5 Online Side Hustles & Their Risk Factors

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Learning how to start a side hustle is a big deal for a lot of millennials these days. Full careers are harder to come by, advancement can be slow, and on top of those issues, young adulthood seems more expensive than ever. Young people who are still pursuing a normal career or “day job” though have to get creative about finding side hustles, which is why so many turn to the internet.

This can mean trying anything from a survey app using a survey app to starting a blog, with plenty of pursuits in between. In many cases, these pursuits can at least yield a little bit of side income – though sometimes they can carry some risk as well. Here we’ll look at both sides of five fairly common side hustles.

1. Survey Apps

This is actually an enormous category, if you take the word “survey” somewhat broadly. To talk about any one app or website would be to limit the category a little bit, but broadly speaking, this is the idea: these programs ask you to offer opinions, scan purchased items, and/or complete tasks as regularly as you’re able to. In exchange, they offer various rewards, ranging from small amounts of cash, to gift cards, to tokens that can eventually be converted for value after a certain point. Needless to say some programs are more effective than others, but this is the gist of the operation.

Survey apps really don’t have any risk factor, other than the fact that you might wind up devoting more of your time than you intend to. For the most part these apps only provide small amounts of money. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth it, but don’t sacrifice any work time for them.

2. Freelance Work

There are a few platforms online that have sought to make it easier for people, and particularly creative types, to find clients and get side work online. Fiverr has become perhaps the mot popular, though there are legitimate questions over whether it’s worth it for writers (in our book, it isn’t). But if you have a marketable talent – writing, painting, graphic design, web design, editing, music production, etc. – there are other platforms that do a wonderful job of facilitating freelance work. Upwork, for instance, connects creators with clients; Patreon helps creative types gain paying audiences for their work. Generally speaking these are low-risk platforms, where you can often find real value for your work. Just be careful not to work for poorly rated clients.

3. Investment

Historically speaking, it was always a bad idea to think of investment as any kind of side hustle. It was something to do either as a full time job or as a long-term efford assisted by a professional. In the age of mobile apps however, investing has become far more accessible. Specifically there are several apps designed for amateurs, with low (or no) fees, in-app tips, and easily organized portfolios. Stash and Robinhood are perhaps the main platforms, allowing users access to a full range of stocks. Acorns is another popular option, though it works a little differently (investing small amounts of change that add up over time on your behalf). Furthermore, some young people looking to invest money are also looking into apps like Coinbase, which allow the purchase and sale of cryptocurrency.

As is the case with any investment, these are high-risk propositions. It’s certainly possible to make money with these apps, and in fact with careful strategy and a good deal of luck, they can even be fairly lucrative. However, it’s possible to lose your investment also – and perhaps likely if you don’t really know what you’re doing.

4. Betting & Gaming

This category encompasses a lot, but basically it’s the idea that you could stand to make some side cash through sports betting (or daily fantasy apps) or gaming on casino sites and similar platforms. There are things you can do to make these inherently risky options marginally safer. For instance, if you’re playing daily fantasy for real money do some research on which sits offer the best odds of winning (Draft tends to beat out DraftKings or FanDuel in this regard). If you’re looking into casino play or sports betting, a wealth of casino reviews are littered across the web, and you can see which platforms are considered secure and reliable. In any case, make sure you’re as knowledgeable and prepared as you can be for whatever specific game or bet is at hand.

Even with those precautions however this is probably the riskiest proposition on this list, unless you try the investment apps with absolutely no idea what you’re doing. You can earn some side income through these means, but the odds are against you.

5. Blogging

Finally, there’s blogging! The only risk here is that it can be very time-consuming to get it right. But if you figure out a blog that you can maintain and which offers something new to people, you might actually be set up to profit regularly from it. Ads, sales, subscription models, and other special features are among the money-making aspects of a popular blog, and if you have the creative know-how, you can potentially take advantage of all of them.