My top five side hustle strategies in 2022 are:
- Micro Real Estate
- Spoonflower.com
- Micro Flipping
- Tiny or Unique Home AirBNB/VRBO/VASA
- Restaurant Websites

- Micro Real Estate
Of course this is first, given who I am, but Micro Real Estate is an emerging category of real estate that is focused on micro-properties for small pieces of hardware or equipment and will be one of several great side hustle strategies in 2022. Think about the placement of Electric Vehicle Chargers and Vending machines – those machines are worthless when they are not in a good spot, but can make a lot of sales if they’re in a good spot. There are many other pieces of hardware and machines that need a micro-property and they vary greatly in how passive or active the owner/operator of the machine needs to be. The owner of the micro-property can make truly passive income from renting out the space to the owner/operator of the machine. For more information take a look at our homepage www.microrealestate.leptonic.io.
- Spoonflower.com
Spoonflower.com is a website that allows graphic designers to upload patterns and post those patterns for sale of print on demand fabrics. It works similar to other print on demand services like RedBubble and Zazzle, in that the designer can get a cut of the sales of their designs. It does take some upfront work to create and upload the designs to Spoonflower, but after that you can start earning passive income. Of course, marketing your designs will certainly increase your revenue. I’ve personally had designs on spoonflower for over 5 years, and I typically make about $400 dollars a year without lifting a finger. I’m sure that if I were to try to market my designs I could make more, but I got into Spoonflower when I started a company to sell my ArmPillo product, but the ArmPillo has fizzled out. I’ve left my Spoonflower shop running this whole time, and the money is automagically transferred to my PayPal account each month.
- Micro Flipping
Micro Flipping is specifically in reference to flipping real estate (traditional size, not micro real estate) in a short period of time. So short, in fact, that there likely won’t be any physical improvements made to the building/land. The micro flipper is merely submitting an offer for a house and then once that offer is accepted, the micro flipper sells that contract for a higher price. This can be a little confusing, so I think an example is in order. The micro flipper has a bid accepted for $200K on a house, but has no intention of actually buying the house. So, the micro flipper finds a buyer who is willing to pay $210K for that house and essentially links the original seller of the house to the new buyer and the micro flipper takes a profit of the difference of his original bid and the bid by the new buyer (which is $10K in this example). There are some risks, like what if you can’t find a new buyer for a price that is higher than your original bid? But it is certainly an interesting process with a lot of income potential for side hustle strategies in 2022.
- Tiny or Unique Home Vacation Rentals (AirBNB/VRBO/VASA)
Not quite micro real estate, but tiny homes are fairly unique living quarters that have a huge advantage over traditional housing – low cost to build and maintain. Tiny homes typically cost under $50K to build and can be placed on a large property (possibly with other tiny homes) so that you can have immediate access to the great outdoors. Of course, depending on where you want to live the land could be in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are a lot of people who a interested in living in tiny homes, but may not want to take the leap required to downsize and get rid of a lot of their stuff. So, tiny home vacation rentals make a lot of sense for people who want to try out the lifestyle without the need to fully commit. Tiny home rentals allow the curious people to get their feet wet, and either stop dreaming or purse their dream harder. Tiny homes are relatively unique, but certainly growing in popularity, but if you want to set your vacation rental apart from the rest, you could make a uniquely themed rental house, like this Winnie the Poo house in the UK.
- Restaurant Websites
This is not a new idea, but restaurant competition has become even more fierce during the pandemic, so a strong web presence is a must for any restaurant and is great side hustle strategies in 2022. Most restaurants don’t have the budget to support a full time webmaster, so they typically go by the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but with out a good website and SEO, profits are likely to suffer. So, I’d suggest that you learn how to use WordPress and pitch an update to the restaurant website that will be easier to support than something a web designer made in the early 2010s. You can easily search restaurant website in your area and pick out the non-function sites or poorly designed sites to target with a sales pitch.
Conclusion
I think these are some profitable passive income ideas that should help seed your growth, but remember, just like newly planted seeds need to be watered often, so do new passive income ideas. Picking an idea and sticking with it for a few years is really the only tried and true method of generating passive income. Bouncing between ideas is okay if you’re first starting out, but it take commitment to achieve a solid passive income stream.