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7 Side Hustles Ideas to Make $1000/Month

2023-01-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 29:11 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Sponsor segment present, AI, His own numbers

Ali lists seven side hustles that can bring an extra $1,000 a month (content writer, sales copywriter, thumbnail designer, website designer, short-form video editor, a solopreneur's second pair of hands, a one-man video production agency), each a valuable skill sold to businesses through the permissionless apprentice model; in his early twenties he would pick web design.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: seven side hustles to make an extra $1,000 a month

00:00:24 — The philosophy of side hustles: second job versus side hustle, three boxes, the law of making money

  • ★★ Ali calls shifts at a local kebab shop more of a second job than a side hustle: you must show up at set times, without autonomy over your time or the flexibility to work when you want. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ A decent side hustle, Ali says, ticks three boxes: it pays more than a local service job, you enjoy doing it, and, most importantly, it is flexible. — 00:01:27
  • ★★★ Ali's law of making money: money is an exchange of value, so to make money you must provide value to people who are willing to pay you for it. — 00:01:56 · first law of making money
  • ★★★ Ali's formula for making money: learn a skill that people will pay for, then find people who are willing to pay you for it. — 00:03:24

00:03:43 — Side hustle one: content writer for businesses and creators

  • ★★★ The easiest way to level up your ability to make money, Ali says, is to think business-to-business rather than business-to-consumer: ask which services you can offer businesses. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ Almost every business needs to hire writers, Ali says, and content writing is one of the main kinds of writing they need. — 00:04:52
  • ★★ Ali's team hires a number of people to do research and writing for its videos, social media, website and courses. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Ali knows writers who charge $1,000 for a single YouTube video script. — 00:05:50
  • ★★ Ali would normally call advertising your writing services on freelance websites such as Fiverr, Upwork or People Per Hour a pretty bad idea. — 00:05:50

  • ★★★ Instead Ali recommends what Jack Butcher calls the permissionless apprentice model: do work for people for free without being asked, then email them to show it. — 00:06:19

    “what Jack Butcher calls the permissionless apprentice model”

  • ★★ To get writing work, Ali would write a free script for each of a handful of his favourite YouTubers and send it with a short video; if the script is good, he can basically guarantee at least one replies. — 00:06:49

  • ★★★ With AI writing tools, Ali says, being a decent writer is now often about using the right AI tools to create a first draft, then editing it into the style of the people you write for. — 00:07:18
  • ★★ By reaching out and working for free with the permissionless apprentice model, Ali thinks a writer probably lands a first client within a few weeks, paying more than $100. (hedged) — 00:07:47
  • ★★ Writing trades time for money, Ali says, but AI tools can leverage it, and with experience a writer can create their own assets such as ebooks, courses and products. — 00:07:47

00:08:36 — Side hustle two: sales copywriter

  • ★★ To become a sales copywriter, Ali suggests reading a few books, such as Russell Brunson's Expert Secrets trilogy, Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers and Copywriting Secrets. — 00:08:57
  • ★★ Sales copywriting has an obvious return for a business, Ali says: improving the conversion rate of his own sales page by even 1% translates directly into profit, so hiring a copywriter is easy to justify. — 00:09:55
  • ★★★ To find clients for a service, Ali says, get your foot in the door with a first paying client and a testimonial; word-of-mouth recommendations then mean you probably won't struggle to find more. — 00:10:24
  • ★★ Sales copywriting is less time-intensive than content writing, Ali says: the formula is much the same for any business, describing the problem, agitating it and providing a solution. — 00:11:23

00:12:00 — Side hustle three: thumbnail designer

  • ★★ To become a thumbnail designer, Ali suggests learning Photoshop, developing an eye for decent thumbnails, then redesigning a YouTuber's thumbnails unasked and emailing them. — 00:12:21
  • ★★ About five people have emailed Ali redesigned thumbnails; none were very good, and in A/B tests they did worse than thumbnails he could make himself. — 00:12:55
  • ★★ Ali would pay £200 to £250 for a decent thumbnail for one of his videos, and knows a creator who pays $1,000 for a thumbnail. — 00:13:29
  • ★ Ali's thumbnail designer works fast thanks to a house style, usually a smiling photo of Ali with some icons and maybe text, which takes maybe 10 to 20 minutes. — 00:14:27

00:14:48 — Side hustle four: website designer

  • ★★ At 13, while at school, Ali did freelance web design in the evenings and at weekends for small businesses he met on a freelance website, making his first several hundred dollars online. — 00:14:56
  • ★★ Ali advises finding freelance work by interacting with people on Twitter and LinkedIn, where people with money gather and pay for services. — 00:15:26 · Twitter, LinkedIn
  • ★★ Ali's team hired the web designer Henry and has paid him over 10K over about a year to help redesign some of its websites. (hedged) — 00:15:55
  • ★★ Henry taught himself web design from YouTube videos and online courses to the point that he can now charge $10,000 for each website he makes for a client, Ali says. — 00:16:24
  • ★★ Web design is pretty easy to start, Ali says: decide it is what you want, watch a few YouTube tutorials, practise and build up a portfolio over time. — 00:16:24
  • ★★ To land a first web design client, Ali suggests doing a small free design of a business's homepage and showing them what their website could look like. — 00:16:53
  • ★★ With TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, Ali says, basically every business he knows is trying to get into video to generate more organic traffic. — 00:17:22 · TikTok, Instagram

00:17:28 — Side hustle five: short-form video editor

  • ★★ After a DM taking on all the risk and offering free edits of Dickie Bush's next videos, Juan Gomez landed a job editing for Dickie Bush, a high-paying client whose work he enjoyed. — 00:18:21
  • ★ Ali gets a handful of pitch emails every day, and none show the competence, relatability and reliability of Juan Gomez's message to Dickie Bush. — 00:18:50
  • ★★ However good you are at video editing, Ali says, you will never land the work if you cannot communicate that value proposition to someone willing to pay. — 00:18:50
  • ★★ Video editing takes a large amount of time, Ali says, so to level up that side hustle you could form an agency and hire other video editors. — 00:19:49
  • ★ Ali says building your own agency, a different way of doing a side hustle, is something he will talk about in future videos. — 00:20:18

00:20:35 — Trading 212 sponsor read

00:22:32 — Side hustle six: a solopreneur's second pair of hands

  • ★★ Ali suggests emailing people you would like to work for and offering to be their second pair of hands, a cross between an operations manager and a personal assistant. — 00:22:44
  • ★★ James Clear, the best-selling author of Atomic Habits, has only one other person on his team, Ali says: a right-hand man who works as his assistant and helps with content, conferences and email. — 00:22:44 · James Clear, Atomic Habits
  • ★★ Elizabeth, once Ali's part-time personal assistant for a few hours a week, got into content creation that way, helped out with his YouTuber Academy and is now, Ali says, a YouTuber with several hundred thousand subscribers. — 00:23:13 · Elizabeth, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ When Elizabeth first reached out to Ali on Instagram, she offered to be his part-time personal assistant for a month without pay; he paid her anyway. — 00:23:42 · Elizabeth, Instagram
  • ★★★ If you take on all the risk yourself, Ali says, it becomes very easy for the person hiring you to say yes without thinking too hard. — 00:24:11

00:25:00 — Side hustle seven: one-man video production agency

  • ★★ Gordon, the videographer Ali's team works with, made health and fitness videos for free as a freelancer, then landed paid clients and was flown to world championship bodybuilding and powerlifting competitions. — 00:25:39
  • ★★ Ali suggests offering to produce YouTube videos for software companies, which have money and know video brings organic traffic, calling it a super easy way to make money. — 00:26:08
  • ★★★ Ali calls video a massively underrated service: many businesses want it and relatively few people can offer it. — 00:26:38
  • ★★★ If he were in his early twenties and trying to make money, Ali says he would probably take the web designer route. (hedged) — 00:27:36

00:27:56 — What Ali would do if he were starting over in his early twenties

  • ★★ Starting over, Ali would teach himself current web design tools such as Webflow and Framer, then offer his favourite creators and software companies without a good website a new one, with the first few pages free. — 00:28:05
  • ★★ Ali is pretty confident he could fairly easily make six figures a year from web design alone by finding the right people and being good at the skill. — 00:28:34

Threads in this video

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Mentioned

Central: first law of making money · permissionless apprenticeship

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Dickie Bush · Elizabeth · Gordon · Henry · Jack Butcher · James Clear · Juan Gomez · Russell Brunson

Projects: Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: $100M Offers · Atomic Habits · Copywriting Secrets · Expert Secrets

Organizations: Fiverr · Instagram · LinkedIn · People Per Hour · Ship 30 for 30 · Starbucks · TikTok · Twitter · Upwork

Concepts: artificial intelligence · digital nomad · landing page · virtual assistant

Products: Adobe Photoshop · Framer · Webflow · WordPress · YouTube Shorts

Also centred on permissionless apprenticeship: 7 Side Hustles You Can Start This Year

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