Getting Started With an Online Side Hustle

Let’s not kid ourselves – side hustling can be hard. Getting started with an online gig, especially for newcomers, has its own overhead and unique challenges. Plus, as non-American side-hustlers, it’s never been easy to land online jobs, but it’s not nearly as difficult as it once was. Here are the tools you need to get your online side-hustle started.

1) Payment Channel
Payoneer or PayPal will do for a payment channel. We covered how you could link these to local currency in an earlier piece. Of course, if you happen to gain employment by a local enterprise, electronic fund transfer across the ACH is your best and most convenient option.

2) Figure Out a Marketplace
Over the last few articles, we covered places that online side-hustlers could land jobs and be protected in their job search. However, for more advanced side-hustlers, you could also use social media, like LinkedIn – work your connections and promote your services and skills.

3) Sort Out Invoicing
All clients will expect you to invoice them. Many of the sites we mentioned throughout the series have built-in payment and escrow methods. PayPal and Payoneer have their own invoicing methods as well. Then, there are other online resources that offer different templates depending on your needs.  If all else fails, both Microsoft Office and Google have useful pre-made invoicing templates that can be adapted for your own use.

4) Spot And Avoid Scams
The last article in this series helped you identify scams so you can avoid them.  In this category, too, are jobs that pay too little for the amount of work they expect from you. Carefully read job descriptions to decide if what they ask makes sense/makes sense for you based on the payment offered.

A Bright Future for Busy Professionals
Many people have long-held dreams that they have no way to realize largely because their full-time jobs consume so much of their time and energy. An online side hustle is a vehicle that can make such a dream a reality. For many of us working regular hours, finding an hour on evenings to throw at freelance work shouldn’t be too difficult. Even if you make US$10 an hour, that’s about US$50 you have at the end of the week. Hey, lagniappe adds up! The first time your online side hustle pays you for your time – whether it just covers the cost of your wi-fi or cable bill or gets you a step closer to one of your dreams – you’ll realize it’s not nearly as difficult as you thought. It may be well worth the effort in the long run.