✅ Tech side hustles

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The gig economy has made tech side hustles popular. Really popular. 2.8 million of us in the UK have worked within the gig economy in the last 12 months (source).

There’s money to be made, and a lot of it!

No longer do you have to work for one company in one department, you can now take on a side job in tech in your spare time and earn some serious cash for it.

We’ve got 10 pretty awesome tech side hustles for you here, and best of all, they’re easy to get started with.

✅ Tech side jobs

These tech side jobs are some of the most lucrative you can start. There’s huge demand for tech freelancers and with more and more of us working at home, so a tech side hustle might just be the perfect second income.

Web designer

Designing websites is creative, fun and pays well.

With hundreds of millions of websites created every single year, if you can create a website, you can turn it into a tech side hustle.

Many websites online today use a CMS (a content management system) like this one you’re on right now. We built this site in WordPress, and it’s a great choice for building a new site.

There’s competition for sure, but price yourself reasonably and fairly and you’ll build up a client base who then recommend you in Facebook groups and within their business world.

Many people prefer recommendations than randomly picking someone online.

This side hustle can also be a good way to break into the industry and gain experience if you think it might be a career choice you’d like to explore.

Where to start

Set yourself up a free profile on Fiverr and Upwork to get yourself up and running.

Average rates

The official rates for a website designer on Fiverr is between £100 – £3000, so not especially helpful :)
However, as a website designer you won’t always be creating a whole site from scratch, so a whole site would be at the top of the scale.

UX designer

UX (User eXperience) designers are concerned with the way a user interacts with a website.

They work alongside visual designers and their job is to make sure the website design works well for the end user alongside looking aesthetically pleasing.

UX designers have become more common in recent years as companies realise the importance of making the user journey as good as possible, but it can be hard to get your foot in the door.

Offering UX services as a freelancer will help you gain experience you’ll be able to add to your CV, while making you a decent side income.

UX Planet has some great free UX courses you can take if this is something that interests you.

Average rates

Between £15 – £75 hourly

Web developer

Web developers are often grouped together with web designers and to a point they can both do the same thing, but a web developer is more focused on the back-end of a site, as in the build and construction of the site, while a designer will be more focused on just that, design.

Both are likely to be able to handle building a site from scratch. In bigger companies the ‘dev’ team tends to handle the backend while working alongside the designers, but in freelancing the borders are a bit blurrier!

Average rates

Depending on your experience and level of expertise, you could charge between £15 – £65 an hour, however, many developers creating a site from scratch will quote total cost fee rather than charge by the hour.

SEO consultant

For many websites on the internet, their aim is to be number one on the Google search results page. It can lead to more business for the site owners and better exposure for them.

Being an SEO as a side hustle will involve firstly having your own proven site to show you know what you’re doing, staying up to date on SEO best practices, knowing how to carry out keyword research and optimise content for search engines, among many other things.

If you know your SEO and have a proven site that ranks well to show for it, you could get SEO work as your tech side hustle.

Moz is a well known SEO authority and offer some great free SEO courses.

Average rates

Current SEO rates for freelancers are between £10 – £55 an hour.

Content writer

Content writers make up a good portion of the freelancers advertising their skills online. Amazing content writers are harder to come by :)

If your grasp of language is fantastic and your spelling and grammar are near perfect, you’ll be highly in demand as a copy writer.

It’s a good idea to know how to research topics and you’ll get extra brownie points if you know how to keyword your content. Familiarise yourself with the most common website platform, WordPress, and you’ll have repeat work and recommendations from happy customers.

There are 4.54 billion pages on the internet (source). The majority of those pages contain some form of copy. The work is endless!

Average rates

Expect around £0.04 per word to start, and anything up to £0.15 per word once you’ve built your reputation up. Good content writers are quite hard to find, people are willing to pay more once you’ve proved your worth!

Social media manager

If all those hours you’ve spent on social media have turned you into something of an expert, you may be surprised to know it’s a valuable skill you’ve picked up and could potentially earn you some pretty awesome side hustle money.

With 3.8 billion of us globally, regularly using social media, the need for businesses to have their own accounts are obvious.

Many companies, especially smaller ones, simply don’t have the time to put into learning how to use social media and growing their audiences. So they look for people who do know how to grow a social media account and pass over that task to them.

Many businesses want a social media manager to post frequently, and so they employ them on a rolling basis, so for a monthly fee, you’ll be doing X,Y&Z.

Make sure you’re clear with any clients what they’ll get for their money, and keep them updated on results. A customer who sees results will stay as a customer and pass your details onto their colleagues.

Average rates

Starting our a social media manager might charge £10- £15 an hour, or a monthly fee equivalent to several hours work, depending on what the client wants done.

More experienced social media managers who run all the social media for a company might be looking at earning between £300 -£600 a month from each client, depending on the level of management the client needs.

Website testing

Testing websites is one of those tech side hustles that many people don’t realise even exists! However, you really can get paid test websites.

We talked about UX designers earlier and how their job is to make a site as easy and user friendly as possible. Well after they’ve done their job, they need people to test it and see of they’ve done their job well or not. It’s hard to see the wood for the trees when you’ve been staring at the same thing for hours, and a ‘User test’ is the perfect way to make sure the designers are on the right track!

You can register with any number of agencies online who’re employed by businesses to do their user testing. These agencies then pay you and I to test them.

After you’ve registered with an agency, they’ll ask you a bit about yourself and your interests so they can try and profile the right user to the right test, and once they’ve done this you’ll be offered work as and when it comes up.

I will say this isn’t regular work and although it’s very well paid, it’s sporadic and can’t be relied on.

Usertesting and Userlytics are a couple of good sites to get you started.

Average rates

Small testing jobs might pay you £3 – £4, whilst big testing jobs that take a couple of hours might pay you up to £50. These are rare though and don’t come up often, but they do come up occasionally.

IT support

IT support is one of those things that you likely know far more about than you think you do. Using computers over a number of years and trouble shooting your own problems put you in a good place to help other people with theirs.

I doubt there’s a person alive who knows everything there is to know about IT and luckily, you don’t have to know it all. As you take on jobs and find yourself Googling things you’ll learn more and many people have the same IT issues, so you’ll have soon seen it all before!

Google offers its Google IT support course that you can take to make sure you’re up to speed, then you’re good to go.

Average rates

Anything between £10 – £25 an hour is what you might expect to earn.

Virtual assistant

Virtual assistant work can cover any number of things. They might write copy, the might make pins for Pinterest, they might book appointments or they might reply to emails.

There’s no one job description that covers the work a VA might do, although they’re common among small business owners who need the help a VA can offer, but don’t have the budget for a permanent member of staff.

To offer your services as a VA for your tech side hustle, you’ll need to be competent in many areas and have basic secretarial skills. Typing, a good grasp of language and some design skills are all preferable.

There are also VAs who specialise in one or a few areas. So for example, if you specialise in WordPress you might take the content from the content writer and format it in WordPress so it’s ready to be published.

Another popular area VAs work in is Pinterest. More of a search engine than a social media, if you know Pinterest and can grow a Pinterest account, you’ll be in demand, especially in the blogging world!

There are a number of free Pinterest guides you can read, this one from Neil Patel is a great place to start. Once you’ve made your way through the free material, it might be a good idea to look at some more advanced courses to out you at the top of your game.

This one from Create & Go will get you where you need to be!

Average rates

VA’s charge anywhere between £10 – £20 an hour.

App developer

Worth a predicted $407 billion by 2026, app developers are becomming more and more in demand. Once reserved for huge companies who had the money to fund an app build, almost anyone now can get an app onto the market.

Developing apps and building them from scratch needs you to know a different type of code from computer code, for i0s it’s called X code, android has it’s own.

However, there are now app builders that take away the need to know any app language at all, and allow you to almost ‘drag & drop’ build an app, although you’ll still need to have some app building knowledege.

For Android, this course from Developers and for Apple, their own Apple course will start you off on the right track.

Average rates

The pays good. You’re looking at starting off on about £20 per hour when you’re starting out and £70 – £80 per hour once you’ve built a portfolio and really know your stuff!

✅ What are the most profitable side hustles?

Right now, the most profitable side hustles you can start earning from quickly are in tech.

Having a tech side hustle will mean you’ll be earning some of the highest freelance hourly fees around.

Setting up a longer term business as your hustle would likely over time also produce some pretty decent income (if you’re successful!) but these tech hustles take very little time to get going and you could earn cash the same week you start!

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