Top 10 Side Hustles to Do From Home

Since 2020, one working trend has emerged: combining working from your passion, and working from home. While it is difficult to make money pursuing a passion or hobby, working from home these days is very easy and possible---but now you can earn from both focusing on your interests and working from home.

How much more challenging is it to do both at the same time? Indeed a side hustle from home is not a lottery win, but it’s not an unattainable goal, either.

Ever since the COVID pandemic restricted travel, the importance of working from home is no longer traced to a desire for convenience, traffic avoidance, or taking care of one’s family. This shift because of health safety concerns has made working from home a viable option to grow toward profitability.

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We will explore the top side hustles you can grow from home, and how to start and sustain them.

Digital

Almost 30 years since the internet was introduced, many jobs either have online components or can entirely be done online already. When you think about side hustles from home, digital work is the first to come to mind. Here are the top digital options to grow an income from home.

Writing

Many side hustles begin with writing as it is among the most accessible especially if you have a skill and/or interest in writing. Growing a writing gig from home can start out as a side hustle, until you find the niches you’re passionate about such as travel, food, business, or health, just to name a few.

While writing often turns out articles or blogs, writing side hustles can also mean proofreading documents, transcribing audio files, or translating foreign files into English (or the language of your client). A writing side hustle can earn you an amount ranging from $15 to $45.

The jobs expose you to different industries and subject matters, and may well help keep you current with trends. Eventually, the growth path could lead you into consultancies.

Your writing hustle could make you practically a subject matter expert; it could be anything on the lists ranging from academic subjects to journalistic beats or features. As your expertise and authority on the subject grow, your earning rate rises.

Clients who like you frequently give you assignments, or you gained wide readership which resulted in funded subscriptions or advertising sponsors.

If you up-skill to editing, you would oversee other writers who align with your business direction. This could well grow into a publishing firm that would hire other home-based hustles like graphics or animation. Editors can earn about $80 an hour or $63,400 a year. 

Another way you could also upskill is to become an author who writes books (paperbacks or ebooks) that gather fans, followers, and huge numbers of readers. Earning more than $67,120 a year from book sales, you can branch out to speaking functions such as seminars or conferences that deal with your subject of expertise. Earning from fees or honoraria for speaking at these conferences can start at $4,000.

If your writing hustle is in the medical, engineering, or computer science fields, your next skill would probably lean toward technical writing. Your writing will explain the latest technology in the most engaging manner at an annual fee of about $74,650.

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Social Media Management

When your passion involves social media presence, social media management would be another hustle you can grow from home. You’ll be doing online work such as engaging communities, designing GIFs, creating videos, analyzing data across platforms. The exception now is that you would be engaging small businesses or online influencers, and be paid from the convenience of your home. 

These tasks will also cover taking note of comments and questions of the business’ customers and their trends, as well as responding to, then addressing concerns. 

Social media management would also mean concerted efforts toward marketing the enterprises behind these accounts together with marketing-related tasks, involving promotion and advertising, and then designing and implementing campaigns. This side hustle from home can earn you an average of $24.73 an hour. Your hustle can grow exponentially when you add clients and the amount of projects require a team enterprise. 

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Web Designer / Developer

One side hustle from home is a web design or developer hustle. From creating a client’s brand look to functional client-customer interphases, you start at an average of $32.15 an hour.

Up-skilling as a user experience (UX) designer can command an average pay of $98,250 annually. Those additional skills include collaboration with customer service staff as well as design & technology teams. You would also need to acquire an expert level understanding of design principles and tools especially when applied to the brands of software or solutions companies. 

Another path would be to grow into a specialized web design and developing firm which could eventually multiply your earnings to match, if not yet exceed, what you could have earned as an employed UX designer.

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Hybrid Side Hustles (Online and Offline)

These hustles can be done offline but are greatly enhanced because of the digital component. Work output is more efficient, the market reach is wider, and services are more accessible. But a lot of what’s behind these jobs will need your own instincts, creativity, and grit. Here are the top hybrid side hustles from home.

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Animator/Artist

The other skill closest to writing that can be done remotely is visual design which includes animation, drawing, illustration, and painting. Most of these works still use non-digital media, but eventually get transmitted or translated to digital. Animator side hustles can average $77,700 annually.

Your animation hustle can work in tandem with a colleague or friend who has a writing hustle-from-home. Together, the two of you can start a publishing or digital enterprise. 

Another up-skill in this area would be leading a team as an art director commanding an average of $92,270 annually by providing a unified visual design for publishing, production, or specialized design companies. 

If your skills and passion have grown beyond creating unified visual designs, you could become a creative director at an advertising agency or a company’s marketing department at $120,003 annually. 

Compounding these skills with expertise in software applications as they affect customer brand loyalty, you could rise to be a user experience (UX) director earning at least $130,500.

The good news is: you can rise to these professions and earn more money just working from home.

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Fashion Design

Designing clothes wear and accessories is another passion that begins non-digitally, which you could also likely do from home. You can develop digital templates that facilitate manufacturing all that fantastic wardrobe and accessories, and then marketing them. 

It can become a high-paying creative career. After your fashion designs are set, building a network of suppliers is the next important task for ramp promotion events, and the eventual production. You can earn a little over $75,000 a year. Earning more would depend on continuing innovation, demand for the products from the concepts you designed, networking with the niche-appropriate patrons, all contributing to creating a trusted brand.

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Creative Performances & Talks

Yes you can earn money through inspiring and creative performances (acting, voicing, or music) that you can produce and market from home. This is a growth area especially given that most live performances stalled or were suspended because of the pandemic and its lockdowns. 

This can likewise be the case in doing online talk shows. While writers blog or produce articles, you could rather speak through a podcast if you’re not too keen on being seen. Otherwise, you’d vlog, or produce a live or recorded video stream.

Another side hustle from home would be editing videos that speak for you and your client. Music, images, and messages come together to form the video’s narrative voice. A vlog with a talk show format can incorporate editing as well. 

The technological advances that have compounded for almost 30 years now have made it possible for productions or performances to at least be uploadable for online audiences’ viewing and listening, anytime, anywhere across continents. At best, they are live-streamed. 

This kind of side hustle from home initially earns an average of $20.43 an hour. You can earn bigger with expansion in terms of paying subscribers, advertising sponsors, or accompanying merchandise sales. All these come along with popularity whether online alone, or a combination of offline factors. This may even get you to break through into mainstream production through recording, television, or film. 

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Bookkeeping

A skill with numbers can grow to a side hustle from home, as you move beyond the chore of computations, to getting passionate about putting things in order. One example is the bookkeeper, an important role in the whole accounting process, which usually has a tax preparation function.

Again, it starts off non-digitally – servicing offline clients, targeting micro-businesses of less than five including the owner. Doing the side hustle from home also keeps your overhead costs to a minimum.

Part of the upskill may be going beyond simple email correspondence or DM transmissions and learning to use bookkeeping software, and servicing online clients. Bookkeeping earns you an average of $29.94 an hour, ranging from $10 to $60 an hour. 

Practitioners observe that an average of 30 clients would be the optimal number to make this side gig from home sustainable.. Planning your earnings in terms of how much to charge would involve also taking this number in consideration. Then, teaming up with others towards building a firm of bookkeepers can exponentially increase clients served and revenue earned. 

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Selling

The origin of business and enterprise – selling things - is another side hustle from home that you can grow.The products may come from items you own, or bought from outside suppliers.

You may start with direct selling with digital platforms becoming your medium for marketing. You should define the market you either choose or find most accessible to. 

The job involves establishing contacts with suppliers and manufacturers. You work toward significantly reducing the leg work and the inventory, if not eliminating them altogether; you now simply coordinate the order and delivery of items, and build your service brand. This is drop shipping at an average of $120 an hour.

The other option is to link with established franchise platforms like eBay or Amazon to be accredited among their fulfillment delivery network. This gives you additional conveniences like leveraging on their brand name and facilities. Selling through side hustles from home like this can earn you an average of $263 an hour. Maintain or increase sales and you can earn between $10,000 to $1M annually.

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Non-Digital Side Hustles

Although it seems there isn’t a job nowadays that’s not digital or online, there still are those that have the bulk of their work done offline non-digitally, before the products and services are advertised or get promoted online. Here are a couple of side hustles from home. 

Catering

A lot of the leg work for catering is accomplished offline.

Your up-skill starting point starts with being a cook, baker, chef, or simply someone who knows how to lead them. Then as you plan and progress, you discover the niche market you’re passionate to serve. Would you rather serve baked goodies for everyone, open a cafe for college students, or do food deliveries for on-the-go professionals?

You can earn a rate that begins at $13.24 an hour. Upskilling further entails enlargement of your team, serving more clients, and getting to charge higher because you are working harder. This expansion promotes you to becoming the catering coordinator.

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Flipping

Unlike the different types of the hybrid hustle, online selling, flipping, or reselling has more offline tasks, especially as they involve up-cycling items for resale for a higher price.

Increasing your worth depends on the appropriate up-cycling skill you possess or have developed. Your ability to repair or upgrade old items will ensure that. 

Popular items include books, bikes, campers, cars, cell phones, furniture, power tools, vintage electronics, video games & consoles, watches, and yard equipment. You can earn an average of $50,150 annually flipping specific items. 

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Earning from side hustles from home

Getting side hustles that you can do from home which are aligned with your passion can be a treasure hunt. Whether you take a digital, a hybrid, or a non-digital type of job, it takes a combination of self-awareness, skill, successful client engagement, and hard work to sustain your passion for it, and to grow profitably from it. Your business can further increase if your hustle grows into an enterprise.

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