594: The $100/day for 100 Days Challenge

23:14That's all the prompts and all the work to be done. That was just a free sample. Yeah, that's a free sample of what's coming down the pipeline. So I think people think like they're screening me and this is an excruciating test, but it's going to be really cool. And in a way, it's cool to be able to write interesting topics or find ways to apply AI that can help people. But overall, it is really grueling work. And I don't want people to be disillusioned by that. I think there was something that said, you know, we'll pay you to do this training. We'll pay you to do this onboarding, like after you unlock 10 or 12 different paid tasks inside the systems.

23:46Like, well, maybe should I stick it out long enough to keep doing the thing? Because I did an hour and they use some tracking software, like to track your time. So I think I'm at like 15 bucks an hour from my work there so far. So I was like, okay, it's legit. They are gonna pay out based on that or maybe there's some minimum threshold that I gotta hit. But I was like, for a while, nothing showed up in my dashboard. You're like, am I getting paid for this? Is this still unpaid training? But like, okay, like, so I did see some money get added to it. There was another one that a Side Hustle Show guest pointed me to, it was called Taskverse, which I'm still on the waiting list for.

24:21And this one was for speaking. It was basically like reading sentences to help AI get better at voice recognition was maybe my understanding of it. I'll have to test that one out and see if... Let me know. And if you see me test that too, I would love to test that one. That sounds right up my alley. I love speaking. So... All right. So we have dataannotation.tech. We have remote tasks and taskverse, so they may be inundated with inbound worker applications at this point. anything else on the short list of side hustles that you do again, or that you plan to continue to do? Off and on, I will continue to do reselling of clothes, just because that's an easy thing to do once a season, at least for a girl like me, I've always got some clothes that I could get rid of.

25:05But what I found partially because in college, I was selling on Depop when that like 2018, 2019 Depop was rising. And there was a whole kind of like stream of girls and sellers who were buying things from Goodwill, selling them for a higher price, stuff like that. I couldn't get into that. And I think that I was just not built that way. So I don't think that it's something I'll do consistently, but I will try to do that. And I like getting money for stuff I would have otherwise just thrown away or whatever. But when people ask me about doing that as a side hustle, I hesitate to say that it's something you can do long term without putting a lot of investment in.

25:40And you have to be very careful that you're not tipping over to actually being under in terms of profit. For me, that would be very hard to track. So I stick to selling my closet and selling some furniture every once in a while. And it is part of my challenge for sure. But it's not something that I'm earning like a ton of money on, I don't think. Well, we just had a full episode on furniture flipping. Oh, yeah. It was really interesting because my interpretation of furniture flipping was like, okay, I'm going to buy this old beat up dresser and I'm going to sand it and paint it and make it look all nice again.

26:09She's like, if it takes more than five minutes of cleaning, I'm not touching it. It was like just straight up buy low, sell high. I thought that was really interesting. I feel like I've given myself a kind of unspoken rule that I will not put in a lot of money for a side hustle. So I think what happens is that I want to stick to side hustles that are either very low cost or free to start up. I'll call clothes I already own free because I bought them years ago. But in terms of, like you're saying, flipping, that's an investment to start out. And right now for the stage of life I'm in and for how much I want to track stuff like that.

26:43I just don't want to mess with that in my opinion, but I know a lot of people do successfully, but I don't think it's for me. Yeah. There are people who go big on T-POP, on Poshmark and they build the systems around consistently sourcing and they've got the lighting set up where they can quickly photograph this piece on the mannequin and ship it out. But it's definitely a grind, especially in kind of low-ish ticket clothing items where like, okay, maybe my profit on this is 10, 15 bucks. And I had to source it and I had to photograph it and I had to list it and I had to ship it where we've seen people have the most success in flipping businesses is where there's enough margin.

27:18And people have given the threshold, like, I want to make at least a hundred dollars on this because realistically, it takes the same amount of effort to sell the a hundred dollar profit item as it did to sell the$10 profit items. And I got to do less volume to clear a much greater profit number. So that's where I would look at the reselling, but it's an important reminder to say, well, the stuff that I bought, like, yeah, it had this purchase price, but it also has this resale value. And that's something that I use in my mind to justify some purchases. Like, well, if I want to buy this bike or this pair of skis, like, okay, yeah, it's this much amount today, but if I use it for five years and then like, okay, whether or not actually, you know, materializes, but I totally do that.

27:56You are getting into girl math territory. I don't know if you know you are, but that's exactly what girl math is founded on. So you really had it in that direction. I support it. All right, I'll take that as a compliment. So that's the reselling side of things, or just clearing out the closet, 100 % recommended as declutter, add some to your wallet at the same time. More with Jackie in just a moment, including the side hustles she didn't love and some of the more time leveraged earning opportunities that her content creation and social following have opened up for her. Did you know there's a disease running rampant among side hustlers and new entrepreneurs?

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29:39What else have you got? What other side hustles did you test out? Side hustles that I didn't love were MTurk. First of all, I don't know if you've talked about MTurk ever, but I think it's short for Mechanical Turk. It's a subset of Amazon. Yeah, Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Yeah, yes. I didn't think they paid enough, honestly. I seem to not be the only one. So at least in my experience and the experience of some others on some forums I read, when compared to sites like Prolific, they just really didn't stand the chance in terms of hourly pay. So I tried them and gave up on that pretty quickly. Yeah, mostly overseas workers is my understanding of Mechanical Turk.

30:14I used it as a customer early on where I had basically a data entry project. Like copy this SKU into this website and copy the product title back. Like really tedious stuff. And we had a guy who he wrote the Mechanical Turk review for the Sign Hustle Nation blog. And the story was like, well, I had a newborn on the way of staring down the barrel of paying for diapers and daycare and everything else. And hey, this is backed by Amazon. This is a legit company. And he ended up making$50 ,000 over the course of several years doing this site. But really tedious stuff. You're making 25 cents a task.

30:52And you think about it in terms of your hourly rate, something you can do sitting on the couch, kind of relatively brainless, but your time may be better spent elsewhere. Think about the opportunity cost on that stuff. For sure. Another one that I didn't like and that I won't maybe recommend are two cashback apps that I'll group into the same category, which would be Fetch and Ibotta. These are like cashback and earnings apps for groceries. So if you scan different items in the store, or if you buy certain items, rather than buying a name brand, you get cash back. And a lot of people in my comments saying they were earning hundreds of dollars, a thousand dollars a year off of Fetch or off of Ibotta.

31:31And I was really surprised by that. And I think what it came down to for me was just that I do not shop a lot. My husband and I, I keep us under$80 a week for all of our groceries per week. So I think that paired with us really basically thrifting everything else in our life, just kind of created this perfect storm of I'm not Ibotta, I'm not Fetch's ideal customer. And I think that's okay with me, but it just didn't work for me. I know a lot of people with larger families tend to lean towards that. And I think that's great for them. It just isn't maybe as obtainable if you are a low spender and maybe you're a household of one or two, I think.

32:04Yeah, not necessarily a side hustle. I mean, I still use these apps and maybe combined they're 25, 50 bucks a year. Like I'm not making a thousand bucks a year, but it's like, you're going to give me money for taking pictures of the receipts? Like, fine, I'll take your free money. It takes three seconds to do it. But is it a lifestyle changer? Absolutely not. Besides that, the only other one I was going to try was instant cart. But I don't know if you've tried anything like that. For me, the market was so oversaturated that as soon as something popped up, people were snatching it right away. And I just was not committed enough to maybe like sit there on my phone and just stare waiting for like the millisecond that a$7 order popped up.

32:44I don't know if this is just Columbus. So people are like, you got to claim it like right away. Oh, yeah. You think it's because it's a college town and people are like... I don't know. That's a great question. Columbus is growing pretty rapidly. We were recently named like the third fastest growing housing market, something like that, like the fastest housing market right behind Cincinnati. And then we were at one point the fastest growing city in America. So I do wonder if like somehow really it is just kind of like the season of the city that I'm in. But it was just absurdly fast. And I just was not as committed to doing that.

33:14But I do love grocery shopping. So I'm willing to give it another chance because I do love highlights like therapeutic to me. I love grocery shopping. Go give it a try. You have the pie chart breakdown of what ended up being the out of the$10 ,000. Like what ended up being the biggest piece of the pie? Definitely data annotation for me was a large portion of the pie. And then something we haven't really talked about yet, I won't maybe classify it as a side hustle anymore. I don't know, is earnings from either TikTok's creativity program or doing UGC work or brand deals. These are three things that I was only able to do because I started this challenge and gained kind of like attraction and a following.

33:52So those things ended up being a pretty big portion of my revenue as well, which I was super surprised about. You have an estimate of the hourly rate overall. And it's hard to say, well, I played Monopoly Go for six hours, but because you're already, you're working full time, you know, now I got to come home and I got to do this. I got to figure out a way to make my hundred bucks because my followers are expecting it. And I got to edit the video and like do all the other behind the scenes stuff that goes into it. Like, did you sleep during this? I did. I did. Yeah. To begin with, it took me in the start, probably four hours a day of active work.

34:28And then at the beginning, I was editing my videos and doing my voiceovers for like an hour. Now I've got that down to like maybe 20 minutes. Okay. Okay. I at least have that down a little bit with repetition. Yeah. You just kind of get used to it. You get less scared of your own voice. Like the first couple of voiceovers you do, you're like, I sound insane. And then you post it and you're like, no, everyone sounds normal. You just are critical of yourself. So in the beginning, probably like a combined five hours of extra work a day. To me, that was pretty normal because I had just in this past year, January of 2023, I had stopped my evening job.

34:59I was working as a server at a Wagyu steakhouse. So working two jobs back to back was pretty normal for me. And honestly, the fact that I could do it in the comfort of my own home rather than working in a kitchen and walking around at my feet for another six hours a night, that was honestly a perk for me. So that wasn't too bad. Towards the end of the challenge, anywhere from two to three hours a day, just because I had the opportunity to work with some great brands. UGC work pays really well. So that was a blessing. And I was earning money passively anywhere from like$5 to$25 a day off TikTok's creativity program pretty consistently, which was amazing.

35:34So this would be similar to like YouTube ads, like it's just ad revenue based on your view count or subscriber count? Yes, that's exactly what it is. So they will pay you per 1000 views. And I think it's anywhere from like$1.40 to$1.70 per 1 ,000 views. Over the break, I had some absolutely ridiculous numbers, partially because I ended my challenge. So my day 100 got a significant amount of views. And then I did a series recap that got a lot of views. And that was my first taste of like, I had had some videos go viral like early on. And I wasn't in the creativity program at the time. I think you have to have like 10 ,000 followers.

36:10So the first few videos that went viral, I had no idea what you could make off of ad revenue for that. But then just this past couple weeks, I've kind of had a taste of what large creators are getting paid, which is insane. So if you can find a niche, create consistent content, I think there's huge money to be made in TikTok's creativity program beta. But it's all for one minute or longer videos. That's kind of like their criteria. Oh, interesting. Okay. So just the nature of the everyday challenge. It's like you got people hooked, got people following along. I want to get the next update. And that makes a lot of sense.

36:44But I will say this, like you have mastered short form. Like that is awesome. But if you can translate that same content over to YouTube, because the CPMs are way higher in this niche. Wow. So even if it's the same stuff, review content, like here are the side hustles that I tried. Like if you want to play the ad revenue game, YouTube is a better place for that long form and horizontal content. Good to know. Good to know. There was an Amazon storefront element. These are like my top product picks. Was this an influencer program or this was like something separate? Yeah, that's their influencer program.

37:18Something I put a little bit of time into. So I mostly called that passive income when that rolled in. I probably put about five hours of work into it total and then just kind of let it sit there. And still it sat there since maybe October. Didn't make anything too crazy off of that. I was happy with it. I mean, for five hours of work, I think total, maybe I made a couple hundred dollars by the end of the challenge and I'm still making per week, maybe$30 for maybe a one time or a couple of times a year investment. I think it's worth it if you have the criteria to meet, to get into that program.

37:49Were you creating, you sending your followers to this storefront or this is like when I was doing Amazon influencer, I still am. This is one of my favorite side hustles of the last 12 months is like create these little product review videos. Oh, yeah. not a lot of production quality. And then you don't have to do anything to drive traffic. They just throw them up on the product page. Hey, if you help us close the sale, somebody watches your video and buys the thing, we'll sprinkle a couple of percentages your way. Yeah. I have heard of that. I haven't done that yet. This is kind of similar, but it's a storefront where you can link whatever products you want.

38:20So for me, I started out just by linking products people were asking me about. I have a heated blanket. I was always turning on each night and part of my videos and people were like, where can I buy that? Done. You can catch it on my storefront, my espresso machine, and stuff like that. And then I did a couple of gift guides, like frugal gift guides, gift guides for$15 and under$30 and under$50 and under. And I just left those up. So maybe I made two or three tech talk videos on those and then just had everything linked in different categories on my Amazon storefront. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, nice.

38:49Yeah, different ways to go about it. But again, create something once create that storefront or create those review videos once and get paid for them over and over again. So growing the passive income section of that$100 a day pie, and hopefully growing the size of the pie as well. I wanted to ask about the UGC, the user generated content side of things, because this is, I'm an elder millennial, this is like new territory for me. So how does this all work? So user generated content is kind of exactly what it sounds like brands are paying people to create different videos or static posts images about either their brand, their product on their platform, anything like that, just in order to kind of drive sales in a way that someone talking from the brand would not be able to do.

39:37Do you know what I mean? Like if you get a review ad on your page and it's someone who works for that company, you're like, well, why would I trust that it's actually a good product? But if it's someone that looks like you and there's just some girl in Columbus, Ohio or whatever, and they're like, I really like this product and it works for me. Okay. Well, that seems a little bit more trustworthy. And I think data is starting to show that that is the case. So there's a lot of companies right now that are looking to hire UGC workers. I've seen a lot of people create portfolios and start from scratch and kind of pitch themselves to brands, which I think is great.

40:10There's a lot of great, great UGC content creators on here. I've been following one for years. Her name is creative. Did you have to do any of that or were the brands reaching out to you? This was inbound for me, which is kind of why I kept that in a separate category when I calculated it because at least I am this time, because again, that was something that I didn't seek out, but kind of an opportunity that came to me. But I have, again, seen a lot of creators on TikTok pretty consistently making content and then pitching it to brands. So like, here's kind of what niche I can offer. I'm a lifestyle creator, wellness creator.

40:44Here's an example of some product reviews I've done in the past. Here's how much my rates are. Would you like to work with me? and brands can be like, yeah, sure. Why not? Yeah. What's typical? Like if you're comfortable sharing changes a lot. I think when I started, I was doing like a hundred or$200 UGC videos. There's a difference between a dedicated Tik TOK and an integrated Tik TOK integrated being kind of like an ad read in the middle of a YouTube video versus a dedicated Tik TOK is like, this is only about this product. And this is the whole point of that video. So those are two different rates dedicated being higher.

41:19I think at the start I charged like$100 for an integrated$200 for dedicated. And then there's also videos that you upload, UGC videos that you upload, and they will post on their social media. And that is usually what I charge the lowest for because it was not cluttering my feed. So it was less like kind of, I don't know, risk if that makes sense for me. So that I probably charged$75 to begin with. There's a lot of people that charge a lot of different rates, depends on your portfolio, how long you've been doing it. If you're posting a dedicated or integrated TikTok on your own feed, it depends on how many followers you have.

41:55Right now I'm in contract with a brand for a few thousand dollars for one, which is insane to me. But now I have 110 some thousand followers, which is very different than when I was doing UGC work for brands when I had 10 ,000. So it's crazy. Isn't that crazy? Could you imagine like compared to where it was three or four months ago? Yeah, it's just been bizarre. Now we've got 100 ,000 people paying attention to this stuff. It's been absurd. It's almost one of those things where the human brain has trouble seeing exponential growth. Genuinely, I think there's been studies on how people just truly cannot understand what a billion dollars versus a million dollars is.

42:33It's so hard for people to grasp exponential growth. That's been true of me. I can't even comprehend how many people that is. It's absurd. Well, you're in Columbus. That's like the entire horseshoe. It's like 100 ,000 of people, right? It's bigger. Yeah. That's crazy. It's crazy. That's probably a good transition point to the content creator side of things. And maybe that's kind of where the future of this goes, like focusing less on the hours for dollars side hustles and more on like, how do I get more views so I can get creator program revenue? How can I drive more Amazon affiliate sales? How can I get more user-generated contracts with bigger and bigger brands?

43:12Where do you see this thing going for the next 12 months? It's a really tough question. I think what I am struggling to kind of come to terms with right now is that there's a really fine balance between wanting to hit goals like that and wanting to stay true to why people followed me in the first place. So I have a year long challenge right now that I started on January 1st, how much extra income I can make in a year. I didn't give myself a daily goal. Right now we're moving house. So I'm averaging like 30 to $50 a day, something low. But what I want to show people is that little bits consistently over time, make a big difference.

43:45So I'm documenting 366, because it's a leap year, days of earning this year. Could I say I'm getting to the point where I'm earning thousands of dollars or whatever on ad revenue and brands, UGC work? I could, but there comes a point, and I've seen this happen to a lot of creators. For years when I followed creators, I would see them kind of the trope of influencers becoming out of touch. I think there is a fine line to be walked to not kind of lose why people followed you to begin with. So I owe it to my audience. They're like, I would say like 90 % women and they're from 18 to 35 years old. So I owe it to those girls who are just like me.

44:25And a year ago, we're in my shoes, you know, wanted to make a little bit of extra cash to save up for a home. I owe it to people to show them ways that don't cost money to start up, or you don't have to have a following to start up. So I'm going to continue to do that, but I will post transparency videos. Each Sunday I post how much I made on TikTok's creativity program and from any other like passive income, as I would call it. I think it's super compelling. And it just goes to show this consistent effort really stacks up and kind of, I mean, I'm hearing echoes of what Side Hustle Nation was in the early days, where it's like, I want to be the guinea pig for this stuff.

45:01This was one of my early hypotheses for the site. I want to test out selling on Amazon, selling on eBay, driving for Lyft and selling on Fiverr and doing freelancing and all of this different stuff. I'm going to report back the results, what I like, what I didn't like. And hopefully, knock on wood, I haven't lost touch because I think the curiosity still fuels so much of it. But going out and finding other people to tell those stories, if it's a side hustle that I don't have the expertise to do or I don't have the time to go do, I will find somebody to tell that story. But you're doing it in a really compelling way.

45:32And I think it's something that obviously resonated with this audience early on and has clearly resonated with your audience so far. So make sure to follow along at Jacqueline Mitchell on TikTok. We'll link that up in the show notes in case there's any trouble spelling. But that's the one year of extra income challenge. Like you said, you get an extra day this year, leap year, 366 days of extra income. I'm really excited to see what the total comes out to be because I imagine it's going to be big and we're going to have to do a follow up even from now to see what you hit. So again, thanks so much for joining me.

46:06Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation. Do your taxes is my number one tip. Make sure that you are tracking your taxes and make sure that you keep an accurate idea of how much you owe because you don't want to get so disillusioned with how much money you're making on side hustles that you forget to save the money that you owe come March. So that's my tip. That's right. Yeah. Take whatever the top line was, take 25 % of that and you mark that away and maybe more depending on state taxes. do you get those questions? Like, is this taxable? It's prolific taxable. All the time.

46:39All the time. And what I tell people is absolutely it is. If the government knows you're doing it, you're going to get taxed on it. They want their money and they want it now, which is, you know, that's fine. But I have a spreadsheet in my bio on my TikTok for free that kind of breaks down if anyone wants to do a one year of extra income challenge with me. And it takes that total and then it breaks down automatically a 27 % set aside for taxes. And what I recommend is that people throw that when they're getting paid weekly or whatever, throw that amount into a high yield savings account and let that build interest in the meantime.

47:10Yeah. Yeah. Throw it in that high yield account, make those estimated tax payments. There's no surprise come next year. And here's the other cool thing. Like if you're going to be getting 1099, like you're an independent contractor, like all of a sudden, like hashtag disclaimer, like not an accountant, but like as a business owner, whether you're freelancing and you know, if you're getting 1099, the government considers you an independent contractor slash freelancer, you can write off more stuff than you would be able to as just a w-2 earner so make sure you take advantage of the deductions that come along the way but i get that all the time is this taxable like yeah it's going to be taxable but like well it's not worth it then like well there's no such thing as a 110 marginal tax rate like you're still better off i know the misconception of well what if this raises me a tax bracket well it wouldn't raise you to a hundred percent tax bracket so you're still making money you're good you're still better off yeah yeah absolutely well super cool Again, at Jacqueline Mitchell, we'll link that up.

48:02Really inspiring stuff. Just a couple of quick notes, takeaways. Like the little wins add up. I mean, you set out with kind of a big goal of$100 a day, added up to over$10 ,000. Even$10 a day would still be$3 ,500 at the end of the year. Like it's not, you think about what that would afford in terms of a savings cushion, in terms of a nice vacation, in terms of whatever it may be. Those little wins really start to compound. And the other thing that we've seen kind of a somewhat common theme here is working in public or documenting the process because people love that behind the scenes is like the unboxing videos of making extra income.

48:40I think it's really, really compelling and has unlocked the UGC stuff, the affiliate stuff, the ad income earning side of things. And I'm excited to see what the following looks like a year from now. So whether you're a first time side hustle show listener or a longtime fan, I really appreciate you spending some time with Jackie and me in your earbuds today. If you're looking for what to listen to next, I've got over 600 or almost 600 of these episodes to choose from. You can take your pick. But if you don't have that kind of time, I also understand. So what you could do instead is take a more curated approach by going to hustle.show and answering a few short multiple choice questions.

49:19and I'll build you a personalized playlist based on your answers. These are the eight to 10 episodes on a specific topic, deep dive on a more specific topic, the more curated angle for you. Totally free, hustle.show and I'll get that sent over to you. Big thanks to Jackie for sharing her insight. Super inspiring stuff. We'll have links to all the resources she mentioned in the show notes at sidehustlenation.com slash Jackie. You can also hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors. in one place. And big thanks for you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.

49:53That really does make a difference. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you find value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.