FREE Side Hustles in 2026 For Beginners

I've made a lot of money online over the past few years using various side hustles and online businesses I've documented all of it here on this channel but one of the number one questions I get is which one is the cheapest to start so in this video I'm actually going to rank all the different side hustles I've tried from the cheapest to the most expensive so if you're a complete beginner and you're looking for a way to make money online that doesn't cost a lot of money then you'll really want to make sure you watch this entire video because there are some online businesses here that I've seen literally change people's lives even though they started with absolutely no money let's start out by talking about Tick Tock and other forms of short form content video creation so this is basically when you make short videos and you post them up to tick tock maybe to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and you make money from this by getting paid by the platform itself now this is actually really cheap to do it doesn't really require any money assuming you already have a smartphone so in terms of this scale on the left I'm going to put this all the way down here at zero but I wanted to really give you a full picture here because it's not just enough that this is cheap to do you also have to consider what is the likelihood that you'll actually make a substantial amount of sustainable income from this so I'm going to rank these from different side hustles that are pretty much guaranteed to work to ones impossible to get to work so for tick tock even though it's really cheap to do anyone can start doing it the likelihood that you'll actually start to make money from it is pretty low I'm going to put it all the way over here because most people who post up on Tick Tock they're just not going to make money with it if you really want to do well you have to post a lot of content and get people to get you money some other ways like through things like sponsorships so that is why I'm putting it all the way down here with a really low chance of success with this so really The Sweet Spot here is right here you want something that's cheap but it's almost guaranteed to work so that's what we're going to be looking for today the next one up on my list that I have here is eBay Drop Shipping specifically this is something that I've done for about six or seven years now doing it for a long time and what this involves is you posting up products to Ebay that you don't own or have in stock we get these items from other websites like Walmart AliExpress sometimes homedepot. com and this really allows you to get started for very cheap because you don't have to spend so much money or really any money on inventory up front now when someone buys it from you on eBay you just buy it from your supplier and enter in the buyer shipping address so the supplier ships it directly to the customer so this is really cheap to start very close to zero there's some software that we used that would make it if you're going to use that about twenty dollars a month or so pretty much under a hundred dollars definitely close to zero and there's a really high chance of success with this I've taught thousands of people how to do this it's what I talk about a lot of my channel and I've seen so many beginners actually get great results with this so I'm going to put this one right here around the cheapest to start and a really high likelihood of success with it the next side hustle I want to talk about is Amazon FBA so there's many different ways that you can do Amazon FBA specifically the one that I tried that I want to talk about is called eBay to Amazon and this is a method that was developed by my friend Steve it's kind of like online Arbitrage if you've ever heard of it so what we do is we order items from eBay and when they arrive we then list them for sale on Amazon send them into Amazon's warehouse and Amazon will take care of the Fulfillment after that they'll take care of shipping out the items returns all the customer service so once you get the items to Amazon it's really hands off and the benefit of using like eBay as a supplier as opposed to what most people do with online Arbitrage which is when they buy from like department stores is that you can really find scarce items that there's not many of so your competition is going to be really low with it now with this model though you do have to actually buy inventory up front and when I was doing it I was buying a lot of inventory I was spending thousands of dollars on inventory so I'm gonna put it up here but really what I was so surprised at How likely it was that all the products I listed sold so pretty much actually all the items I had listed for sale on Amazon that I use this method with sold eventually so there's a really high chance of success with this if you do it

correctly but it does cost thousands of dollars to actually buy up all of the inventory to really have a sustainable growing business with it so I'm going to put it right about here the next one I want to talk about is called affiliate marketing so affiliate marketing if you haven't heard of it that's when you recommend products or services to your friends and you give them a special link you say hey use this link when you sign up to for the service or this website or when you buy this product from Amazon and if they use that link you'll get a cut and you'll actually make a commission off of that this is as you might imagine really cheap to start it costs pretty much nothing to start you can just start posting these up on Facebook you can make YouTube videos which you can do for free you can post them on Tick Tock any social media but the problem is that to really make good money from it it's going to be really hard to do with affiliate marketing I'm going to put it really low chance of success and that's because in my experience to really get this to work you have to have some sort of following a YouTube channel that you build up you have to have a tick tock that you build up or an Instagram that you grow that you've grown quite large if you have that your chances of success are quite high but without that your chances are much lower you'll probably make some sales you'll probably definitely make some commissions but not a sustainable or really recognizable amount of money from it so I'm going to put it right there next one we'll talk about is any sort of day trading so I'm going to include in this stocks crypto I'm going to include in this 4X any sort of day trading where you're at your computer buying something on one day and then the same day selling it or vice versa this is something that does require some Capital to start you need the money that you invest up front that you can then trade with but you can start with just a couple hundred dollars with this the problem is that in my opinion and most financial advisors will tell you that day trading is very dangerous extremely risky and most people lose money with it we all kind of think that we can outsmart the market and that we can make money in the market where other people can't but that's just not true statistically that is not true so this costs you know somewhere around here however much you want to invest but honestly the chances of you being successful with it are pretty much damn near impossible so I'm going to put it all the way down here and of course there's always people that outsmart the market we always hear those stories but don't let that fool you into believing that you're going to be just as lucky as they are next thing I want to talk about is any sort of automation service so these are businesses that you can invest in as they like to say where you basically buy an Amazon store so you give them money they set up an Amazon FBA business for you or an Amazon Drop Shipping business for you and then it's completely hands-off for you they the company runs the entire automation store for you the first problem with these is that these cost over ten thousand dollars to get started usually closer to twenty five thousand dollars so completely off the chart the other problem with them is that I've heard of very few success stories with this so I'm going to put this all the way over here into a really low chance of success you're investing a lot of money into something that historically what we've seen doesn't produce any sort of income for the people that invested there was a company recently that did a lot of these Automation Services and they went bankrupt and none of their clients had any stores that were successful at all so I would stay far away from them they're very appealing because they seem so hands-off but I would stay well away from them next one I want to talk about is Shopify Drop Shipping this is when you actually Dropship onto your own website with Shopify you have to build a website you have to do product research and figure out a product that you want to sell on that website and the hardest part about this is that you have to pay for marketing to actually get people to visit your website marketing costs money building a website costs money because you have to pay for a domain name plan with Shopify that you might have to pay for a logo on Fiverr so there's several costs involved here it's going to be at least a thousand dollars or close to a thousand dollars I think you can get away with getting started for about a thousand dollars but when you start doing the ads that can get pretty expensive now this is a little bit tricky on the scale of success because there's if you do it right you can be successful with this and you can do really well with it I

have some friends that build up Shopify stores that made them thousands of dollars of profit a month and they're able to sell their store for tens of thousands of dollars but I've seen far more people who have tried to do it and we're not successful with Shopify Drop Shipping at all so it's kind of like anything else where if you really figure it out you can do well but overall I would say the likelihood of success is kind of like right in the middle I would put for this one um and I think for a lot of people where they're going to get tripped up is with the marketing because it's so hard to actually get people to visit your website so I'll put that one right there I want to talk about YouTube right now YouTube obviously if you make videos you can get paid by YouTube for all the ads that run on your videos and the cool thing is that you don't have to show your face like I am right now you can create these faceless YouTube channels there's a lot of them out there I was watching one the other day that was all different riddles so you would watch there would be a riddle it was very captivating really sucked you in I watched like 15 minutes of it you make a couple of those videos a week you're going to get a lot of views and a lot of watch time and it's really the watch time that determines how much you're paid how much time people spend watching your videos so this can be very cheap to start again if you have a smartphone you can record off of that you don't need really any fancy equipment when you start so assuming you have that the cost to get started can be zero dollars but just like a lot of the other things that we talked about like with Tick Tock the chances of you being success successful with it honestly are pretty low it is really hard to kind of break in and for most people they just don't have kind of the knowledge of which kinds of videos do well on YouTube and how to Target those videos so I would say the chances of success here are somewhere between medium and low with something like YouTube for that reason another one I want to talk about let's talk about something that's been uh around for a long time and that's blogging so this is when you create a website and put articles on that website the goal here is to get people to find your website when they search for something so let's say you really like fishing you can make a fishing website and then when someone searches for what is the best fishing rod to purchase hopefully your website comes up they get to visit your blog post about how you found the perfect fishing rod and what you think it is and you compare a whole bunch of different ones the way you get paid from this is you can actually run ads on your website or you can do affiliate marketing like we talked about before and actually put some affiliate links on your blog again this is pretty cheap to do I'm going to put this like sub a hundred dollars you can technically get started for zero dollars just by creating like a Wix website but you do want a custom domain and those can cost like fifteen twenty dollars you might want a custom theme as well so you know like sub 50 on this one but there is some money involved especially if you have to pay for hosting as well but again the likelihood of success with this I'm actually going to put pretty low I think it used to be a lot higher back in the day but now it's so much harder to rank on Google because so many people are competing for these keywords so and in addition to that so many people have kind of turned away from going to blogs and they prefer to watch videos on YouTube instead so I'm going to put blogging down here it's pretty low it's lower than YouTube because I think just the you reach that YouTube Hab has is really large so there are plenty of people that I've seen for instance I'm going to bump this one up a little bit because I just have thought about this there's so many videos that I've seen that have just gone viral on channels that don't have a lot of views so a person made a bunch of videos no one would really watched them then they made one video that got like over a million views so that one video is giving them maybe like a hundred dollars a month in passive income now so it is possible to have these viral videos even if you don't fully know what you're doing or you don't fully have a lot of experience on YouTube so I'll put that one right there next up we will talk about let's talk about chat GPT and specifically what I want to talk about is using AI in different ways to make money online and this can include chat gbt it can also include mid Journey which creates AI art for you it's a pretty broad category in general this is going to be really cheap to start chat GPT is free mid-journey does cost money I think

it's like 20 a month to get started so pretty low here to get started with this and I'm going to move this right now into kind of like the medium area because there are people who are making money with AI right now either that's by AI art that they're selling on Etsy my friend Patrick does that and he made a lot of videos about how he's doing that I've seen people kind of giving out services like making blog posts but instead they're just using chat TBT so it's kind of hot right now there's if you jump on this there is opportunity here but I think as time goes on and more people kind of get into the space and are more familiar with it this is going to get kind of less and less lucrative but right now there is some really good potential right here with different sort of AI art and AI writing and things like that and that kind of brings me to the next one which is drop servicing which I'm going to kind of lump those two together so drop servicing is where you provide a service to someone that you don't do yourself it's kind of like Drop Shipping so think of it this way the example that always comes to mind for me is I get these emails every day from people who tell me hey I want to make your YouTube thumbnails for you I'm going to charge you thirty dollars per thumbnail those people are probably if I say yes to them they're probably just going to go over to fiverr. com and find someone to do it for five dollars and then they're gonna pocket the 25 that's drop servicing right the drop servicer all they're doing is kind of giving customer service and being the one who reaches out to the person who needs the service done but they're not actually doing it themselves this is pretty much zero dollars to start maybe you have to build a website to look a little bit more legitimate which as we talked about before is like around fifty dollars or so and you can use something like chat gbt because you can say hey I'll write a blog post for you and just have chat gbt do it you can say hey I can create art for you and just have mid-journey do it or something like that so those two can really work hand in hand together quite well the problem with it is that it can become very saturated like I said I get those emails like probably like three of them a day so they just immediately get trashed at this point so it can become saturated but if you get creative especially with the AI stuff going on I think there's still opportunity here to make some money with this and it's pretty much zero dollars to start this um this is getting a bit cluttered and in here but we'll do a recap at the end to kind of make sense of all of it next one I want to talk about before we talk about the final one here is wholesale Drop Shipping so this is when you drop ship I have experienced doing this on eBay but instead of using retail suppliers like we talked about before you're going to use wholesale suppliers now the cost to get started with this is going to be higher I'm going to put it somewhere between a hundred and five hundred dollars only because in order to do this you actually have to get set up as a real business that sometimes costs some money it's definitely going to cost you at least some time and you might even need to build a website to look legitimate so it's probably closer to a hundred dollars but it's not nothing right but the chances of success with this are really the likelihood of doing well with this I'm going to put like right here it's not as guaranteed as something like eBay Drop Shipping with from retail stores but if you do get it right if you find a good wholesale supplier you get connected with them and you find some good products with them you can do really well very consistently without a lot of extra work on your part it's just getting to that point which is honestly difficult for a lot of people that's why I'm kind of putting it over here in this area and the final one I want to talk about is Facebook Marketplace Drop Shipping this is very similar to eBay Drop Shipping which we talked about in the beginning where we're selling products from Like Home Depot and Walmart but instead of selling them on eBay we're selling them on Facebook Marketplace and the cool thing about this is that Facebook Marketplace is hot there's a lot of people there just like with eBay the customers are already there so you don't have to pay for marketing like you do with Shopify Drop Shipping very low cost to get started very low barrier to get started because you don't even need to sign up for it as long as you have a Facebook account you're ready to go there's no upfront cost involved all you need is a credit card to fulfill the orders until Facebook releases the money to you so I'm also going to put this one right here because we're seeing a lot of people have a lot of success with Facebook Marketplace especially because it is so hot and new and untapped like a

lot of the other different ways to make money online so as you see a lot of the businesses I've focused on over the past five six seven years are ones that cost low amount of money to get started and that's because I know that it's something that is really appealing for people like you who don't have a lot of money to invest to get started because that's where I was seven years ago before I got started with all this now the one business here that really took off for me and allowed me to quit my job and to start making these videos was eBay Drop Shipping and has continued to be one of the best ways I've ever found to make money online especially for beginners that was really until Facebook Marketplace came along because Facebook Marketplace I would say is just as equivalent it's just as good of an opportunity and it's just as easy and low cost to get started there's a lot of other cool stuff in here you know different things I would stay away from I would stay from automation I wouldn't do Shopify Drop Shipping at first that you can do after some experience things like Tick Tock and affiliate marketing and you know I you know they work but you know it's not the best use of your time things more over here are better use of your time definitely stay away from any sort of day trading and automation and Amazon FBA you know it's a really good option if you have Revenue sorry income sorry money I should say to invest up front into the business it is a really good option like I said every product I purchased using the method that I have learned sold so my fear with something like FBA is that the products that I buy are never going to sell but using this method they all actually sold at some point I never lost money on any of them so it is a really good option if you do have some money to invest up front now obviously there's a lot more that goes into each of these different side hustles and different ways to make money online so do me a favor comment down below which of these two you are the most interested in and I'll make sure to make some in-depth videos about how those different side hustles work or if you're really eager and you want to get started right now I do have a course that teaches you how to drop ship onto eBay and I have another one that teaches you how to drop ship onto Facebook Marketplace the links for those will be in the description down below or you can just go to dropshipping titans. com to learn more about them but if you're just here for the YouTube videos then check out this one right here it's like an in-depth guide into how eBay Drop Shipping works you can click on it it's perfect for beginners and I'll see you over there in just one second