, a lot of your energy has to be channeled to time management, because being home can be much more distracting than being at the office or out of your relaxing and comfortable space.

Now you may be wondering what other side hustles are there to be done in COVID-19 when everywhere is shut down, wonder no more as you read the rest part of this article.

It is important to note that at the creation of this article, the world had successfully emerged from the total lockdown and adaptation to the Post-covid era is evident. But with the current ‘omicron variant’ situation, we cannot say we are over the bridge yet of a lockdown. This thereby means, you are going to find this article very helpful, even in a post-covid era.

5 Best Side Hustles To Start During Covid-19

1. Blogging

This is one side hustle that is relevant in and out of COVID-19 era. A lot of people already hacked this skill of blogging and how to make money from it. Others find it as a leisure spot outside of their regular work activities. If you are in the latter category, then you will need to learn how to make that income from your skills of blogging.

There are a couple of know-how-to-make-money-as-a-blogger articles and even videos online you can learn from. Ideas on affiliate marketing, being an influencer, online advertising and many more tools from which money can be made through blogging. In the main time here are a few tips to make that side hustle bring you extra income:

Tips On How To Cash Out From Blogging

Ø  Create a niche:

One major difference between blogging as a hobby and blogging to make money is the niche created from the onset. When blogging for money, you cannot choose to blog on various topics that interest you alone, you have to be deliberate on picking topics that interest a particular set of the target audience. In other words, your blog is required to meet the need of a particular set of audience/readers. This way your niche becomes well defined and profound in the same like-minds who will serve as your community and network and in turn potential customers and consumers for advertisement.

Ø  Schedule your time:

It is a side hustle and not your main job. The major struggle in handling side hustles and the main job simply lies in the trick of effective time management. As blogging is recommended for a good means of cashing out on the side, it also requires time for the cash to come into manifestation. A lot of people have migrated from blogging as a side hustle into full time blogging, not only because they are cashing out, but it also requires a great deal of time to maintain and keep up. Hence being disciplined on time set for this as a side hustle is highly paramount.

Ø  Be consistent:

Making money and inconsistency doesn’t work hand in hand in blogging. For you to make blogging your extra income, you have to be consistent in providing content for your audience/readers. This will also foster customer acquisition and possible retention when the time comes. Consistency is key when blogging, especially as a side hustle.

Ø  Build and maintain a community:

Every tip mentioned above all boils down to building a community and maintaining that relationship between the blogger and the community. Being consistent shows your community/reader that you value their presence. Your well-defined niche has naturally captured their attention, your consistency in creating content in line with their interest will keep them hooked. But you must have to remember the essence of this community is to help sales, visibility and platform for online advertisement. This is because you have built a loyal community to your brand. I mean how do you think influencers cash out again?

Ø  Promote your work:

No one will promote your work as much as you and your ‘community’ do. Urge your community to share your works in the best way you can sensitize them to. You will be surprised how much visibility that advertisement can do for your blog. It is also your main responsibility to curate content that is worthy of sharing and interactive enough to spur engagements.

In a nutshell, blogging is a highly lucrative means of livelihood and its flexibility makes it easy for it to serve as a side hustle.

2. Tutoring

If you have a special gift at oratory this might just be the easiest and best side hustle for you. A tutor as you will know is a private teacher who tutors individual students in one-on-one lessons or small group classes. The best part of this is you don’t need a qualification to become an online tutor for students. Like I said earlier, it is also possible to be doing this and not cashing out as expected. Here are a few tips to make your tutoring side-hustle a money-making venture:

Tips On How To Cash Out From Tutoring

Ø  Knowledge Acquisition:

Of course, the first thing you want to be as a tutor is to be knowledgeable on subjects and topics you want to teach. Even though you don’t need a teaching qualification to be a tutor, you have to be well-read and highly knowledgeable in your teachings. Remember you are being paid for the added value of being a tutor to students and not a teacher who is mandated to teach by school authorities. It is in this value and positive result that sells your craft better. This being a side hustle also means you have to create time for extra readings on your part.

Ø  Visibility:

It is paramount to make your skills visible to others. Unlike other services, if you don’t blow your trumpet well enough to make people know your skills at tutoring, no one will never know and the only way to cash out is to have more students (clients) to tutor. One of the easiest ways to get visibility is a free distribution of knowledge through digital and social media platforms, which is easier, cost-effective and marketing effective as these contents are consumed more during the lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic era.

Ø  Flexibility:

Flexibility in this term falls in line with so many things: time flexibility to fit in for students’ schedule, technology adaptive flexibility to fit into what makes the online tutoring easy for both tutor and student, the flexibility of ability to tutor on more than one subject or topic, flexibility in adapting to students’ learning ability. All these have to be put into consideration because as you would know, online tutoring is a side-hustle and not your full-time job. Making your tutoring flexible enough will aid more application of students.

Ø  Structure:

More than ever, you need to be structured in planning tuition payments from clients. If this will be per course/subject, per hour, per day, per week or monthly. Although as a tutor you do not work with a strict curriculum, it will be in your best interest to have a workable and measurable course curriculum. For a fact, creating online courses (video or written); that can be downloaded from a site platform at a particular rate is a more viable option when considering online tutoring as a side-hustle.

Placing these tips into view and practice, it is almost impossible not to have a high record of gross earnings with ease while maintaining your full-time job.

3. Social Media Management

Not to get this twisted, social media management is a whole full-time job considering how exhaustive it can get with the process of what the job entails but you are reading this article because you need ideas for your side hustle. So I’ll be sharing with you tips on how to make this work as a side hustle and still make cool cash from it.

Tips On How To Cash Out From Social Media Management

Ø  Understand the Job:

Social Media management is a job required by digital content and marketing companies, entrepreneurs/small scale businesses. Which therefore means you can either work as an employee (part-time) for a company or become a consultant with multiple clients as a freelancer. Either way, your job doesn’t change from managing the social media platforms of this company/brand. This entails, content creation, post scheduling, social media campaigns, research and analysis, virtual customer service and many more attached to this job role. It will be highly advisable to understand the job description in detail and get abreast with tools that make the job easy and makes you seem knowledgeable on the job.

Ø  Build a personal portfolio:

This is the best form of advertising what you do and can do. And in more cases than not, your social media platforms are seen as your portfolio. This means you are your first client, how you operate your social media accounts can serve as a yardstick for your knowledge and experience on the job. You have to be specifically deliberate about this especially when you rather operate as a freelance consultant taking on different clients.

Ø  Carve a Niche:

The digital space is crowded with a lot of social media platforms ranging from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and many have we that most businesses use for better visibility. It will be disastrous to be a social media manager of “all” without creating a specialty or a niche in social media management. Especially when this is being done as a side hustle. Know the basics in management of all social media platforms (if possible), create and master your niche. This will also aid to streamline your target audience, making accessibility easy for potential clients.

Ø  Be Realistic:

The tricky part of taking social media management as a side hustle is to avoid taking on too many clients or too many accounts to handle at once. This is because accrued income from each of these clients can be so tempting, especially when holding onto your regular paying job and you want to keep acquiring clients. One thing you would want to avoid is the dissatisfaction of clients when curating your client base, so it’s better to stick with a realistic number of jobs you can take on, in line with the timeline agreed upon with clients.

During COVID-19, a lot of businesses relied heavily on their social media presence to bring in customers for their products and (or) services, hence the sudden surge in digital content creators worldwide. This makes social media management one of the surest and best viable side hustle you can always bank on in such a time. You would do yourself good to take on that free or paid online course in social media management/digital communications, it will be worth it.

4. Graphic Design

This can very much be considered as one of the best lucrative and most sought after skills needed for businesses, especially during a pandemic. With businesses leveraging on their social media accounts to do more customer conversion, it has become paramount for social media managers to make the page, attractive thoughtfully laid out to retain customers to an appealing sight. And how else can this be achieved if not through graphic arts?

That is an obvious tip to leverage to cash out from graphic designing. Here are more tips to know.

Tips On How To Cash Out From Graphics Design

Ø  Equip yourself with knowledge and the right tools:

No one needs to tell you how important it is to be properly skilled on this job. You can’t claim to be a graphic designer without a firsthand skillset of knowing how to design. Access to a computer and online creative tools (Adobe, Photoshop, etc.) is also considered a must-have if you are serious about cashing out as a graphic designer. Learning this skill has been made easy by numerous online tutorials available on YouTube and other online platforms to help navigate the journey of graphic designing.

Ø  Create Templates to sell online:

Once you are a master of graphic design, you can venture into the creation of logo templates, font designs templates, templates for e-books covers, posters, Pinterest graphics, etc. and sell them online to target audiences like Canva, Etsy, creative market etc. Many entrepreneurs find it easier to download readymade templates that can be modelled into what they want. It’s one of the best tips to earn from graphic design as a side hustle.

Ø  Online tutorials:

Just as a tutor, a graphic designer can as well curate courses packages and upload them to a host where these tutorials can easily be accessed by paying for them at a given rate. Another one is starting a YouTube channel with consistent content on graphic designs tutorials and what have we. This is another passive income that can be generated through online advertisements, and YouTube payment on monetized content for graphic designers.

Ø  Curate a client base:

It is already expensive to be in business as a graphic designer considering the cost and expenses to maintain tools being used both hardware and software, hence you must constantly seek to acquire new clients. Of course, as a side hustle you are careful not to take on too many jobs with unrealistic deadlines, but at the same time, to be able to cash out, your graphic design business runs on a life wire of your clientele base.

Graphic design is almost everywhere you look, you may not realize it until you start to notice the e-flyers, posters, e-invites, including prints, e-books, products labels, business logos and so on! The demand for the skills cannot be overemphasized and all that is needed is a skilled graphic artist with an intuitive mind. No specific qualification is needed to become a graphic designer, and the best part is the flexibility of work hours at your disposal as you can work from anywhere as long you have access to your hard and soft tools.

Hands down one of the best side-hustle you can get during a COVID-19 era or not.

5. Delivery Services

In taking on this job you are expected and required to have access to a fast and reliable means of transport. During the covid-19 pandemic era, the majority of physical stores and restaurants were shut out to the public, and just like corporate organizations adapted to working remotely, stores resorted to delivery of goods and products to customers with a better option of no-contact delivery.

How can this serve as a side hustle and how do you cash out from this? Easy-peasy.

Tips On How To Cash Out From Delivery Services

• Use fuel-efficient vehicles:

It is not enough to have access to a mode of transportation suitable for moving products/goods. It is highly paramount to consider your operating expenses, and buying fuel is one of the biggest ongoing expenses. If you can successfully cut down on this expense, then your profitability can increase.

Ø  Be Reliable:

Nothing sells a delivery service brand faster than the reliability of services rendered. Every customer or vendor attended to is a potential retained customer, and this depends on a variety of factors which the strongest is being reliable, and accountable.

Ø  Prompt Communication:

In the business of delivery service, there is always a high tendency of urgency from customers and vendors. When communication flow is quick and prompt, they will be encouraged to keep coming back for use of services. Procedures to give fast response to requests and update of the request being attended to should be put in place, this also builds trust in the brand or business.

Delivery service business sales unlike any other kind of business rely heavily on experience, no matter the number and reach of advertisements done. The best part of this as a side hustle is you don’t have to be the direct driver or rider of these vehicles. Having someone take on that task, and being remunerated in accordance to delivery made per day or per week, depending on your preference of payment, is worthwhile and makes it easier for you to concentrate on your full-time job while monitoring operations of the business.

Wrapping this up

Do not forget that side hustle business/services is a side hustle only when there is a full-time job in place. Doing any of these jobs mentioned above alone is already a business, this is because all of these jobs are usually someone’s full career/business option.

There is always a time when side hustle migrates into full-on business or job, but this is highly dependent most times on revenue gotten from this. COVID-19 is not an excuse not to make that money. Left to me, it is the best period to stay away from the hustling and bustling of the city, get to business and make that cash while you can with your flexible hours.

Most importantly, cashing out without savings and investments is a waste of wealth. Never forget that.