As a student, you might find your day to day life restricted to going classes and doing the assignment.
Believe me, getting high grades and mastering your subjects only won’t give you the best career option. You need to explore more and get smarter to find the various possibilities out there.
Side income is a great way to help you to earn extra bucks while you’re in college and also build up your skills.
There are some of the was to earn money that worked for me.
#1. Youtube/Facebook videos
Youtube can make you viral and suddenly you will realise that you are getting more attention from your family and friends.
But that’s not easy for everyone, most of us are shy or not good at recording ourselves.
[Solution] You don’t need to be in front of the camera for everything. You can make videos describing things on a board.
You can make videos on every chapter of your subject and distribute it among your classmates.
Ex1. Summary of a subject so other can just go through it quickly before the exam.[Can be really useful]
Ex2. Funny videos like [Make Joke of]
Learn to create animated videos and find someone whose voice is funny and bingo.
Ex 3- Education videos, Current affairs, case studies you think other students might be interested, explain the topics of your subjects etc.
#2. Tuitions/Coach
We think that the tuitions are limited to the teaching the subjects. But you can teach a lot more things, these days parents are looking for people who can help them in making their children smart.
You can teach the following skills:-
1. Computer skills.
2. Basic programming to build websites/apps etc
3. Music Instrument.
4. Dance
5. Photoshop
6. Animations
7. And a lot more
[Hack] Create a pamphlet mentioning your skills and how you can consult children to be smarter and distribute it via newspaper guy/delivery guy/maids working in your neighbourhood.
#3. Freelance
There are a lot of opportunities out there for freelancing. But the basic problem is to how to find work.
While you can create a profile around different freelancing websites like Odesk, freelancer etc but getting the initial project will take some time and effort.
[Hack] This is one of the hacks I’ve tried to get freelance tech projects. Believe me, I’ve done more than 8+ Lack rupees projects via this technique.
[Imp] You need to create a catchy email mentioning some projects that you’ve already done either as your own or for someone else.
Find out all the relevant job portals where startups post their job listings, individually go to their websites and send them your proposal. Apply to all companies even If they’ve mentioned “Full time”. Yes, you don’t need to restrict yourself to apply only “Part-time” opportunities. If they find that you can solve their problem then they will definitely want to try you even If you work as part-time.
Facebook groups are also one of the ways to find out the clients, most of the early stage startup post their jobs on FB groups.
#4. Create your brand and sell custom services.
Look at this guy – Sahil Dev.
He has created an exceptional brand out of his designing skills.
#5. Headhunter
You can become a part-time recruiter where your job is to search for the best talent for startups and take a cut whenever a company hire someone via you.
#6. Photography
Click interesting photos and sell it online. [More info here – How to earn money by selling photos online]
#7. SEO(Search Engine Optimization)
It is an interesting skill to learn and you could find a lot of small companies who look for freelancers to get their website SEO friendly. You can contact and explain how you could help them with your expertise.
#8 Business development – Help companies to reach their initial customers
When I started my company we were approached by one college student asking us to give him some work to get the initial customers. He went out and approached some local tea sellers and supplied them with paper cups labelled with our brand. Win-Win situation for everyone.
You decide:
There are a lot of ways to become a hustler, money will automatically kick in and the best time is to do it while in college. You just need to add an “Add-On” to catapult your current profession. An engineer who knows how to market himself smartly is an “Add-On” on his current profession. I will write a separate article on it.
For more help and hacks for your profession, reach out to me.
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