3 Overlooked Places to Build a Real Side Income
Back in 1984, I was newly a single father with two children to look after and three men on my books. I was doing subcontract work for British Coal on housing maintenance and chimney repairs. When British Coal went on strike that year, around 80% of my work disappeared almost overnight.
I remember sitting with what invoices I had left and realising I had built the whole thing on one client. Every job, every wage I paid out, ran through that single pipe, and there was no way to dress that up as anything other than fragile.
I had built the whole thing on one client.
I found other work to keep my three lads employed, but it meant long days out. A childminder had the kids until I got back, always before six. It worked, but only because I scrambled to find a second source of income the moment the first one dried up.
I bring this up because I watch people building a side income online make the same mistake now, without ever meaning to. If you’re 50 or over and trying to get something going alongside a state pension, this is worth sitting with for a minute. Ideally you’ll have it in place before you retire, rather than starting cold after.
One Door In Is Never Enough
For years, most people building something online put all their eggs in one basket without realising it. Nearly everything ran through a single search engine. Rank well, get visitors, make sales.
That’s changing fast. People now ask AI assistants for recommendations before they ever open a search bar. They watch YouTube instead of reading. They ask in a Facebook group instead of typing a query. A neighbour of mine recently picked a plumber this way, straight from a recommendation in a local Facebook group, without ever typing a single word into a search engine.
Someone messaged me last month to say they’d asked an AI assistant which affiliate tools were worth starting with, and mine came up because of things I’d written and shared over the years, not because I ranked first on any search page.
None of that is a problem on its own. The problem is if your entire side income depends on just one of those doors staying open. It doesn’t mean any of those channels are wrong to use. It means none of them should be the only one you rely on.
That’s exactly the position I was in with British Coal. One client, one pipe, and when it closed I had almost nothing to fall back on. Building an online income the same way, on one platform alone, carries the same risk. It just doesn’t feel like it until the day the door shuts.
The First Place: An Email List You Actually Own
The one thing that would have helped me most in 1984 was a second source already in place before the strike started. I shouldn’t have had to scramble for it afterwards.
A platform can change its rules overnight. An email list is yours. Nobody can take it away, and nobody stands between you and the people on it. I’ve seen people lose access to an account overnight over a rule change they never saw coming, with years of built-up followers gone in an afternoon.
This is part of why I use eShowcase day to day. It posts automatically to social media to bring people in. Then it lets me follow up by email with offers, rather than hoping people happen to see another post. It doesn’t replace the list. It’s what fills it, quietly, in the background. It means the list keeps growing even on the days I don’t sit down and actively work on it, which matters more now than it used to.
I’ve written a bit more about how I use it, and a few other things I’ve picked up along the way. You’ll find those in other articles I have shared recently, if you want to go further into that.
The Second Place: A Home Base Nobody Can Take Away
The second place worth building is somewhere you control completely: your own home base, however plain it starts out. A blog post you own can quietly keep bringing people in for years. A post on someone else’s platform can vanish the moment they change how their algorithm works.
This doesn’t need to be complicated. Start with one thing you know well, written down plainly, and let it sit there working while you’re doing something else entirely. It might be a single page explaining how you fixed the one problem that used to frustrate you most, written the way you’d explain it to a neighbour over the fence. You don’t need design skills or a big budget for this. A handful of honest words, put down where people can find them later, does more work over time than most people expect.
That’s the appeal of a side income built this way. It doesn’t need forty hours a week from you once it’s in place. It needs you to have put something there in the first place.
The Third Place: Somewhere Small You Show Up Consistently
The third place is smaller and easy to overlook: a group, a community, or a weekly meeting where the same people see you turn up again and again. I attend Nick James’s weekly meetings myself, mostly for the structure and the encouragement to keep going. That matters most on the days when concentration doesn’t come easily.
It’s not glamorous. Some weeks it’s just showing up on a call, saying what you did and what you’re stuck on, and hearing someone else say the same thing back. Weeks like that add up. They’re part of what’s kept me showing up myself, especially on the days when nothing else feels like it’s moving.
You don’t need a huge following for this to matter. You need somewhere consistent enough that people start to recognise your name, separate from whichever platform happens to be sending traffic that particular month.
Put those three places together: an email list, a home base, and somewhere you show up consistently. Together they give you a side income that doesn’t collapse the moment one platform changes its rules. That’s the whole point. Not bigger. Just less fragile.
If You Want a Shortcut Into the First Part
Building the email side of this from nothing can feel like the slowest part to get moving. It’s one thing to know you need a list. It’s another to actually sit down and build one without a template to follow. It’s the part I’d point you towards first if you’re starting later in life rather than earlier. For anyone starting later in life, that shortcut matters more than it does for someone with decades still ahead of them.
Nick James put together a course called Lazy Way To Email Riches. It walks through building and using an email list without needing to be a natural writer or a technical person first. If the idea of a list that keeps working long after you’ve built it appeals to you, it’s worth a look as a next step, not a starting point in itself.
The Real Lesson From 1984
I didn’t choose to diversify back then. The strike forced my hand, and I only found other work because I had to, not because I’d planned for it.
I think about that childminder now and again, and how close the whole arrangement came to falling apart if I hadn’t found other work in time.
You’ve got the chance to plan for it now, before anything forces your hand. Pick one of the three places above and put something small in place this week. It doesn’t need to be finished. It just needs to exist somewhere that isn’t rented from someone else.
Whatever stage you’re at with this, building something steady later in life doesn’t need youth or energy to spare. It takes putting a bit in place, one piece at a time, before you need it. That’s really all a small income like this needs to become steady: three small places, built one at a time, standing there quietly whether or not you’re paying attention that particular week.
