8 Excel Side Hustle Ideas to Make Money with Spreadsheets
Are you an Excel nerd looking for ways to monetize your skills? If you’re someone who knows your way around Excel like it’s your second home, you’re in the right place. With the rise of the gig economy, there are tons of opportunities to turn your love of spreadsheets into a profitable side hustle.
From crunching numbers to making sense of data, your advanced Excel skills may be worth more than you think! Because many businesses rely on Excel, and few people take the time to truly know how to use it to its full capacity, your Excel skills are in high demand. This article will explore several side hustle ideas to help you monetize this unique skill.
Let’s jump in and discover how your spreadsheet expertise can help you earn some extra income.
Why Start an Excel Side Hustle?
Starting an Excel side hustle offers a smart way to capitalize on your existing skills! If you’re already proficient in Excel, or at least know more than the average person, you’re seriously sitting on a goldmine of opportunities. Think about it – businesses of all sizes rely on data, organization, and analysis. By offering your Excel expertise, you can provide valuable solutions that save time and improve efficiency for clients. Plus, an Excel side hustle can give you a lot of freedom to work when and where you want. Even from the comfort of your own home!
This is your chance to turn your passion for spreadsheets into a practical and profitable venture!
Excel Side Hustle Ideas
If you’re an Excel expert looking to make some extra income, here are some side hustles to look into.
Sell Excel Templates
The best way to make an income with Excel, and have total freedom to work when and where you want, is to sell Excel templates! The better you know Excel, the more elaborate and unique you can create your spreadsheets. If you have experience creating spreadsheets for a certain type of business, that will give you an even better advantage.
You can create templates for different purposes and audiences. Some examples are budgeting, project management, or inventory tracking. These spreadsheets can be geared towards individuals (like budgeting spreadsheets), or even small businesses. You can sell these templates on an online marketplace like Etsy, Creative Market, or even create your own online store using something like Shopify.
Here are some examples of spreadsheets for sale:
- Ultimate Monthly Budget Spreadsheet
- Ultimate Budget by Paycheck Spreadsheet
- Client Tracker Spreadsheet
Offer Custom Excel Spreadsheets
If you love a challenge and want to make more money per project, you can offer up your spreadsheet skills by providing custom Excel spreadsheets to small businesses. Most small business owners don’t have an Excel expert on staff, and don’t have a reason to hire someone to do it full time, but could benefit from having some specialty spreadsheets made that are tailored directly to their business.
With this type of side gig, you can charge per project or per hour, depending on the complexity of the project.
Create an Excel Course
If you want to spread the Excel knowledge and make some money doing it, you can create a Microsoft Excel course! Online courses are a great way to earn an income online. Most people aren’t Excel experts, and many people just need to know the basics. You can create a crash course covering the basics for those who just need to be able to use it for simple tasks and create simple spreadsheets. Then you can also create more specialized courses on various Excel topics, such as formulas, macros, or pivot tables.
The best thing about a course is that they can command a higher price than most other digital products and you only really have to create it once and occasionally update it as needed.
If you want to create a course, I highly recommend using ThriveCart. I use and love it because you can create sales pages, take payments, and create your course all in ThriveCart for a one-time fee (other than payment processing fees). Monthly fees can really add up, so I love recommending ThriveCart to anyone looking to sell digital products!
Start a Blog About Excel
If you want to share your knowledge about Excel, you can start a blog that helps people learn and use it. Answering common questions that people are searching for online can bring you traffic. Then you can monetize your blog through affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, or advertising. You can even combine your blow with other side hustle ideas from this post like selling an Excel course or custom spreadsheets.
If you want to start a blog, I recommend starting a WordPress blog with SiteGround. That’s what I use for this blog!
Offer Local Excel Classes
There are also opportunities to make money with Excel offline. You can offer local Excel classes if you prefer to teach in person. You can advertise your classes on social media, Craigslist, or local community centers. You can charge per class or per student, or you can even approach your local community centers to see if they’d hire you to teach a class on their behalf. There are a lot of great ways to do this!
Excel Coaching or Training
One one one coaching and training can be a great way to make money with Excel! It’s flexible in the sense that you can take on only as many clients as you want, so if you have a busy day job, you can just take on clients in your spare time. Offering coaching or training through your own website or advertising on social media can be a great way to reach potential customers. With one-on-one coaching or training, you can charge per hour or even come up with packages for your clients.
Provide Excel Training for Employees
Many companies would be interested in hiring an Excel expert to teach their employees how to use the software so that they can work more efficiently. You can create customized training programs based on their specific needs and answer any questions that come up during their daily operations. You can charge per employee or per session, depending on the scope of the training.
The key here is getting in touch with business owners and executives. Online, you can promote yourself on platforms like LinkedIn, and offline, you can contact businesses in your area to pitch them on your customized Excel training programs.
Luckily, Corporate America has a lot of money to spend and can pay freelancers quite well. If you went this route, I would guess you’d only have to do a few classes a week to make a decent income!
Start an Excel Youtube Channel
Since so many people learn through visual platforms, like video, starting an Excel Youtube channel can be a great way to reach a wider audience! You can create tutorials, provide expert tips, or answer viewer questions related to Excel. On YouTube, you can make money through ads or even sponsorships.
To increase your income, you can also pick a few other side hustles mentioned here, like selling spreadsheet templates or Excel coaching, and mention them in your videos so your viewers can take advantage of those opportunities.
💡 Build Multiple Streams of Income with Excel 💡
As you can see, you can take on several of these side gigs to ensure your income is diversified and you’re making good money. If this is just a side hustle to make extra money, you may only need one stream of income. But if you’re going to make an Excel based business your full time job, I highly recommend building several streams of income for financial stability. Most of these can easily be intertwined, so it won’t be hard to do!
Starting a side hustle is a great way to make an income in addition to your full-time job, or it can even eventually replace your day job. The good news is that spreadsheets and data management isn’t going anywhere. So if you keep up with your Excel skills, there are so many ways to make an income creating spreadsheets or helping others with their spreadsheets. So whether you prefer to teach, create, or consult, there is a side hustle that can fit your skills and interests.
