15 Creative Ways To Make Money On The Side (2021) (2024)

15 Creative Ways To Make Money On The Side

How did you come by the money that you have in your wallet right now?

Chances are, you did not find it walking through the park nor did you rob anyone to get it.

The same applies to the amounts that you have in your savings accounts.

You had to fight resistance in order to save money, but before that, you had to do something to make money.

The problem I find with making money is that most people misunderstand how it works.

You’re reading this post for creative ways to make money on the side, however, the ideas are not really what will help you make money.

They ofcourse play a role in the process.

However, for the money to make its way into your bank account and into your wallet, there is more to understand, apply and do.

Before we dive into the creative ways to make money, let us first understand a few things about money:

Money is a Certificate of Performance

Back to the original question I asked you – How did you get the money in your wallet?

You probably got it because you have a day job working the “9 to 5” or whatever.

In order for you to have been paid your salary, you would have had a contract with an employer about your position.

With that position comes deliverables outlined in a job description.

You then agreed a place (your office), price (your salary), time (e.g. 9 to 5) to deliver as agreed on a contract.

Now here is where it really gets interesting –

If you consistently do a poor job, would you continue to get paid?

Chances are, you will not.

So this means that the money you paid (which ends up in your wallet) is because of your performance.

Money, therefore, is a Certificate of Performance.

You have to do something well i.e. add value, in order to get it.

Let’s take this idea a bit further…

So you get paid and you put 100 ‘Certificates of Performance’ into your wallet and you go out to dinner with a friend.

On getting there you find out that the restaurant only admits people with ‘Certificates of Performances’ in their wallets.

You order a nice meal, and enjoy your time with your friend.

At the end of it, you ask the restaurant – “How many ‘Certificates of Performance’ would you like for the meal?”

They respond – “70 Certificates, please”.

You pay up because the service was amazing and you could recognise the effort and quality that went into cooking your meal.

They take some of those Certificates of Performance that you gave them and pay their suppliers who delivered the raw materials to cook your meal.

And so it goes…

You see how money is made and then around?

This leads us to the next important point about money…

Money is Made by Serving Others

Picking up from the above example, the only way you made money in the first place was to serve your employer first.

The only way the restaurant made money was to serve you first.

Think about any situation where you had to pay money for something.

They probably had to meet a need in your life in order for you to have paid them.

E.g. Bought a smartphone recently? They served you by meeting your need to communicate or be entertained.

Money Is Made Through Creativity

What I mean here is applying your imagination to what you see around you.

This usually involves being open to experiments, doing the work and connecting dots in your life.

Learning to be creative is the stage of life where I am at the moment in my life adventure.

It involves growing in confidence to make things happen without fear that others might judge me.

Judgment or not, I’m creating as I’ve accepted this path as a part of my identity.

This blog post is a good example. I could have started it by making this great big list of ways of making money…

But, I would feel like I haven’t created at all, and not made the effort to help you move forward.

As such, all I have written so far above is my attempt to bring something unique to the idea of exploring creative ways to make money.

Whether you’re making money through your day job, side hustle, creating products/services, etc; creativity is what unites them all.

Money Is Made Through A Trade-off

I can’t tell you how many times I have had this conversation –

Enthusiastic person – Ken, I love what you do… I’d like to start a blog…

Me – Great! I’d highly recommend it. Hard work but life-changing. Here is what you need to do.

• Read this tutorial
• Join this free course I created to help people like you.
• Carve out 1 – 2 hours a day from your TV time.
• Buy some hosting, domain name, etc.
• Pay someone to bring your design dream to life.
• Start creating no matter how terrible it looks.
• Listen and write content people are looking for.
• Repeat consistently at the same time and place every day/week.

Enthusiastic person – Oh… Ok… Thanks… ***Silence***

Then they disappear and return back to life as normal. To that dreadful comfort zone.

The issue is, people want something for nothing.

They aren’t prepared to give up time and money to get what they want.

Money making requires giving something up first.

It will not just walk into your life and into your bank account.

Now that we’ve got through the mindset stuff, let’s get onto some creative ways to make money on the side.

These are ideas I’ve seriously spent time considering whether it’s worth your while mentioning.

I’ve also considered how practical these are to most people given my experiences of them.

Creative Ways To Make Money – EDUCATING OTHERS

These ideas on creative ways to make money come the most natural to me. In my opinion, educating others is the best way to use your talents and abilities.

1. Use Your Existing Skills to Coach Others

You may recall I said in a previous post that what you need to move forward in your life is already in your hands today.

Everyone has something they are already good at to some extent.

The problem most of us have with offering our services is:

• The fear of selling anything.
• Fear that we are not good enough.

Both of these paralyse most people and as such, their existing skills and abilities are only offered to their employers.

Just think of how many people you could help move forward, and as such you move forward too.

There is absolutely nothing to lose.

2. Offer Tutoring to Others

We previously explored both making money as a tutor and also starting a tutoring business.

I’ve had experiences of both personally and neither will make you rich per se.

The former has the potential for decent scale with hard work.

Both are rewarding and offer you the opportunity to put your creativity to work whilst helping others.

3. Become a Publisher of Content

This is more of a mindset than anything initially.

At one stage of my life, I was a net consumer of content. Today, I’m a net producer of content.

The kinds of things I’m talking about here are starting a blog, creating a podcast, making YouTube videos, etc.

All of them work differently but are quite similar in terms of how you make money from them.

Examples include sponsorships, ads, affiliate marketing, etc.

I’d highly recommend exploring these for fun as a priority and remember it’s really about service.

If the opportunity to make an income from them arises, then so be it.

This blog for me remains a fun experiment.

This way I don’t take myself too seriously if things don’t go my way.

Creative Ways To Make Money –ACCOMMODATING OTHERS

These creative ways to make money make the most of available spare capacity.

4. Rent Out A Spare Room

Although this a no-brainer, thousands of people who need money have spare rooms they do nothing with.

If you do this right, this could generate monthly income at little to no extra cost.

5. Become an Uber Driver

If in doubt, drive! Although this is not a particularly imaginative idea, what I like about it is the possibility it presents.

It is guaranteed money every day, which you can make even if you don’t own a car.

When we had a guest post from Perry on the hard truth about getting rich, I was intrigued to learn that he drives 70 hours a week to make his dreams come true.

Can you drive a cab for an extra 20 hours a week?

6. Rent Out Unused Spaces

Got unused spaces such as lofts, garage space, etc?

Rent those out to people who have precious things they do not have space to keep.

Storemates is a great platform for finding people in your local area who might be interested in renting your space.

Simply search by postcode.

You can charge what you like although a good example of what you can earn is circa £800/year for a 25 sq ft loft space in South London.

Creative Ways To Make Money –SELL WHAT PEOPLE NEED

These creative ways to make money involve a focus on delivering a product or service that truly adds value.

7. Create Services On Subscriptions

Here I’m talking about the everyday services that people really need.

You also don’t need to be an expert first in order to deliver these.

What you need is to be able to find the market for what people need.

This could be anything from gardening or cleaning services, to sports activities for kids.

A creative way of making such a business sustainable is to improve a process such as payments.

One good example is cleaning. I have a cleaner who shows up every Wednesday at 2 pm.

Every time the work is done, I pay by bank transfer. However, they could do things a lot smarter.

They could create a subscription service for cleaning services that means that I pay each month for their service whether I’m on holiday or not.

This way they guarantee the receipt of cash flow in advance to pay cleaners etc.

For such a business, anyone can start it and apply the same thinking, with their main job really being to manage people and win new business.

The key point to take note of here is that you want some element of sticky (recurring) money no matter what your business is.

Book to read: The Automatic Customer – Creating a Subscription Business In Any Industry

8. Amazon Associates Programme

Amazon offers you and me the opportunity to sell popular products that other people have created through them.

What I like about this is that it’s an easy way for anyone to get involved with making some extra money.

Amazon pays you a commission for each sale that you make through them.

This site, for example, gets a small commission each time I recommend a book or product from Amazon.

Read: How To Make Money From The Amazon Affiliate Programme

9. Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA)

FBA gives you the opportunity to run an eCommerce store straight away but without your own self-hosted platform.

Instead, your store forms a part of the main Amazon website and is found in the search as an Amazon listing.

The great benefit of this is that you spend no money on marketing at all.

You essentially ride the traffic wave that Amazon generates.

In addition, you have the potential exposure of having your products promoted by Amazon affiliates and by Amazon if it is highly reviewed and converting.

Read this to Explore Amazon FBA

Creative Ways To Make Money –ENTERTAINMENT

10. Events Organising

Are you good at organising dinner parties or events in general?

Throw in a bit of creativity (e.g. imaginative themes) and you could end up with a business that brings people together for fun.

Plus it grows in popularity at the same time.

You could even get involved indirectly. For example, my wife Mary is involved as a supplier in the kids' party scene.

11. Online Searching, Watching videos and Gaming

Swagbucks pays you virtual cash for short online tasks.

You can then exchange your virtual cash for real money, PayPal credits, Amazon or M&S gift cards and much more.

Swagbucks also acts as a Search platform like Google and you get rewarded for using it instead.

Other tasks you can do include completing polls, watching videos, etc. They pay you by passing on a cut of the advertising revenue that they receive.

12. Become a Student Host

This is a brilliant way of making some money during the holidays.

A friend of mine makes about £750 a month (net of costs) for hosting students from France, Japan, etc in the UK.

You have to provide food (usually breakfast and dinner), a comfy and safe environment and WIFI.

Students will typically be out all day and usually, stay glued to social media in the evenings, so won’t usually be in your way.

Learn more and get started with HomeStay.

Creative Ways To Make Money –CREATING ASSETS

This is one of my favourite creative ways to make money as it usually involves using existing knowledge.

13. Create eBooks & Self-Publish for Amazon Kindle

Are you knowledgeable in a particular area?

E.g. Healthy living, Baking, Online Marketing, Accounting, Selling on eBay, etc.

This could be anything!

You can create eBooks for specific niches and sell them via Amazon.

You can self-publish for FREE and start generating revenue with no minimum required to be sold before you earn.

See the Kindle Direct Publishing tool that lets you upload for free.

Every time the book sells, Amazon gives you 70% of the list price (net of VAT).

To learn how to self-publish a book including the economics of doing so, read this detailed guide:

Self Publishing a Book: The Good, The Bad, and The Money

Watch this video for the key differences:

14. Create Courses Using Thinkific or Teachable

You might have noticed that we launched Financial Joy Academy for direct learning video courses.

It’s early days but we have some big plans for it. Come to think of it, none of this would have been possible years ago!

Today, you and I can start whatever we want from our bedrooms.

There is no one I know who doesn’t have enough info in them today to create something useful for others.

The tech is there, the knowledge is there… What are you waiting for? Share your knowledge!

FIRE SuperPower™ is an example of one we created with existing knowledge.

Yes, it took a lot of work over 7 – 9 months. But once done, it is done and you get rewarded potentially for many years to come.

15. Create a Physical Products White Label Brand

One of the best ways of making a killing via Amazon is to build a physical product brand on the platform.

Once you can prove that such a product sells well, you can leverage that for scale and sell it via other channels too to diversify and improve your sales mix.

Such brands are often on the radar of people looking to buy lifestyle or high growth brands to add to their portfolio.

So there is a huge potential for you to actually create such a business from scratch, using Amazon to grow a brand, with the sole intention of an exit down the line.

Book to read: The 1 Day Brand

To conclude,

Ideas about making money are not new. But breakthroughs in technology today make so much more possible.

What many are lacking is the need to take action and apply their creativity.

If you want to make more money today, focus on the mindset stuff I covered earlier in the post.

My personal journey has taught me that fear is really a vehicle for change.

It can be used to your advantage and this goes beyond money making.

Related posts for other creative ways to make money:

• 8 Online Business Models To Explore for Your Side Hustle
• 85 Ways To Make Extra Money Today
• 7 Guaranteed Ways To Make An Extra £1,000 a Month

What Creative Ways To Make Money On The Side Have You Tried?

Do please share this post if you found it useful, and remember, in all things be thankful and Seek Joy.

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