Side Hustles

Hello everyone,

I am someone who likes to try out new things and to keep up with trending hobbies or even earn a little extra cash. I joined TikTok a little over a year ago, I finally understood what everyone was talking about and why they like the app so much. Then, more and more I kept scrolling the more side hustles kept popping up to make extra cash on the side, which I thought was ludicrous/scams until I started trying them out for myself. I know a lot of Gen Z's are trying to get out of a typical work week with these side hustles and they all brag about making 10,000 dollars by just working three hours a day to nothing. As a millenial/zillenials I came from a generation where we can work our butts off and not get a whole lot from it, we all think that working five days a week is too much, but we still show up to work and do the best job where we can, even if our co-workers give 50% at our jobs. I thought "what is the harm in trying a side hustle myself?" especially if it costs me nothing other than a little bit of effort. The first side hustle I tried was selling notebooks off of Amazon, I got a lot of excitement from it and I was able to use my creativity towards making money. Amazon KdP offers you to publish empty notebooks, so onto Canva I went, and it took many tries to get the standards of size correct, once I got that down i kept making more and more copies of different notebooks. I kept checking my sales and I was receiving absolutely nothing, like actually nothing and I don't know if I was advertising it right or I could have done more. But this is what the sales looked like and still do:

No sales to report, which is fine. Here are my notebooks though:

As you can see, they are not terrible designs, and I am selling most of these for pretty cheap on Amazon and I still have them on sale. Just there is no give to them, and the affiliate links don't seem to work on books. if you want to purchase them you can if you type in Adrianna Peters Notebook, they might show up. However, this side hustle is not great.

Okay, so I thought "where else can I sell stuff?" that's when I came across another side hustle by selling stuff on Etsy and combining it with drop shipping, it seemed simple enough. I found a drop shipping store first and then I opened an Etsy shop, but in order to make any profit I would have to sell my items for super expensive...like no one will buy this for that amount of money expensive. I gave up on that quite quickly, I had even reached out to an Etsy seller to see if they had any advice for me and they ignored me, even though they were racking in sales at the millions. I gave it I think about two weeks and decided this was not the side hustle for me. I would have to do more market research probably and try it out again somehow, without breaking regulations with Canva and I have looked at YouTube videos for advice, but they only told you how to set it up and nothing more.

Now, I have moved on a discovered affilaite marketing. Okay, so I can use Vocal. Media to my advantage, however the idea had not crossed my mind when I started a week ago. I was only creating pins and making Pinterest links to the products I advertise. Then, i saw that most people were getting traffic through their blog, and I will be honest, it's not going horribly wrong... I have had 2.1k viewers on Pinterest already, 56 outbound clicks going to my links, yes some of them were generated by me. I have made 1 sale though, which is a start with 0.63 cents. I started to post more about buying stuff on Vocal. Media and sadly I feel like the views have gone down since then, I think I should just keep them up though maybe more people will come across it. Feel free to follow my Pinterest board, of course no pressure:

the last side hustle is writing for Vocal.media and it actually works; this is a tried-and-true method of making more money. I joined Vocal.Media when I was in university in 2018- before I graduated, I could have sworn that this was not going to work out. Then, I kept getting reads on articles and before I knew it, I was withdrawing money every quarter at least. Then, in October I recieved top story, that has never happened to me before...I was so happy and then I got more comments and people actually wanted to read what I wrote. I was over the moon about it. I love writing for Vocal.media, i love the community of writers and i started to subscribe to more people as well. I only got positive comments and I was encouraged to write more. Challenges were introduced, which gave me more incentive to keep writing, even if I don't win, I love participating, it makes me feel like I am a part of something bigger than myself and I get to read the stories that did win, and I feel that I have become a far better writer.

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