'I made £300,000 from side hustles in under three years - what worked'
Side hustles are more popular than ever on TikTok, where countless videos are shared daily on the topic. From success stories to lessons learned, there's a wealth of posts for entrepreneurial social media users. One business owner who regularly posts about her career claims she's earned six figures from her side hustles in just a few years.
Posting as @ startabusinesswithme, Helena, a blogger who often posts business and lifestyle content, told followers: "I've made £300,000 from side hustles in the last two and a half years." As she explained in her video, she trialled several money-making ideas during that time, but she didn't stick with all of them.
Helena said: "I've made £300,000 from side hustles in the last two and a half years, and around half of that I made whilst I was on maternity leave." The business owner explained she didn't want to invest money in her side hustles at first. "I sold things I already had in my house on eBay and a little bit on Vinted, and that financed my initial ability to invest in some other small projects," she explained.
Helena continued: "I tried out print on demand. I lost a lot of money doing that as a project, and I actually never put it out into the open because the samples that I got delivered just weren't good quality. I was trying to sell kids' artwork and things for children and children's bedrooms and doing print on demand and personalisation, and it just wasn't good."
The blogger was also interested in "faceless content" as another possible income stream. "I tried out faceless content and faceless YouTube. If I'm honest that was an absolute uphill battle and struggle: it didn't make any money at all," she shared. "I think if you're going to be in the kind of faceless space, you need to be doing something really unique with a really clearly defined niche."
"I was actually in the travel space, and I grew a pretty decent-sized account, and I did some initial monetisation. If I'm honest, I just couldn't keep up with it because I had a newborn at the time and I found it too overwhelming," she added.
Moving onto her more successful projects, Helena said: "My most successful side hustles have been selling digital products. I sold my own version of financial models and spreadsheets. For a very long time, they were my most successful alongside my Notion Planner, which I still sell to this day. I also had an AI and automation starter kit, and I sold those via Stand Store, which is a social selling platform.
"A lot of my traffic for those came from TikTok so I have to say that was one of the best things that I did was grow a platform and an audience and continue to deliver value where I managed to acquire customers, but I have to say a lot of the sales for my AI and automation content in particular used to and still to this day comes from SEO, actually comes from Google search."
She added: "I've also made money from doing UGC content, so where you make content for other brands to post on their social channels, and I have done a very small handful of paid ads on my platform and to my community via my email as well."
Summing up her video, Helena said she credits the diversity of her projects for her success. She said: "I honestly think one of the keys to my success has been having diversity of income streams from day one and having multiple ways of making money because if one area was slightly quieter in one month, then another area would pick that up."
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