Inspiring Life Design

5 February 2020

Lady looking into distance thinking about what new side hustle should you start this year

If you’re still on the fence about starting a side hustle, or you’ve been contemplating creating another income stream for your portfolio, here’s my top recommendations for new business ventures that are perfect to start this year.

Have you been getting to the end of a month and finding that you’ve spent all your money again? If the answer is yes, it’s time to have a think about why you never have enough money and then roll your sleeves up to get stuck into a new side hustle to bring in additional income.

If you’re curious about what side hustle could be perfect for you, why not take this Side Hustle quiz to get your recommendations.

If you’re already subscribed to my email newsletter, or if you follow my Instagram stories, you’ll already know that I’ve been having a long think about the direction to take Inspiring Life Design this year.

Inspiring Life Design has always had a large focus on ways to make money to boost income. While I’ve been working on the target niche for my brand, it’s become clear to me that I need to refine this down a bit more.

Rather than covering any and all ways of making additional income, my passion lies in creating sustainable longer term income streams which are effectively mini businesses in their own right.

There are many ways to make money online trading your time or your personal information for money. The majority of UK money making websites I’ve found cover these types of methods. I’m talking survey sites, matched betting, sign-up offers and doing gigs for pay. The trouble is, I don’t like trading my time or information directly for money. That’s too much like a regular job to me.

However, I’m happy to trade my time to build up a business which will ultimately provide me with an income stream that turns into passive or semi passive income. I’m interested in the longer term returns possible from my upfront time investment.

So that’s what you can expect from me in the future. Blog posts, YouTube videos and newsletters that focus on building sustainable hustles. Building up a portfolio of small income generating businesses if you will! It may take a bigger learning curve and more effort up-front but the rewards are worth it.

What To Expect

Every one to two months I’ll be focusing specifically on a different business model, taking time to go in-depth so that you get all the information you need to decide if it’s right for you. Plus tools, strategies and steps for how to get started of course.

Whether you’re looking to create a small side hustle, or wanting to create a bigger business that will support you and your family, there’ll be plenty for you to choose from. The thing about these kinds of side hustles is that you can go as big or small as you choose, they’re entirely scalable.

Detail you can expect to see about each business model includes:

What the business model is
Pros and cons
How to get up and running (including upfront costs and time required)
Ways to optimise or simplify the business model, with a view to spending the least amount of time necessary on the business (because it’s all about getting time back for you)

Before our first deep-dive kicks off, here are 5 business opportunities that I think it’s worth considering in 2020. I will be covering at least some (if not all) of these topics this next year.

Knowledge Business

You may be curious what this is, because it’s not necessarily that obvious (well it wasn’t to me anyway!)

I’m excited to say that my first deep-dive into an income stream will be how to create your own knowledge business, so fear not, more information is coming very soon!

This model involves you making use of your own unique skillset, experience and knowledge to create a business where you help others learn from you. So that they can get short-cuts and know-how that they would otherwise have to spend time learning and making mistakes along the way.

Self education is a massively growing industry, especially with the ease of delivery online. The possibilities for what you can create a knowledge business in are endless - there are thousands and thousands of untapped niches.

I love this opportunity because I think it involves one of the smallest learning curves to create as a business. You use knowledge that you already have and simply create a business to deliver this knowledge to others.

Sounds simple? Well that’s because it is!

You can look forward to lots more information about this exciting income stream over the coming weeks…stay tuned!

Self Publishing Books

If you don’t already know, this was my very first side hustle venture. I made my first £££’s online by publishing a book through Amazon’s KDP service.

One of the fantastic things about self publishing is that there are 3 easy income stream possibilities using the same book content - just with a bit of tweaking to make it work for each format. You can publish as a Kindle book, a Paperback book or an Audible audiobook. You can opt to focus just on one medium, or take a bit more time to push your book out to all 3.

One of the questions I most commonly get asked about self book publishing is: “So you’ve written a book?”

Believe it or not, I haven’t! I’ve never written a book in my life. The most I’ve ever written is 10K words for my university dissertation and that was hard work!

The fact is, you can become a self-publisher without having to do the writing. If you’re prepared to spend a modest amount of money, you can pay a ghost writer to create the book content, then you own the rights to the book.

There are endless opportunities for book topics to choose between. The entry costs to start your publishing business can be extremely low - there’s even an argument to say that you could start with zero investment (though it will require a lot more effort on your part than if you have say about £300-£500 to invest).

I have previously created some content around getting started with book publishing, although there is much more for me still to share - so treat this as a taster until I return to this topic later in the year!

Affiliate Marketing

I was new to affiliate marketing in 2019. If I’m completely honest I thought that affiliate marketing was just for people with huge followings or businesses that they could use as a platform to promote through. I also thought that you had to be good at “sales”.

The truth was far from this. Supporting just one big ticket affiliate launch earned me more money than I’ve ever earned from all of my other side hustles put together! I made over £10,000 and thoroughly enjoyed the whole process.

Now what’s important to note, is that not all affiliate marketing opportunities are created equal. You need to know what to look out for and how to get accepted onto the affiliate programs. Plus you need know-how for exactly how to make sales (which you can do without feeling like you’re “selling” by the way).

It’s hard for me to believe I’m saying this, but affiliate marketing is fast becoming one of my favourite income streams. The reason I can say that is because I’ve chosen to only become an affiliate for products that I love and that are completely aligned with my mission and values. I think this is key to success.

I’m still learning the finer details & tactics and I’ve yet to promote an evergreen affiliate offer. However my success last year led me to such fabulous profits AND the opportunity to meet role models such as Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi and Russell Brunson, I feel that I have to feature affiliate marketing as one of my future deep-dives.

Writing A Blog Or Website

It’s true that it’s harder to make money from creating a blog or website than it used to be. However, that doesn’t mean you should write this income stream off.

Writing a blog can be very personally rewarding, you can make an impact, and there’s definitely still money to be had.

As with most income streams it takes a while to build up a blog to the levels where larger amounts of money can be made, but stick with it and the returns can be worth it.

One of the keys to creating a blog that works in 2020 is to carefully pick your niche.

Money making opportunities from blogging or curated websites include sponsored content, advertising, product promotions and of course there’s also the chance for free swag to write about!

The other great thing about creating a website or blog is that you can also use it as a marketing outlet to promote some of your other income streams.

This website is one of the things I’m most proud of in my solopreneur business and I wouldn’t be without it.

YouTube Business

The appeal of video is undeniable. It’s immersive and viewers get to feel like they know you better than they would from a blog or even a podcast.

If you have a smartphone with a decent camera, you can get started with YouTube for free. Like with blogging, it will most likely take a while to build up enough of an audience to be able to start making money, but if you pick a good niche and make great videos you’ll be surprised how quickly your subscriber count can add up. A friend from one of my masterminds started 2019 with less than 100 YouTube subscribers and finished the year monetised with about 4.5K subscribers - so that’s proof that it definitely can be done.

There are plenty of things to learn when starting a YouTube channel, including how to edit your videos, optimising your lighting and sound, creating great Channel Art (for your channel’s header) and thumbnails. So there’s lots for me to dive into when we get to this income stream.

Money making opportunities start as soon as you reach 1,000 subscribers and a minimum number of hours viewed. At that point you can apply for the YouTube Partner Program and start to show ads before, during or after your videos. There are of course other ways to make money from YouTube too…paid product placements, sponsored videos, endorsements and other perks that can come once you start hitting the higher subscriber counts.

Let me know in the comments below whether you would consider creating a new income stream this year. Do you already have a side hustle? What has been holding you back from starting an income generating business of your own? I will aim to cater my future content to your needs, so be sure to give me the details!