Looking to earn a little extra money? There could be various reasons for this. Perhaps you have a birthday or occasion coming up and want to get some gifts for a loved one. Maybe your car needs some repair work done and you need some extra cash to get this complete. You might want to save for a larger scale purchase, such as a mortgage deposit or a luxury holiday. You may be looking to clear some debt that you’ve accrued. Whatever your reason for wanting to earn extra, it’s good to know that there are plenty of options out there that can help you to achieve this. Here are just a few you might want to try out!
Overtime
If your workplace offers overtime, this is an extremely simple and straightforward way to earn a little more money, as and when you need it. Overtime will simply mean doing the work you’re already qualified to do, just for more hours than you’re currently completing.
Freelancing
Another option you have available to you is freelancing. If you have some sort of skills that can be useful to other people, chances are, you can freelance. When you freelance, you work for yourself. You will find clients and sell your services to them. This could be an individual, a company or an agency. You will need to build relationships with these different clients and then complete projects on their behalf for an agreed rate. This can work well alongside your usual, employed job in the long term, or can be a short term means of making a little extra cash. As you are working for yourself, you take control over the work. If you don’t have time for projects for one week, you simply don’t take them on. If someone isn’t offering enough money, you can turn down the project. You get to choose who you work with, what you charge, how many hours you will do, where you will work from and various other factors that make this a very flexible way of making money. Just make sure to register as self-employed and to deduct your own tax and national insurance contributions each time you’re paid. This can then be paid through your self assessment at the end of each fiscal year.
Setting Up Your Own Business
You don’t necessarily have to freelance with a skill to make extra money on the side. You could sell products too. Setting up your own business can be time consuming at first, but as long as you have enough time to create or order the products you’re selling, you can manage your business relatively easily around your usual commitments once everything is set up. Start out by considering what you want to sell. Do you bake particularly good cakes? Do you know how to make macrame and can make nice macrame plant pots? Can you draw well and create custom cartoons of people’s pets? There’s a world of potential products to be sold out there – you just need to think about what you’re good at. Once you’ve settled on a product, it’s time to follow the next steps.
- Create a website – you’re going to need a website to sell your products from. This doesn’t have to be the best website in the world, but it should look half decent to give people confidence in your products. You can use platforms that make website creation easy, or you can pay a web designer or developer a one off fee to create a unique website for you.
- Product photography – remember that when people shop online, your product photos are the main thing that will sell your products. So, make sure they’re good quality. You can take your own, but you may have to learn skills such as how to take quality photos or how to convert heic to jpg. Often, a good option is to pay a product photographer to spend a few hours photographing all of your items.
- Order fulfilment – how are you going to fulfil your orders when you make sales? Make sure that you have the time to create the products fresh and within an agreed time scale if they need to be made fresh. If they can be made in advance, you should consider making them up before they even sell. Then use a reliable shipping service with tracking to ensure your products safely make their way to the customer.
Here are a few options. Hopefully, you’ll be able to benefit from at least one and save up for whatever it is that you’re aiming for!
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