The whole point of side hustles is to help Cybersecurity professionals build additional income streams alongside their 9-to-5 jobs.
This is becoming increasingly critical as Cybersecurity is no longer the layoff-proof, recession-proof haven it used to be. This week, I thought I would start listing down every single one of my income streams and side hustles that I have built beside my 9 to 5
I have tried many cybersecurity side-hustles over the years .
Some of them worked, while some of them flopped into the black void of the Internet.
In this post I plan to list down my current ones and then deep dive into each in the coming weeks.
I hope this gives you some insights and shows you what is possible with monetizing your cybersecurity knowledge.
Let’s see how it goes!
How I Chose These Cybersecurity Side-Hustles
I started experimenting with cybersecurity side hustles in 2022 and used these criteria to choose the ones to focus on:
Enjoyment: I would enjoy doing them in my spare time. Staying consistent is tough, so you want to choose something you actually enjoy instead of getting burnt out.
Passive: They would have the potential to be completely passive over time. While no side hustle is 100% passive .. these income streams should have the potential to become increasingly passive over time. I do not want to exchange my time for money as I already have a 9 to 5 job.
The Compounding Effect: These streams should have the potential to compound over time and increase momentum, i.e., the snowball effect. For example, Freelancing on Fiverr is not really scalable, as 10x the order means I have to put in 10x the effort!
My 2024 Income Streams
Udemy courses
Self-Publishing
One-to-One Mentoring
YouTube
Medium
Income Stream 1 - Udemy
Udemy is like the YouTube of online courses. I have always been a massive fan of this platform, as anyone can make a course and upload it to Udemy to make some $$$
The downside is that Udemy is massively saturated with thousands of courses uploaded daily. I have been creating courses since 2022, and provided you do the proper research; you can still make a good income with Udemy. But not as much today as you used to.
My initial courses sank like stones, but these failures helped improve the subsequent courses, with incremental improvements happening over time
Income Stream 2 - Self Publishing
Income stream #2 is about self-publishing cybersecurity books on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I have over five books ( one under a pen name not shown here ).
KDP is a great way to make money as a cybersecurity professional, where you can monetize your knowledge by writing books. But full disclosure in that I have not made a lot of money directly through this side hustle, i.e., through the KDP royalty program itself
Indirectly, though .. there is a lot of $$$ to be made.
A lot of CEOs have reached out to me and paid me a lot of cash to ghost-write cybersecurity books for them. Self-publishing is a great way to stand out in the industry and gives you a lot of street-cred that you can leverage to make some serious $$$
Income Stream 3 - One-to-One Mentoring
Over time, if you establish a name for yourself, people will pay you for your time.
If someone had told me many years back, people would have paid me a hundred dollars for an hour of my time. I would have laughed. But many people in Cybersecurity are willing to pay to get access to your knowledge and skills.
I use Topmate, which allows people to block slots in my calendar after paying. I like it more than Calendly because it does not charge you every month. I have shared this on my LinkedIn Profile so anyone visiting it can use it to book a 1-1 with me.
I have over 115 bookings and am featured in their top 1 percent.
Income Stream 4 - YouTube
I got into YouTube not to make money, honestly. The platform is massively competitive right now, and earning good money via adsense is no longer what it was a decade back (or during the pandemic). Yet despite this .. it is a great way of sending traffic to my courses, books, and other side-hustles profiles.
I started YouTube as it is the second biggest search engine in the world and cannot be beaten as a traffic generation method. My Channel has over 5K subscribers, and I make sure to link my courses and profile in every video
Income Stream 5 - Medium
I think it is fair to say that Medium’s glory days are behind it. The Medium Partner Program (MPP) is no longer the cash-generating machine it once was, and the days of writers making thousands of dollars every month are pretty much finished
Not to mention the ridiculous changes to the algorithm they make every few months, which destroys views and earnings, however, just like YouTube, it is a great way to drive traffic to your side hustles and generate money.
I have over 9.6K followers on Medium and still love writing on the platform ( although that love is increasingly one-sided ! )
Income Stream 6 - My Flagship Course
I created a flagship course called The Cybersecurity Career Accelerator in 2023
The goal was to make a course to help people land cybersecurity jobs in the industry.
While I still make sales .. this is one of my lower performing side-hustles, as I have to do all the marketing and traffic generation.
I can potentially make more money self-hosting this course than placing it in a marketplace like Udemy … but driving traffic toward it is a major pain! Generating traffic to your products/courses/website is not easy, and it takes significant upfront investment and capital. If interested, I may host the Cybersecurity Career Accelerator course here at Cyber NOW® for members as an addition to SOC Analyst NOW! and SOC Job NOW!
This article concludes. If you are wondering why I omitted Substack, the answer is that it is not a side hustle for me. I am still learning the ins and outs of the platform.
I plan to show the different methods I use to generate traffic for these side hustles soon, which can be the most challenging part of creating a side income.
No one will buy your stuff if they cannot find you!
Taimur Ijlal is a multi-award-winning information security leader with over two decades of international experience in cyber-security and IT risk management in the fin-tech industry.
Taimur can be connected on LinkedIn or on his YouTube channel “Cloud Security Guy” on which he regularly posts about Cloud Security, Artificial Intelligence, and general cyber-security career advice.
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