How I set up 10 income streams in lockdown

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

In March of 2020, the whole world came to a stand still. Some discovered the definition of furlough whilst others worked from home or sadly were left unemployed. I decided to set up 10 streams of income so that if a situation like that occurred again, I would be financially prepared (more so than I was first time around). It is now November 2020 and the 2nd lockdown has been announced in the UK.

Below are the income streams that I set up in the past 6 months.

1. Investing — I shifted my portfolio to shares offering a dividend and to funds. This meant my risk was significantly lower than it was before where I was holding individual growth stocks. It also meant that I was being paid dividend income.
2. Affiliate marketing — This one is pretty easy, find something that you already use, this might be an insurance company, a piece of software or perhaps a product that you bought on amazon. Most of these will have an affiliate program. An affiliate will get a commission every time someone uses their personalised code.
3. Freelancing — Sites like upwork and fiverr are perfect for freelancers to create a profile. Businesses will search for individuals with certain skills whether it be digital content creators, editors or CV writers. Many freelancers are paid a respectable fee for such services. It takes several minutes to sign up and you're ready to go.
4. Dropshipping — This one takes a lot more effort and research. Dropshipping is basically where you find a product at a low price from a site like aliexpress and you sell it on your own website, pocketing the profit. You are responsible for marketing costs and creating your website. Host sites such as shopify and woocommerce make this easy.
5. Buying and selling — Similar to the above but on a smaller scale. This includes finding products on places like facebook marketplace and reselling them for more money, whilst you keep the difference as profit.
6. Article writing — If you’re like me and went to university or college, you’ll definitely have above-average writing skills. You can create articles and post them on sites such as this one (Medium) and everytime someone reads your article, you’ll gain a small income.
7. Selling photos — There are so many websites where you can find free pictures nowadays, these include Pixabay, Unsplash and Burst. What you may not know is that these places pay people for their images. Afterall, they have to come from somewhere.
8. Teach — Creating a course on a site like teachable is super easy and it allows you to share your knowledge with other people interested in that subject. Now you may think “what do I teach”, I guarantee that you know something that someone else wants to learn. Whether it be cooking/ finance/ sewing/ blog writing or something different entirely, you can create a course for it and set your price. The best thing about this is that you can set and forget, once you create the course, you may need to keep it up to day but apart from that it is entirely passive.
9. Youtube — Smart phones have brilliant cameras, which makes it all the easier to start up a youtube channel. Similarly to the above, you probably know something that someone else want to learn or listen to. There are youtubers who makes 000’s passively by posting weekly videos of them enjoying their hobbies or talking about something they love.
10. Royalties/Licensing — This is where you create a product, an idea or a process and you let someone else use it. In return, they pay you a small fee. The product can be a song or a piece of music or an idea for a new product or design.

Honourable mentions —These are income streams where I thought about it but ultimately I didn't go ahead with them.

• Surveys — Apps like Streetbees allow people like us to pick and choose surveys to answer and in return, we get paid. Each survey can take anywhere between 2–5minutes and you’ll get paid anywhere between £0.20 — £2.00 per survey. The more you do, the more surveys you unlock. You do eventually unlock the higher paid surveys and this is where you can earn a considerable amount of money.
• Rental income — If you have a guest house or a separate house that you use as a holiday home, this may be the one for you. Unfortunately I don't have either of the above so couldn’t go ahead with this one.
• Write an ebook — Similar to teachable, this is a create and forget. That being said, once you create an ebook, you will need to find an audience/market to buy it.

If any of the above are calling out to you, do a simple Medium/Google/Youtube search and find more information out about it, as I realise I have only provided the summary of each income stream.

Thank you so much for reading and keep well.