My Side Hustle Failures

In this video I’ll be sharing my online side hustles I tried out that weren’t successful to hopefully save you some time and money.

back story

I’ve always been interested in finding ways to earn money online and one of the main reasons I wanted to start this channel was to continue to explore different avenues to do so and share my failures and successes.

Now I’ve already documented creating a print-on-demand shop that wasn’t successful and you’ve seen me lose money day trading, but there are a handful of other videos I started to make that didn’t end up working out. And usually, it’s fine if my experiments fail because the point isn’t to just be successful, it’s to give it a solid boy scout try and share the results either way… but with the ones I’m about to talk about – I either hit a roadblock and didn’t know what else to try and yet still felt incomplete as a video, or for other reasons, I decided to not pursue it further.

So without any more blabbing, let’s get into it.

$0 to $10k

Over a year ago, before I even launched this channel, I started filming a 0 to $10k challenge series.

And of course, this really is no easy feat. I started doing online surveys and promos, earning almost $60, which I then used to buy a call option on eBay… and then again with AMD.

This brought my total up to $104.25 which I then used to sign up for Webull to get two free stocks.

I then worked my way up to $157 and decided to try and create a digital product to sell. I went with Lightroom photo presets, since I have a lot of experience making them. I spent about a week working on them and creating ads, but I ended up not receiving any sales whatsoever.

I also started getting free stocks from referring people to Webull, and I didn’t want that to influence the challenge nor did I feel like doing a bunch of trading with a $100 account on another brokerage, so I left the challenge there and haven’t revisited it since.

I’d still love to give it another go, even though it is really challenging, it’s also pretty fun to try and get creative and see what may be possible.

Music YouTube Channel

Alright, this one started off kind of fun.

So I created these longer-form chill videos, but then I wanted to go live and turn it into one of those 24/7 Youtube radio stations. So I dusted off my old PC, plugged it into the router, and went about setting up a livestream.

For music, I signed up for Epidemic Sound because they have a lot of lofi hip-hop tracks which is the genre I was going for.

I then got a looping graphic, and then, for simplicity, I found Epidemic songs on Spotify and made a playlist. Since I had a license for Youtube, I figured this would work well.

And then, my streams started getting shut down for copyright. I guess Epidemic might not clear the songs for livestream or something like that – I tried researching it but didn’t find a clear answer.

Now I thought the livestream would encourage Youtube to rank my channel higher in search results, but it didn’t really seem to do so. My 3 videos never really got views and of course, I could have maybe hired someone on Fiverr to create more and more videos until I had a massive library on my channel, but I didn’t really want to invest money into it and decided to move on to other projects.

Etsy

Next, I decided to try and start an Etsy shop selling digital goods – again Lightroom presets. The problem is this niche is very crowded – especially on Etsy. But what’s interesting is one of the top sellers has over 80,000 sales of their presets, which is over $400,000 in mostly all profit. So if you can just get a little slice of those customers for yourself, it could be a pretty decent source of passive income.

Now to give me a little boost, I also ordered a gig from a Fiverr seller who promised to boost your listing in Etsy’s SEO. And he did, but not for my ideal keywords. It all depends on the age of your shop, how competitive the keywords are you want to rank for, and other metrics I probably don’t even know about.

And I even started Etsy ads, which I should continue to test, because it’s obviously not working. I have over 1,5000 views and 0 clicks on my ads, so I haven’t spent any money, but I also haven’t made any money.

Over 6 months, I have only 200 visits to my shop and $0 in revenue. This is something I may continue to try and test and see if I can “crack the code” to start getting at least some sales, but as of now, it’s a pretty big fail. The good news is I was able to use all of the assets I made when creating presets for my 0 to $10k challenge, so I haven’t had to invest any money outside of the $73 and 50 cents I spent on the Fiverr gig.

Online Poker

So next up, I gave online poker a shot. And of course, there’s a big element of luck involved, but certainly some skill as well. I used to play online poker in my early twenties and managed to pay my rent a few times with it, but it had been over 10 years since I’ve played. It’s been hard to find sites that allow US players, since it’s kind of a legal gray area. I did find one that allowed me to deposit Bitcoin and I started playing.

I was definitely a bit rusty, so it took me awhile to find my groove, and even then I wasn’t consistently winning. I did some more research, and it sounded like there were a lot of bots on this platform and after a little more research, it seemed like it may not be a legal gray area and instead just straight up illegal – which while I think it’s ridiculous – I also didn’t want to make a video about doing something illegal, so I decided to call it quits. I transferred my $260 remaining in my account back to bitcoin and took the L of about $240.

Affiliate Website

Let’s rewind back to 2013. I was learning about internet marketing and different ways people were making money online, so I decided to try out affiliate marketing. My first attempt was a website called AutoQuoted.com. The idea was to have articles about different types of car insurance and then list out the different insurance companies with referral links. The idea here was I knew insurance companies did have pretty generous referral programs so that it would justify the work involved.

I ordered a Fiverr gig to get an SEO optimized article written for $10. I asked them to write an article with tips about finding and comparing the best auto insurance rates online. My keywords I wanted to target were “buy car insurance online” and “get auto insurance quotes.”

It ended up being one of those pretty generic articles you find on pretty generic sites like the one I wanted to start. I ordered a total of 10 articles from a handful of different sellers.

Now I’m not 100% sure if I ran Google Ads for this site or not – but what I am sure of is I didn’t get any traffic or generate any money.

What I learned from this is actually one of the most important lessons about starting something like this: you’ll be a lot happier and likely more successful if you are working on something you actually enjoy working on for the sake of it – not for the money. I couldn’t have cared less about auto insurance and thus, I had no desire to spend more time or money on it when my first attempt failed. Now compare that to me and my wife starting a Youtube channel about photography. We loved photography and had fun making videos about it, so not only were we okay with it not being instantly profitable – which is an unrealistic expectation to have anyways – but our love and passion showed through in our videos and that played a role in helping it become successful.

Final Thoughts

So just because these experiments didn’t initially work out for me, doesn’t mean they won’t work for you. I try to approach these experiments as someone who isn’t an expert in any given area, but rather give a more realistic expectation for how the average person can expect these online side hustles to turn out for themselves. So if you’re really good at SEO or running Facebook Ads or graphic design – you can leverage these talents to give you a leg up on the competition.

I’ve failed a lot trying out different things and while I always try to learn from the failures, I also have found the things that end up being most successful for me are things that I truly enjoy doing.

Now if there’s an experiment from this video you want to see me kickstart and try again, let me know in the comments section of the video, and I’ll definitely consider it. If you would do me a favor and hit the thumbs up button on this video, that would really help this channel out. Consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you in the next one.