9 Easy Side Hustles I Struggled With

Having coined myself with the title of the side hustle king (I jest). I have tried most side hustle ideas over the last 35 years or so and am proud to have a pretty good amount of extra income from my various forms of easy side hustles that I still do to this day. I have however over the years had some side hustles I struggled with.

For whatever reason, whether I couldn’t get motivated or I just plain didn’t understand how to implement them I did fail with a few. I will list these below and tell you where I believe I went wrong.

The scary thing about all of these is that the ones that were coined as easy side hustles seemed to be the ones that I struggled with the most.

When starting out trying new side hustles, easy ones are the ones you should start with. I found more success with the ones that involved more work and required a little bit of brainpower.

Everyone is different however and I’m sure you will find the ideal side hustle for you.

1: Selling On Fiverr:

If you are not already aware Fiverr is a fantastic E-commerce site whereby you can sign up and sell digital products or anything that needs your creative type of skills.

Having already had a Fiverr account when I started to see it as a great side hustle. I had already purchased some services such as a logo design for a previous website I owned.

Even though I wasn’t the most creative person alive I could create some simple Pinterest Templates and sell them for £4 or £5 and hey presto I would be flooded with sales and make lots of money. The ideal passive side hustles if you will.

Well, I was wrong. The problem wasn’t getting a digital product together, My pins were actually quite good. You can see one example a little further down the page.

The problem was with my profile. I had created what I thought was a decent Fiverr profile but people were not getting to see my gig as I had not made it stand out from the rest. This ended up with my profile and therefore my gig being drowned out by all the people who had more professional profiles than me.

Take your time with your profile Make it stand out and get the sales you are looking for.

2: Mystery Shopping:

Mystery shopping is great, You sign up with a mystery shopping company and they find you jobs. These jobs vary from making a simple phone call and reciting a script and then noting the responses or perhaps a meal for 2 or a trip to a bowling alley.

Usually, the jobs are in the local area you live in and you will be paid or reimbursed for your time and any spending plus occasionally there can be bonuses. What’s not to love about mystery shopping right?

Well, it turns out that if you are like me and you are really busy with a full-time job then you simply dont have the enthusiasm to fulfill any of the jobs offered to you as you would rather spend any free time you have doing stuff you want without a timeline, etc.

Mystery shopping is great but does require some time. It is more suited to people who work part-time or perhaps people who have retired and have lots of time on their hands.

3: Online Surveys

Believe it or not, there are some very good online survey sites out there. They will enable you to earn some good money and are what you would consider an easy side hustle.

I have a very good article coming up on the best places to get well-paid surveys.

When I started doing surveys a few years back however, It was not the easy side hustle I was expecting. For starters, I assumed that once you had filled in a comprehensive profile of yourself in order to make sure you got the right surveys that this would be it and great surveys would be emailed to me every day.

Wrong. The frustrating thing I found about online surveys is that although you may have this very detailed profile you could end up spending 3 or 4 minutes at the beginning of a survey answering questions only to find out your not qualified to enter and then you get sent to another one.

This can happen several times. It can end up with you spending 15 minutes of your valuable time just trying to get a survey you can complete.

This is why I kind of gave up on doing online surveys until very recently.

4: YouTube Channel:

Again Youtube is another potentially easy side hustle providing you pick the right niche. Well, this is where I went wrong. If you ask me about what I’m passionate about it would be making money, Saving money, Video games and travel.

So what was my youtube channel niche? Yep video games. Now I could talk your ears off all day about video games but on youtube, this is a very saturated niche. So much so that you have to really stand out to make any kind of dent in this niche.

I started with a friend and the amount of effort he put in was less and less. This led to me doing everything and not getting the kind of results I was after so it soon fell by the wayside. I think even today we have only had 50,000 views or so and this was several years ago.

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5: Customization

So this can be done with lots of products. You take a good product and customize it with either new features or new designs.

In my example, I started a side hustle customizing Xbox Gaming controllers. What I would do is buy brand new controllers in bulk for cheap. I had a third party who would hydro dip the controller shells so they had pretty patterns or designs on them.

I would then add these customized shells and add new colorful buttons etc to make the controller unique to the person buying it.

The reason this didn’t work too well was that the cost of producing these items meant I made only a small profit from each one which didnt justify the work involved.

Not only that but not long after I started, Microsoft decided to do something very similar. This meant that my clientele had somewhere else to go that they trusted to get unique hand made gaming controllers.

6: Matched Betting

Now for anyone that follows my blog will know I am known mainly for Matched betting. It has been one of my most successful side hustles. So this makes it a little weird to be on my list of Side hustles I have failed at.

So this needs some context. When I started Matched betting I did not belong to any kind of subscription service which helps you find profitable bets. Now I did make around £300 in a couple of weeks from doing it myself. I then very quickly spent that money which in Matched betting is a big no-no.

If you spend what you make then you don’t have a very big pot of cash to continue to earn great profits. This limits you because sometimes you need a big bank to be able to complete multiple bets in a single day.

Don’t be like me. Matched betting is still, in my opinion, one of the greatest side hustles available. You can make thousands of pounds from it. You just need to be disciplined and keep building up that profit. Then you can continue to make more money from this amazing side hustle.

7: Selling On eBay

Yes, everyone, ‘s number one go-to plan when trying to make money from home. It usually starts by having a clear-out at home and ending up with a load of items you are not going to use. Instead of throwing away perfectly good stuff you take a photo of it and put it up for sale on eBay.

As I stated above I used to design and sell gaming controllers. eBay was one of the places I sold these as well as Facebook ads.

My main issue and why I struggled with eBay was I found that sometimes the clientele could be a pain in the backside. I would send out a controller and they would complain that it wasn’t how it was described or try and send it back because they ordered the wrong one.

Now all those things are absolutely fine and the customer has every right to do that. The issue is that more people do this then you might expect. It really does eat into your time responding to people and getting items returned and sending out new ones.

This is why as a side hustle eBay didnt work for me. The time and effort I put in were disproportionate to the profit I made from it. This isn’t to say it won’t work for you and you may turn it into a great side hustle. I just couldn’t make it work.

8: Fixing Cars

So another thing you may not know about me is my main job. Now a perfect side hustle is making money on the side doing what you naturally do day to day anyway.

Well, I inspect motor vehicles to make sure they are safe and legal to be on Britain’s roads. I have spent many an hour fixing various types of motor vehicles as well. I find most mechanical work relatively easy albeit a little dirty.

The main problem I had with this comparatively easy side hustle is again people’s expectations. Usually, people, you know as well. Once people knew you were willing to carry out repairs to their cars on your driveway they do tend to take the mickey a little bit.

To explain better I once did nearly 2 hours labor fixing a vehicle and received in return 4 beers!! This was also 2 weeks later. Potentially this was my own fault for not setting out rates before I started working on the vehicle. Nonetheless this is why I no longer consider my day job to extend to an easy side hustle.

9: Create A Smartphone App

This makes me sound like some kind of computer genius. Believe me, I’m not. To test this out I simply used a program that allowed me to copy all the details of a website I had at the time. I then simply turned it into an app version of my website which I could then sell. It was on the Nokia platform and I made about £50 from doing this.

I then decided to look further into this to see if it was possible to build an App. Especially when you had no prior knowledge of how to do so. It turns out that you can but you certainly have to invest money first.

Just to create and market a basic application would cost thousands of dollars. I decided that although the few ideas I had for apps were good I simply didn’t have the capital to invest to get this off the ground. I will be revisiting this at a later date though for sure.

Summary:

So as you can see I haven’t been successful with all my easy side hustles. I keep persevering and make quite a lot of money from the ones I am successful at.

If you are currently struggling with a side hustle keep trying or switch to a new one. Let me know how it goes.