4 Fast Income Side Hustles for the Holidays
When the holidays are fast approaching, many people go into panic mode. Not only do you have your usual bills to pay, but there are added expenses that you have to devote money to as well.
This may include gifts that you have to purchase for your immediate family, visiting relatives, and even coworkers or friends. Plus, there are many additional expenses such as increased grocery bills for holiday dinners, décor, etc.
When you are dealing with a flatlined economy, it makes things even worse. Many people are struggling at this time, and what helps is to have a method that you can use to quickly and easily earn a bit of extra money to get you through the season.
Below, you are going to find several options for you to choose from or combine in an effort to help you supplement your current earnings so that it takes the pressure off of you and allows you to relax and enjoy the holidays.
These are things you can continue doing after the holidays have passed, if you want to earn extra money and put that towards your debt or into a savings account so that the next time a holiday rolls around, you won’t be in a pinch.
Important Factors to Consider Before Selecting a Holiday Side Hustle
If you are pursuing a side hustle as a way to make money online quickly, you don’t want to be wasting your time choosing anything that isn’t a good fit. There are three separate things you need to take into consideration before making a decision on which direction to go in.
The first is whether or not you have certain skills to offer for use as a way to help you generate more revenue. Even if you discover a lot of profit potential with something such as graphic design, it won’t help if you have amateur level skills and cannot do the job appropriately.
If any of the side hustles listed below, or others that you discover along the way includes some sort of skill set or talent that you are either not good at or that takes you too long to complete, it will work against you in terms of earning money for the holidays.
Another thing to consider is how fast you can earn with a specific method. You don’t want to select anything that is not going to pay off ahead of the holidays, when you need the money the most.
A good example of this is affiliate marketing. There are some methods of affiliate marketing that generate profits quickly, as you’ll see in an upcoming section. But if you choose to go with something like Amazon, you will be sorely disappointed.
That’s because it takes 60 days for you to get paid from your commissions on Amazon. Plus, they are fairly strict about how you can promote their products. For example, you can’t put things in emails or in a PDF file and generate commissions in that manner – it needs to be publicly accessible.
Whenever you are considering a specific side hustle to earn money for the holidays, look at all of the fine print to see how quickly you can get paid. There may be some sort of disclaimer such as having to meet a certain threshold before they send out a payment to you.
Another thing you want to consider is how much you can earn in a short amount of time. If the holidays are just weeks away, you want to maximize your earnings. Even though you might be able to earn from something like ad revenue on your site, for example, that will be pennies on the dollar that will eventually add up rather than something substantial that can help you with your bills and holiday shopping.
Use This Strategic Approach to Getting a Quick Paying Gig
the first side hustle that can provide you with quick money when you do it correctly is accepting work from other marketers. These types of freelance gigs can be secured easily through word of mouth and determination.
If you are going to take time to set up a profile and portfolio before you begin bidding on a site like Upwork, that may take more time than if you start friending and initiating conversations with fellow marketers directly.
All you have to do is start out with a few marketers accepting your friend request and then you can add many others who you feel have a workload that is significant enough that they would be willing to hand off some of their tasks to you.
When you have the right people on your friends list on a platform like Facebook, where many people chat about their projects, you’ll be able to post publicly and privately in direct messages about deals you are willing to offer in exchange for money.
One way you can do this is to reach out to a top entrepreneur and offer something quick and free in exchange for a gig they may have or a mention to their audience. For example, if you know of a top marketer who has a successful blog about search engine optimization, you can write a unique pillar blog post for them and give it to them free to use with their name on it with the request that they let you know if they have any friends who need help with their content.
Oftentimes, they will mention you on their own wall where all of their followers can see. Or, because people often chat behind the scenes, they may know of someone who is overwhelmed with their content needs and they will be able to direct them to you so that you can get a quick gig or more before the holidays.
In addition to offering a freebie in exchange for this type of networking, you can also create some inexpensive batch work. Instead of charging per gig or per page, you can heavily discount something larger so that you can get a bulk of payment before the holidays.
An example of this might be if you are capable of ghostwriting and you normally charge $15 per page. For this deal, you might charge 7 to $10 per page if they purchase a minimum of 30 to 50 pages.
This is something many people will jump on as a way to save money, and you can have them purchase the packages ahead of time and get on your schedule whenever they are ready with their topic.
You can also join marketing forums and begin participating with a signature file that hyperlinks to one of these discount deals. You don’t want to spam the forum, but you do want to participate and showcase your skills so that people want to hire you.
In addition to writing for other people, which you can do for blog posts, eBooks, lead magnets, emails, and more – you can also offer graphic design skills or packages of graphics to people who have upcoming launches or to authors who need graphics for their book promos.
You may also be able to get gigs as a virtual assistant. Make sure you have the tasks that you are capable of handling outlined and ready to showcase to prospective clients. This can include things like handling customer service, responding to emails, uploading content to their blog, or managing their social media.
You may also want to position yourself as an affiliate manager. There are many other marketers who are currently launching products for the holidays to boost their own income.
One area that they may be lacking time for is going out and recruiting people to promote for them. If you have the ability to network with top tier affiliates and simply approach them in private messages with a link to the JV page, a review copy, and some sort of enticing or motivating words, that may be something that people are willing to hire you for so that you get a flat payment or a percentage of the earnings before the holidays.
Keep in mind that these marketers are also struggling during the holidays. It may not be a struggle with money, but with time. Everyone is busy naturally during the holiday season, and anything you can do to shoulder the burden for them will be met with a positive response.
Pursue the Fastest Affiliate Income Generators
We talked about the warning against using Amazon or other long term affiliate programs that take awhile to get paid after you promote. But you can look for other programs that pay out more quickly.
Some platforms have measures in place to pay you based on your performance. If you have a good performance with low refunds, you might be able to get paid faster than if you have a problematic account.
For fast affiliate promotions, you want to look for digital products primarily, but sometimes you can find tangible items on platforms that pay out quickly. Look at third party platforms such as ClickBank, Warrior Plus, and JVZoo.
But don’t stop there. You can also find many online entrepreneurs who have info products and private label rights that they are selling where they need affiliates to promote for them and they pay out of their own system faster than what you could get elsewhere.
If you are looking on Muncheye or third party platforms, you can also look for contests that are currently taking place or about to launch so that you not only earn commissions for the upcoming holidays, but also cash prizes that are usually paid out the day after or a couple of days after a launch ends.
If you already have a website and list, this can work to your advantage. But even if you don’t, you can use social media effectively to promote digital info products. There are many people making a lot of money using social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram to name a few.
Quick and Easy Money Making Products
Even if you have never created your own info product to date, now is the time to do so if you want to earn money quickly for the holidays. As long as you can either write well or record videos, you can create information products for hot niche topics that convert.
You do need to have a domain and page builder of your own. But if you don’t, you might want to consider partnering up with a seasoned marketer who is willing to share in the profits in exchange for handling the technical, site-side of things.
In order to make money quickly with a product launch, you to look at the marketplaces around the industry of your choice and see what is selling well. For example, many people want to know about using artificial intelligence right now in the Internet marketing industry.
You also have New Year’s Day coming up – which is a big day for the diet niche. If you can look into the near future or see what is selling currently in abundance, that will be a good starting point for you to dig into.
You want to make sure that you bring something to the marketplace that may not be covered yet by others, whether it’s a new slant or new information that they can apply to their own lives.
You may be able to create your info product and they single day, as some people do. Or, it might take you up to a week to get your product finalized. If possible, try to have a funnel in place where you have at least one upsell so that you can maximize your earnings from the product launch.
Your goal will be to bring affiliates on board so that you can earn as much as possible in a short amount of time. That may mean that you need to offer 100% commissions to top affiliates for the front end and make your money up on the upsell.
It doesn’t take much to write an eBook, and you can use tools like Grammarly or even AI to go through your creation and make sure that it is free of errors. You can create a hybrid product that brings more value to the table by recording some or all of your lessons and making that available as one of your upsell offers.
When it is polished to perfection, reach out to top tier affiliates and ask if they would be willing to promote for you after reading a review copy. Look at previous launches for similar topics to see who was ranking high on their leaderboards so that you can approach the same individuals because you will know that their list converts for that topic.
When you launch an info product, you want to be strategic in allowing it to be considered for a deal of the day or bestseller list. If you keep the product launch private, which some people do by accident, it won’t have a chance to fully thrive in the marketplace.
The great thing about launching a product for quick and easy income is that you are simply sharing your knowledge or knowledge that you research with others and getting paid for it – and as affiliates send their list to purchase from you, you are building your own list so that you can leverage that in your quest to earn quick profits for the holidays.
Sell Marketing Bundles to Busy Entrepreneurs
Lastly, you can start selling marketing bundles to busy entrepreneurs who don’t have time to create content on their own. Earlier, when we were talking about affiliate marketing, we mentioned Private Label Rights (PLR) as one type of digital product you may want to promote.
However, this is also an avenue that you can choose to go down where you can create the products yourself and have other people promoting for you. Private label rights can be created in the form of text, images, videos, and audio.
It can be unlimited or limited to a certain number of buyers. It can be priced anywhere from pennies up to a couple of dollars, depending on how limited you make it. You actually earn more from the volume of sales than you do the price point per page or per item with PLR.
The reason these are so popular is because it frees up the time of other busy professionals. They don’t have time to brainstorm content map it out with a good outline, create it, edit it, and then use it.
They just want to find what they need, download it and be able to hit the ground running from there. You will be taking your skills in writing, graphic design, and networking and using it to your advantage for this side hustle option.
Think about what other marketers need at this moment. They may need blog posts to pull in traffic, lead magnets to build a list, eBooks to sell, emails to nurture their subscribers, and more.
If they want to monetize their content, they may need product reviews that cover everything from digital to tangible items in a wide variety of industries. You can offer bundles of reviews for Christmas gifts, marketing products, etc.
You can also offer a variety of graphics as private label rights if you have the skill to create them. These can include banners, infographics, and social quote posters that they can use in their blogs and on social media.
Just as you will do for your info product launches, when you are launching private label rights, you want to recruit affiliates to promote for you whenever possible. Choose fellow PLR sellers, as well as marketers who routinely promote this type of digital product, even if they are not vendors themselves.
In addition to these online staples for making money quickly, you can also turn to offline gig work such as food delivery, ride shares, and even personal shoppers or pet sitters. You just have to manage your time properly, regardless of where you are earning your money and provide products and services that meet the demand of a hungry audience.
Once the pressure is off slightly, you might want to scale your side hustle into something that earns more. You might have clients willing to pay more for your services or be able to price your funnels higher and take time creating bigger or better launches.
You can put your reviews from social media onto a blog and have it earning for you on autopilot from this point on. But with a holiday hustle the emphasis is on hustle – you need to turn things around quickly, which means working in a focused manner, diligently and not slacking off or wasting time.