I Tried 7 Online Side Hustles. Here’s What Actually Paid.

Alston Godbolt was making $48,000 a year running a satellite campus for a private university. He had the car he wanted. Life was fine. Then one October he found out he and his wife were having twins, and “fine” stopped being an option. Going from two people to four (and eventually three kids under three) meant $48,000 a year was no longer going to cut it. So he did what you probably did: hit YouTube, typed in “how to make money online,” and started clicking on everything that looked promising.

What followed was a decade of trial and error across 30 to 40 different side hustles. This post covers the 7 most talked-about ones he actually tried, ranked from worst to best based on real results. Some of these you should skip entirely. A couple of them can change your financial life if you do them right. By the end, you will know exactly which one fits where you are right now.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why surveys are a time trap that earned less than $20 across years of trying
The real math on microtasks vs. a part-time job at a gas station paying $17 per hour
Why pay-to-play phone games like Solitaire Cash are closer to gambling than to a side hustle
How freelance services can pay $2,500 for three hours of work, and why they are still only a B
What it actually takes to earn consistent income on YouTube beyond hitting the 1,000 subscriber threshold
Why affiliate marketing without email is leaving most of your commissions on the table
How to find the specific side hustle that matches your current skills and timeline at finder.platformproof.com

The D/F Tier: Side Hustles That Sound Easy and Pay Almost Nothing

Before getting to what works, it is worth spending real time on what does not. These three show up constantly in YouTube thumbnails and Reddit threads. They are easy to start, which is exactly why so many people waste weeks on them before realizing the math will never work out. Alston tried all three and graded them D or F.

Side Hustle 1: Online Surveys

The pitch for surveys is that you sign up, fill out a form, and get paid. That is technically true, in the same way a scratch ticket technically pays out. Here is how survey sites actually work: you create an account and enter your biographical information, including education level, income, and household size. Then you receive a list of available surveys and start getting emails with new ones whenever studies open up.

Three things they do not explain upfront. First, most surveys begin with a pre-screening questionnaire to determine whether you qualify. You can spend five to ten minutes on that screening, fail to qualify, and earn nothing. Second, they do not pay you in dollars. They pay you in points that you convert to gift cards later. Five thousand points sounds like a lot until you find out it equals a $3 PayPal credit. That gap between points and real money is not accidental. It is designed to make you feel like you are earning more than you are. Third, surveys disappear fast. If a study only needs ten participants and you see the email while you are driving, by the time you sit down to respond the survey is already full.

Alston spent hours filling out surveys on his couch during the period he was trying to make extra money for his growing family. His total earnings across the entire time: less than $20. The only people who reliably make money from surveys are the sites themselves, who sell the collected data to third-party clients, and the affiliates who promote survey sites through referral links. If someone you follow is recommending surveys, look for their referral link. That tells you most of what you need to know about their incentive.

Side Hustle 2: Microtasks

Microtasks are small digital jobs: labeling images, categorizing data, identifying objects in photos, transcribing short audio clips. The most well-known platform is Amazon Mechanical Turk. Others include Microtask and Pico Tasks, which is more common in the Philippines. The idea is that you stack up enough of these small jobs to amount to meaningful income over time.

The math does not cooperate. Each task pays between a fraction of a cent and a few cents. People who have spent time on these platforms will tell you to wait until you find the good tasks that pay better rates. But the time you spend hunting for those tasks is also unpaid time. Between the search, the screening, and the actual task, the effective hourly rate for most users is far below what any local employer pays. Alston’s total from microtasks: again, less than $20.

His comparison is direct. A gas station near him pays $17 per hour. That is a real, consistent, skill-building job with a guaranteed paycheck. If you have a few free hours and genuinely need money, a part-time hourly job pays more, teaches transferable skills, and does not require hunting for the right task listing. Microtasks offer flexibility, but flexibility at effective pennies per hour is not a trade worth making when real alternatives exist.

Side Hustle 3: Pay-to-Play App Games

You have seen the ads. Solitaire Cash, Bingo Cash, and dozens of variations fill TikTok and Instagram feeds with promises that you can get paid just for playing a game you already know. The hook is always the same: a free download, a small starting bonus that might be $3 in your new account, and an interface that shows you winning. The problem surfaces when you try to actually collect that money.

Here is how the economics work in practice. Take Solitaire Cash as a concrete example. You enter a head-to-head game for $0.50. The prize pool is $1.00. But that dollar does not go to the winner. It splits across the top finishers, something like $0.60 for first, $0.30 for second, $0.10 for third. Meanwhile the app keeps a cut of every entry fee. And the opponents you are playing against? Alston never once saw evidence of competing against a real human. The matches appear designed to keep the game close and keep you entering another round.

Withdrawal thresholds are intentionally high. You usually need $5 to $10 before cashing out, and payouts come as Amazon gift cards or PayPal credits rather than straight cash. To keep playing without running out of credits, you either return every day for a tiny daily bonus or you deposit real money. The design is not a side hustle. It is a slot machine with a card game on top. Alston’s warning is specific: anyone with an addictive personality or a family history of addiction should stay away from these entirely, because the mechanism is built the same way gambling is built. The risk is not just wasted time.

The B Tier: Side Hustles That Pay Real Money With Real Limits

The next two are a significant step up from the D/F tier. They generate actual income and can build real skills. But they both have a ceiling and a friction point that keeps them out of the top rank.

Side Hustle 4: Selling Services (Freelancing)

This is where Alston first made real money online. His specific service was building five-page WordPress websites for small businesses and churches. He chose that market deliberately. Small businesses need a website but often do not understand enough about web design to know what to ask for or how to evaluate quality. They care about the end result, looking professional and findable online, not the technical process underneath. That knowledge gap is exactly where a service provider can step in and charge well.

His starting price was $300 per site. He had a mental block about charging more because he assumed the skill was too common to justify a premium. The market corrected that belief quickly. Once he realized clients cared about outcomes more than technical complexity, he raised his prices. By the time he had a few completed sites and a refined process, he was charging $2,500 per client and completing each site in roughly three hours. That works out to around $833 per hour on completed work. The same skill, the same deliverable, just a clearer understanding of the value being exchanged.

The services category is much broader than WordPress websites. Video editing, short-form editing for TikTok and Reels, thumbnail design, social media scheduling, resume writing, email drafting, virtual assistant tasks, and proofreading are all services that content creators and small businesses pay for regularly. If you do not have a marketable skill yet, Alston’s suggestion is to spend a few weeks on YouTube learning one and building a small portfolio of sample work, even at a discount, before charging full price. The skill exists in you already or it is a few weeks of free education away.

So why is services only a B? Two reasons. First, it is active income. You get paid when you complete work. You do not get paid while you are searching for clients, writing pitches, or in between projects. To maintain steady monthly income from services, you have to keep a full pipeline at all times, which is unpaid hustle layered on top of the paid work. Second, client management is genuinely difficult. Alston had a professor in Atlanta ghost him after a completed website was delivered. A church in Virginia stopped answering his calls and emails once the site went live. He lost the time and the payment on both. The lesson he took from those situations: always collect at least 50% upfront before starting any work, regardless of how trustworthy the client seems in the early conversations.

Side Hustle 5: Making YouTube Videos

This is not Alston’s first YouTube channel, which itself tells you something about how hard the path actually is. Being a YouTuber carries real benefits, but the way most people approach it leads straight to frustration and abandonment.

To qualify for the YouTube Partner Program and start earning ad revenue, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. For most new creators, hitting those numbers takes six months to a year of consistent weekly uploads. After monetization, earnings depend heavily on CPM, which stands for cost per thousand views and shifts constantly based on month, geography, and content niche. Viewers in the United States generate higher ad rates than viewers in most other countries. Finance and business content earns more per view than entertainment content. Your monthly check will peak in Q4 during the holiday advertising season and drop noticeably in January and February. None of that is in your control.

The real benefit of YouTube is longevity. Alston has videos from five, six, and seven years ago that still pull views and income. You record once and the content keeps working. But that passive quality is partly an illusion. To stay in the algorithm and grow your subscriber count, you have to keep uploading consistently. The moment you take an extended break, growth stalls and the algorithm stops favoring your content. You also do not own the audience. YouTube gives you general analytics but keeps the actual customer data, including email addresses and purchase behavior, entirely to itself. That structural limit becomes obvious when you compare YouTube to the top two options below.

Not sure which side hustle fits your situation right now?

Answer a few questions and get a specific recommendation matched to your skills and timeline at finder.platformproof.com.

The A Tier: Side Hustles That Build Something You Own

The top two options share one trait the D/F and B tiers all lack: they build an asset you control. Not a platform algorithm. Not a client relationship. Not a point balance on someone else’s server. Something you own, that you can monetize repeatedly without starting from zero each time a project ends or a client ghosts you.

Side Hustle 6: Affiliate Marketing (B+ / A-)

Affiliate marketing means recommending other people’s products and earning a commission every time someone buys through your link. You do not handle inventory, shipping, returns, or customer service. You find a product your audience genuinely needs, explain why it is good, and get paid a percentage of every sale.

Alston holds up a Warm Audio WA47 Junior microphone as a concrete example. It is a well-known product that retails for around $200. As an affiliate through Amazon, Sweetwater, or Best Buy, he earns 3 to 7% per sale. The product already has brand recognition, so the trust barrier is lower than it would be for an unknown brand. Affiliate marketing also works anywhere in the world. If someone in Brazil or Germany sees the value in a product, they can buy it. There is no geographic restriction on commissions.

The B+ grade rather than a straight A comes down to one mistake most beginners make: dropping affiliate links in video descriptions and waiting for sales. Research on buying behavior shows that most people need between 7 and 11 exposures to a product or brand before they feel comfortable making a purchase. A single YouTube description link is one exposure. If someone watches your video and leaves without clicking, that opportunity is gone. You have no way to follow up. The link sits there until the video is forgotten.

Email changes the math entirely. When someone opts into your email list, you can contact them the next day, the next week, and the next month. You can share a breakdown, answer a common objection, tell a personal story about using the product, or show a comparison against the competition. By the time they are ready to buy, they have heard from you multiple times and the trust is already established. Alston was open about leaving significant money on the table early in his affiliate career because he skipped email. He has a commission plaque on his wall, and he says the number would be larger if he had started collecting emails from the first day. The lesson cost him real income to learn.

Side Hustle 7: Digital Products (A+)

Digital products sit at the top of the ranking. A digital product is anything you create once on a computer and sell virtually: a PDF guide, a checklist, a template, an ebook, a mini-course, a swipe file. You create it once and it can sell 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without you being available or even awake. No inventory. No shipping. No expiration date. The economics are different from everything else on this list.

Sell a $27 product and after the payment processor takes its cut, roughly 95% of that sale is yours. Compare that to affiliate marketing at 3 to 7% commission on someone else’s product, and the margin difference is obvious. Alston’s recommendation is to price digital products under $47. Low enough that the decision to buy is easy. High enough that the buyer takes it seriously and actually uses it. That combination, easy to buy and genuinely used, is what turns a one-time buyer into a repeat customer.

His example product is a step-by-step YouTube channel planner: a cheat sheet for someone who wants to start a channel but does not know where to begin. A product like that can be built in a weekend. Anyone who buys it has demonstrated two things: they have a specific problem, and they will spend money to solve it. That makes them a buyer. A list of buyers is worth more than a list of followers or subscribers because the people on it have already made a purchasing decision with you. Selling to a past buyer is dramatically easier than converting a cold viewer who has never spent money with you.

The other reason digital products sit at the top is flexibility. You can promote the same product on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, or in a Facebook group. The product goes wherever your content takes it. There is no platform lock-in. And inside the product itself, you can embed affiliate recommendations. A buyer of your YouTube channel starter guide is already interested in microphones, cameras, and editing software. When you include affiliate links to the specific gear you use, you are not selling to them a second time. You are answering a question they were going to ask anyway. The same buyer can generate income from the product sale and from an affiliate commission when they purchase a recommended tool, all from one customer relationship built on delivering something genuinely useful.

Honest Drawbacks of the Top Two Options

Both affiliate marketing and digital products require something the D/F tier does not: an audience and patience. You cannot do affiliate marketing effectively without some kind of platform to reach people, whether that is a YouTube channel, an email list, a social media account, or some combination. Building that audience takes months, not days. If you need income in the next two to four weeks, freelance services is actually the faster path to cash. You can pitch a potential client today and have money before the month ends.

Digital products also require that you have something worth selling. If you are brand new to a topic and do not yet have results or a track record, creating a product that delivers genuine value is harder. The honest path through that constraint is to start learning publicly, document your process as you go, and build the product as you develop the skill. Many successful digital products are written by people who are one step ahead of their buyer, not decades ahead. But there is a ramp-up period, and treating digital products as a get-rich-quick option is the fastest way to burn out on them before they have a chance to work.

The Decision Framework: Which Side Hustle Fits Your Situation

Here is how to choose based on where you are right now:

You need income in the next 30 days: Start with services. Identify one skill you have, pick a specific type of client (local businesses, churches, content creators, nonprofits), and pitch five people this week. Charge less than you think you should to get the first few done, collect 50% upfront every time, and raise your rate after you have three completed projects to show.
You have 3 to 6 months and want something that compounds: Start building an email list alongside a content platform. Create one piece of content per week. After 60 days of consistent output, create your first digital product and sell it to the audience you have built, even if that audience is small. A hundred buyers is a real business. A million passive followers who have never bought is not.
You already have an audience somewhere: You are leaving money on the table right now. You should be doing affiliate marketing paired with an email list and creating at least one low-ticket digital product this month. Both can run at the same time, and the combination produces more income than either one alone.
You do not know what skill you have or where to start: Answer a few questions at finder.platformproof.com and get a specific match based on your background, available time, and income goal. Generic advice is the reason most people try the wrong thing first and waste months on it.

Find Your X

Ten years of side hustle trial and error across 30 to 40 different options produced one clear conclusion: the best side hustle is not the most impressive-sounding one. It is the one that matches your current skill level, available time, and income timeline. finder.platformproof.com is a free tool built to make that match. No generic recommendations, no one-size-fits-all answer, just a specific starting point based on where you actually are right now.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did Alston actually make from surveys and microtasks?

Less than $20 from each, across multiple years of attempting them. He is explicit about that number in the video. When you divide those total earnings by the hours spent filling out surveys on the couch or working through Amazon Mechanical Turk task queues, the effective hourly rate is far below any local part-time job. The time investment was real. The payoff was not.

Are app games like Solitaire Cash ever a legitimate way to earn money?

Alston’s conclusion after playing them for hours is no. He never made real money, never saw evidence of competing against a real human opponent, and found that the entry fee structure consistently takes more than it pays back to most players. The design pushes you toward depositing money to keep playing, and the withdrawal thresholds are high enough that most users never reach a real payout. His specific warning is for anyone with an addictive personality: the mechanism is close enough to gambling that it carries real risk beyond just wasted time.

What services can someone sell online if they do not know how to build websites?

Many marketable services require no technical background. Video editing, short-form video editing for TikTok and Reels, thumbnail design, social media scheduling and posting, resume writing, email drafting, virtual assistant work, proofreading, and transcription are all things content creators and small businesses pay for regularly. If you do not have a skill that feels marketable yet, Alston’s suggestion is to spend a few weeks on YouTube learning one and building two or three sample pieces you can show potential clients, even if you do them free or at a steep discount to start.

How much should you charge for your first freelance project?

Alston started at $300 for a five-page WordPress website, a price he now considers too low. He eventually reached $2,500 for the same deliverable after building a track record. His advice is to charge at the lower end for the first few projects to get completed work you can reference, then raise your rate with each subsequent client once you have evidence of results. The most important rule he learned through painful experience: always collect at least 50% upfront before starting any work. A professor in Atlanta and a church in Virginia both received completed sites and then stopped responding. He lost both the payment and the time on those jobs.

What does it actually take to make real money on YouTube?

The minimum requirement for YouTube ad revenue is 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. But ad revenue alone at that threshold is modest. Creators who make meaningful income from YouTube typically use it as a traffic source for other income streams: digital products, affiliate offers, and email list building. Alston’s approach treats YouTube as a distribution channel, not a paycheck source. The platform delivers audiences. The digital products and affiliate programs convert them into income. Relying on YouTube ad revenue alone means your income is entirely in the hands of the algorithm and advertisers, neither of which you control.

Why does affiliate marketing need email marketing to work well?

Buyer behavior research shows that most people need 7 to 11 exposures to a product or brand before they feel comfortable making a purchase. If you post your affiliate link in a YouTube description and someone watches the video without clicking, that opportunity is gone. You have no way to reach them again. If you have their email address, you can follow up the next day with a personal story, the week after with a comparison, and the month after with a case study. Each email is another touchpoint, building the trust that converts a curious viewer into a buyer. Without email, you are betting every sale on a single impression with no follow-up path.

What kind of digital product should someone create first?

Alston recommends something priced under $47 that solves one specific, named problem for one specific type of person. His own example was a step-by-step YouTube channel planner, a cheat sheet for someone who wants to start a channel and does not know where to begin. Other examples might be a budget template for a particular life situation, a beginner meal plan for a specific dietary goal, or a content calendar for a particular niche. The product does not need to be long or complex. It needs to solve one clear problem well enough that the buyer feels the price was completely worth it and would recommend it to someone in the same situation.

Can you combine multiple side hustles at the same time?

Yes, and Alston specifically recommends pairing digital products with affiliate marketing. Inside a digital product, you can include a recommended tools page with affiliate links to products related to the topic. Someone who buys your YouTube channel planner is already interested in microphones, cameras, and editing software. The affiliate links inside the product answer a question they were going to ask anyway, rather than feeling like a sales pitch layered on top of the purchase. The combination means one buyer can generate income in two ways: once from the product sale and again from an affiliate commission when they purchase a tool you recommended. Both happen because you delivered something genuinely useful.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “I Tried 7 Online Side Hustles Here’s What Actually Paid,” YouTube: https://youtu.be/7-mANH2Sp2A
Amazon Mechanical Turk microtask platform: amazon.com/mturk
Warm Audio WA47 Junior microphone: warmaudio.com
YouTube Partner Program eligibility requirements: support.google.com

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.