Becoming a Millionaire with Side Hustles (April 2025)

Finance

Apr 30

This month, I decided to streamline my side hustles by removing anything that leaned too heavily on my existing credentials. While it was tough to say goodbye to affiliate marketing and Google AdSense, I felt they had an unfair advantage because of my well-established website traffic. However, I kept YouTube in the mix since the channel I’m making money from is brand-new and generates followers through organic traffic.

With these changes in mind, I was able to dive deeper into some specialized projects that aligned with my background in science. One of these projects was with Stellar AI, which offered an impressive rate of $40 per hour and brought in $2,191 for April alone. I also picked up a smaller gig with Alignerr that called for annotation tasks—again requiring specialized skills—but they provided fewer tasks than Stellar AI, so I only made $775 there.

That’s it for AI training tasks. I also began using SORA instead of Midjourney to create AI-driven images to sell on stock sites. The results were better in terms of quality, but SORA doesn’t offer a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means I have to do a bit of extra editing. Despite the minor inconvenience, I saw a nice jump in Adobe Stock earnings, pulling in $59 this month—much higher than previous months.

To keep things fair, I also decided to exclude my novel earnings from Amazon KDP, as those sales are closely tied to my name and preexisting fan base. Instead, I’m only reporting the revenue from low-content books. I’m pleased to share that I made $111 on KDP this month, and that includes the addition of one more low-content title. In between tasks on Stellar AI and Alignerr (when the models needed time to process), I also squeezed in some quick Prolific and Cloud Research surveys. Those little bits of downtime netted me another $100 or so.

On a personal note, my health has improved a little bit, and I’ve been able to keep up with a steady rhythm of work and learning. I even started a Cyber Security course on Udemy, which I hope will help me land a part-time remote gig. That would be a neat addition to this blog series. I’m feeling hopeful about what’s next, and I’m looking forward to sharing all the twists and turns with you next month.

Enjoy your weekend, and thanks for reading!