Six Side Hustles That Helped My Earn $26,000 in 2021

I never used to see myself as someone who was good at making money, or attracting wealth, despite always having some form of side hustle on the go. I have tried pretty much everything with various levels of success and dedication over the years. Dedication and success have sometimes been correlated and sometimes not, this year they definitely were. I have also realised that I am very good at making money, and I have no doubt I will make more in 2022, my main focus for 2022 needs to be spending less of it.

My Side-Hustle earnings came from 7 places ( well 6 of them made money and one lost)

I will start with the one that lost me money:

1. Coinbase (-$29.11 / £22.00)

Now this isn’t a true reflection of my success with Coinbase as the reality is that I had about $22.00/£17.00 worth of Crypto currency that I had collected via random faucets in 2018. I then promptly got bored of that grind and thought nothing more of it. A few weeks ago, I found my old account and saw that it now had $263.00/£199.00 in there, as you can imagine I was pretty smug, all that work had actually paid off. However, in the interest of clarity, Crypto is having a bit of a freefall this week so my balance is now $215/£163 which is $29.11/£22 less than it was on January 1st 2021, so I am reporting it as a loss for the year.

2. Cash Em All ($16.02/£12.11)

This isn’t really a side hustle, it’s an app you can download and if you play games through them, you can earn pennies for playing. I traded most of my earnings for google points to spend in game, but if there is a game on there you are going to play anyway then it’s worth taking a look. There are also other versions such as Mistplay that work in the same way. I have used Mistplay and Cash Em All so can vouch for their trustworthiness, but I haven’t’ tried any of the others.

3. Ziglu ($32.58 / £24.62)

Ziglu is another crypto trading app, I only downloaded Ziglu to get Swagbucks (a platform I have used for a while but haven’t cashed out with this year, so I am not including it in this article). You had to deposit $3.31/£2.50 to get the reward, so I did, I liked the app and it seemed really straight forward, so I decided to invest another $13.23/£10.00 into it. My current balance through growth alone is $49.12/£37.12 making my profit so far $32.58/24.62. Again, this would have been higher if Crypto wasn’t taking a nosedive at the moment.

4. Facebook Store ($193.79/£146.45)

So, the last three are all related to my business I set up in July 2020. I have an Etsy store, and eBay store and a Facebook page. My Etsy store has been closed by Etsy for a policy violation, but I still have my eBay and Facebook stores going. I only set the Facebook page up properly when my Etsy got closed. I don’t really like the interface, so I haven’t put a lot of effort into it, I also don’t use Facebook for personal use, so I struggle to promote the page.

However, I have still managed to make £146.45 on there so far and I am sure I will make some more sales before Christmas. I wouldn’t recommend making a Facebook Page if it’s going to be your only ecommerce method, but if you already have an Etsy or eBay store and you can quickly upload all your photos into albums on Facebook then it is worth having as an extra. Saying that, if you already spend a lot of time on Facebook and have a large network on there then you are likely to have a lot more success on the platform.

5. eBay ($1313.50/£992.63)

While my Etsy store was up and running eBay was my secondary platform, I have put very little effort into it, I used a website to transfer all my Etsy listings to eBay to save time and just left them there. I don’t have a registered shop on eBay which would likely give me a more professional look and increase sales, but I still managed to make over $1000 on there, I will likely put some more effort into it next year and see how much I can build on that number.

6. Etsy ($20,378.05/£15,400)

Etsy provided the majority of my side hustle income in 2020, but unfortunately this isn’t a tale of ‘I threw some instant download designs up and sat back’, no I worked my arse off. I had over 1000 sales and a 5-star rating, and when Etsy closed me down (which I cried about a lot) I had 375 listings active. I started Etsy in July 2020 and made a loss the first month, made nothing the second, a tiny profit the third, then I had a bump for the Christmas months, then back down to hardly anything in January and February 2021. The reason I did so well for the rest of the year was because I worked on it every day, I designed new products, I improved my listings, I experimented with tags and titles, I designed even more listings, it built and built and built, and the really sad thing is I think I would have taken over $5000 in December alone if I hadn’t been shut down.

So what’s the plan for 2022

I am going to start a new Etsy shop; I don’t want to get shut down again, so I have to learn from my previous mistakes and think really carefully about what I am going to sell. I am giving myself until the end of the year to come up with a plan and I will launch in the new year, then I will grind and build it up again. It’s going to be tough, but I have seen that it can work now, so there is no reason I can’t make it work again.

I am also going to focus on my writing, I have always wanted to write but never had the courage to do it, Medium has helped with that, so I am going to continue. I want to carry on writing about mental health and education and about business and earning streams that I have tried, or I come across in the new year. I will keep you posted on how 2022s earnings are going as the year progresses.

Let me know what your most profitable side hustle was in 2021 in the comments!

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