Best Online Side Hustles for Teens
One of the best online side hustles for teens these days is creating and selling video gaming content to online marketers. To succeed, content marketers in the gaming niche need quality articles, and it’s teens who game that have the skills and knowledge to deliver those articles.
With that in mind, if you’re a teenager, it’s important you don’t undersell yourself just because you’re young! Here we share five tips on how to get started turning your video gaming knowledge into an online side hustle.
Tip 1: Your Customer
Statista, an online consumer and market data platform, estimates that the video gaming market is set to reach revenue of US$197 billion in 2022. With growing markets such as this, more people enter them to make a profit from selling advertising space, physical products or doing affiliate marketing.
One way they do this is by establishing content-based websites that focus on a particular niche within the video gaming industry. For example, PCGamer.com specialize in covering content related to PC games, whilst FortniteInsider.com specialize in publishing content related to the game Fortnite.
To be able to grow their audience and remain competitive, these types of video gaming focused online businesses need to regularly publish helpful content. But everyone who starts a business like this doesn’t necessarily have the skills and knowledge to write on the subject. And that is exactly who your customer is!
In fact, the Google Trends tool shows a stable and growing trend over time for the search term “buy content”. This is where your video gaming knowledge and a market need intersect, making it one of the best side hustles for teenage gamers.
Tip 2: Choose an Online Marketplace
There are loads of online gig marketplaces where you can offer your content creation services, but don’t be tempted to create profiles at them all. Instead, choose one and focus on establishing your profile there over time.
Fiverr is one such platform to get started on. It’s free to register and once you’re set up you can create “gigs”, outlining the skills you have and the related services you offer. If you’re 18 years or older you can create your own account. If you’re at least 13 years old but under 18 years, you must use an account belonging to your parent or guardian (with their permission). Learn more about Fiverr’s terms of service here.
Safety is the most important thing when it comes to communicating online. Never communicate or process payments outside the platform you’re working on, and always report issues to customer support.
Tip 3: Know Your Value
How much you earn for the content you create will be determined by a combination of things. For example, if there are lots of people competing for gigs writing about Fortnite, the high competition can drive down prices.
Also, each content creator will have different levels of skills and knowledge with different games, which will impact how much they’ll be paid. Knowing where your specific strengths are, and discovering how much competition there is in that area, will help you determine how much to charge.
All that being said, when you’re first starting out as a new seller, buyers can be a little wary. This means at the outset you may have to charge less to build up a history of positive reviews.
Tip 4: Know Your Priorities
The good thing about gig marketplaces is you can control how much work you take on, how fast you’ll agree to complete it and when. This flexibility ensures that you’re able to prioritize school or university work over gig work. Fiverr has simple steps on how to set limits on the number of orders that can be queued up and also how to pause your gig completely whenever needed.
Tip 5: Be Patient
It can take some time to get your first order and build up a customer base, so patience is definitely needed when starting out. Fiverr have excellent tips and free courses to help out new sellers, and these are definitely worth exploring to improve your chances of success.
Additionally, you will likely find it time consuming at first when creating articles or video content. However, rest assured, you will get faster with experience, and also by creating repeatable processes to follow.
There are many avenues you can pursue to turn your video gaming knowledge into a rewarding side hustle—creating content for online businesses is in our opinion one of the best though. Not only does it provide gamers like you with a side hustle income, it also ensures the people reading the articles receive content that is actually helpful. And that means everybody wins!
