How to turn a hobby into a business and make money? If you have a passion or a hobby, there are strategies to turn your interest into cash! Many hobbyists have turned their passions into scalable businesses with the help of the internet to reach a global audience. Whether or not you want to do this, the internet can help in many ways.
For starters, let’s say you have a certain skill. Whether you can teach a musical instrument, speak a foreign language, have a teaching qualification in a school subject or are good at some other skill, you can earn money from it if you pursue it and go about it in the right way.
The internet has helped thousands of hobbyists to turn themselves into entrepreneurs by selling their own products over the internet.
How To Turn A Hobby Into A Business And Make money? Your Hobby
How to turn a hobby into a business and make money? Whatever your hobby is, you can build an online following helping others to learn and develop their skills. This can be done in several ways but here’s a few ideas just to get started:
- Build a blog – Blogging is one of the most popular methods of building a following online. Blogging can be monetised in several ways including selling your own products or other people’s products (affiliate marketing).
- Start posting videos on YouTube. Video is one of the most popular methods of online marketing. If you have a skill like juggling, for example, you can create a series of instructional videos to help people learn.
- Run some private classes from your home. Music teachers or after school private sessions can work really well if you have such an ability. You can advertise online with the help of a Google Places listing which is free to use.
How To Turn A Hobby Into A Business And Make money? Build A Website
How to turn a hobby into a business and make money? Build a website. Building a website isn’t as tricky as you might think! There’s even free website building platforms which let you create the look you want quite quickly.
Once set up, you can generate visitors to your site by creating content around your chosen topic, interest or passion. As you create more content and share it around the internet, your following will grow.
You’ll want to build a subscribers list at some point to collect an email data base of your most loyal website visitors. To build a list you’ll need to collect your subscribers email information.
This can be done by offering a freebie giveaway of some sort. I use a couple of ebooks on my website to do this. Ideally, create some product which will be useful for your visitors. Give it away in exchange for your visitors’ email address. See autopilot marketing.
Once you start building an email list of subscribers, you’ll have a database of potential customers to promote your products to. Hang on maybe you don’t have any products yet! If you haven’t any products of your own, you can use other people’s products to promote from your website and email list.
Affiliate marketing is a business model which allows website owners to sell their products for a commission. Find products which suit your particular hobby by doing a search on the internet for “your passion affiliate programs”. You should find some good products you can promote through your website and email list. Ideally, find products which are digital because they tend to offer the best commissions.
Look carefully into the products you want to promote. Ideally they should be products you want to buy yourself. To sell them to your customers you’ll need to choose products which will genuinely help your website visitors. Build trust through your emails by offering free help and advice to your subscribers.
How To Turn A Hobby Into A Business And Make money? Marketing Your Hobby Website
A website is just one strategy of turning a hobby into money. To make it work, you’ll need a good amount of traffic (visitors) to your website or blog and a good monetisation strategy.
Traffic doesn’t just come overnight to a website. You need to build content and share that content in order to get more and more visitors over time. Only a small percentage of people will buy from you but this will grow as your website traffic grows over time. See top ways to generate traffic for free.
You can also pay for traffic too to get visitors although it is best not to do this at first because you won’t know how well your products/services will sell. See The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing for help with this.
Using Google’s Free Business Listing
Google offers a free business listing for locally based businesses. If your hobby or interest is a service of some kind, such as piano lessons, you can create a free listing.
I ran a listing for a local handyman for a while because I enjoyed doing some DIY around the house. It’s pretty simple to set up a Places listing but you’ll need to verify it through a delivery address and code number once you receive it.
This is a good starting point if you already have some service you can offer. If you don’t, you can build some products to help people and use them to build an email list through a website.
Start An Online Business From Scratch
With or without a hobby, anyone can start an online business from scratch, even with little or no experience.
Learn how to sell other people’s products online, build websites and the power of online marketing strategies. Access a free 7 day video series here.