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Painting hobby
What if you could find a way to enjoy your hobby and make a little money? If your hobby is a popular one , making money from it would be possible. Making money from hobbies is a time-honored tradition for all hobbyists. Some hobbyists earn enough to pay for their hobby, others earn enough to cover any expenses incurred by the hobby, and yet others earn enough to quit their regular job. It’s up to you how much you want to make.
One of the things you should consider prior to jumping into is to do a little research about the industry and the audience for that hobby.
How Marketable Is Your Hobby
If your hobby appeals to a wide audience, you are more likely to attract potential customers. Find out how many people need and want the items you offer. This is the key to deciding if you want to turn the hobby into a full-fledged business or even a part-time business. The bottom line is that if only a few people are looking for products like yours, a business may not ultimately meet your ongoing economic needs.
Three things to consider if your hobby can become a business is :
- Are You Creating Something People Will Buy?
- What Can I Sell?
- Are There Other Options to Earn Money?
- How Are Others Making Money From Hobby?
Are You Creating Something People Will Buy?
A lot of hobbies involve creating a physical product that someone will buy. Hobbies like baking, sewing, knitting, are great examples of physical products. Perhaps you enjoy writing as a hobby. Will someone buy your short stories, books, or poetry? Is something like that selling already? If so, you have more of an opportunity of making a sale.
What Can I Sell?
You can make money from physical products you create, such as jewelry and clothing; however, you are not limited to physical products. You can also sell digital products and services. Digital products can include information products, such as pdf reports, audio, images, and video, just to name a few. You can also offer services such as ghostwriting, web/product design, coaching, and teaching others what you know about your hobby. There are more options to consider.
Are There Other Options to Earn Money?
There are many ways to share your knowledge and experiences, while making money. One of the popular ways doesn’t even involve creating a product or service to sell. However, you will need to do some creative thinking, but you can handle that with some work.
Instead of rushing to make a new crocheted blanket that you will need to sell and deliver, recommend the instructions you used by supplying an affiliate link to them, as well as related items such as yarn, crochet hooks, row counters, project and yarn organizers, etc. If flying model airplanes is your hobby, instead of selling planes, consider selling parts, tools, and other supplies because these hobbyists frequently prefer to build their own planes.
Each hobby can be quite different. Your hobby’s target audience, as well as their wants, needs, and problems are very different. To find out what is likely to work best for you, you’ll need to do detailed research.
Explore Your Creative Side with Paint By Numbers!
How Are Others Making Money From Hobby?
Find out if you can make money from your hobby by checking out how many competitors there are, what they are doing and what they offer. Find out what their best selling items are. Research complaints and suggestions related to products you are interested in selling. When you find a loophole or gap where a need isn’t being met, plan to create a similar item and enhance it to meet the needs of your audience. This means you want to get creative and fill the need for this market.
Don’t limit yourself to looking only at the hobby or craft niche you’re in. Identify hobbies and crafts that are similar to your own. For example, if your hobby/craft is crocheting, you’ll also want to look at knitting, macramé, embroidery, quilting, and other sewing related hobbies. This can be helpful in giving you crossover ideas. In addition, many hobbyists and crafters have multiple interests.
Selling Your Hobby/ Craft Items
If you make an item that you want to sell to the public, it’s important that the product is attractive, works as advertised, follows all local and nation-wide safety rules and laws. This is harder if you’re making items for children, pets, edible items, or skin products. There may be special laws regarding selling your product, so you’ll need to check into what is required of you and/or your business, from a legal perspective.
Check the Laws
Every country, state, city, and/or county has its own laws regarding selling your handmade items. If you’re going to teach people how to do the craft, there may be additional regulations or restrictions, depending on the materials or methods being used. It’s always a good idea to understand all laws surrounding your industry including the local laws that affect you.
Systemize Creation Process
If you want to be able to enjoy your hobby while selling the things you make, you’ll need to systemize the process and get slightly ahead so that your customers won’t have to wait too long for their product.
Get Legal
Make sure you have a business license and all appropriate licenses for your area, before you start making sales. You don’t want to get a surprise fine because you overlooked or ignored this step.
Offer Multiple Payment Possibilities
When you are selling your craft items, it’s going to be easier to make more sales if you allow your customers to pay in the way they’re most comfortable. For example, cash, check, and credit. If you sell items online, you’ll want to take payment processors that help protect consumers like Paypal.com and Strip.com.
Price Your Products Right
Many hobbyists tend to price their work too low. Check online and offline what your type of items normally goes for before pricing. Keep in mind all the resources you use it to create your craft. For example, time, money, and expertise. Don’t undercharge for your time and expertise.
Turning your craft into a salable item simply requires that you think more about how your customer’s experience will go when they buy your item. Will they feel as if it’s a good experience? Will they be glad they spent the extra money on the handmade item instead of buying the mass-produced quantity?
Hobby Related Services
One exciting way to monetize your hobby is to turn it into a service instead of, or in addition to, selling the product directly. You can coach, teach, and write about the topic. Let’s look at the ways you can turn your hobby into a service.
Coaching
Anytime you’ve successfully done something you can also successfully help someone else through that same thing. For example, if you started a business with your hobby successfully you can coach others to do the same thing.
Depending on your hobby, there may be additional ways you can help your audience. For example, you can provide a service that helps others organize their hobby or crafting by going into their homes and assisting them directly.
Teaching
Anything that you know how to do is an opportunity to teach someone else to do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s painting, knitting, sewing, decorating, cooking, jewelry making and so forth. You can teach people via small workshops or a lot of people asynchronously using online.
Another service that may work with your hobby/craft is to offer a beginner’s class, to help people get started in the hobby. Once you do this, you may want to offer a more advanced class later to show them great ways to sell their items.
Writing
There are lots of ways to approach earning money writing about your hobby. You can start a blog sharing your projects, your how-to’s and the resources that you love to use. You may even get sponsors who want you to use their products to help earn more money.
Create Videos
This is a great way for any hobbyist to earn money. You can create videos, each with a different goal in mind. For example, you can demonstrate how to do something, share how you make money, talk about products you like to use and more. You can use platforms like Vimeo.com and Canva.com to create, edit engaging videos. By being a video creator, you can serve your audience by being their go-to source for specific hobby information.
Create eBooks
One way to provide a service to your audience is to create an eBook of different subjects or examples, or how to guides. One thing to remember regarding digital books that even though the book is digital your customer can print it out themselves.
Top 5 Profitable Hobbies
Being deeply involved in a hobby or passion is the stuff that successful businesses is made of.
Top five profitable hobbies are :
- Blogging
- Graphic Design
- Photography
- Jewelry Making
- Crafts
Blogging
Blogging refers to writing, photography and other media that is self published online. There are 4 common types of blogs are : personal, business, niche and affiliate blogs.
One of the best type of blogs to make money is a marketing blog. Marketing blogs helps readers learn and monetize marketing skills online to start a business.
Profitable blogging niches are :
- Digital Marketing
- Blogging and work from home ( make money online)
- Health and Fitness
- Personal Finance and Investment
- Recipes and Food
- Personal Development and Self Care.
Money generated from traffic powered by SEO optimized blogs. This income is gained through ad placements on the blog, selling digital products ( eBooks, email courses) , affiliate marketing, having a paid membership site.
You can start a blog on free platforms like :
- www.wordpress.org
- www.wix.com
- www.linkedin.com
- www.weebly.com
- www.medium.com
- www.blogger.com
- www.tumblr.com
Best sites for paid blogging platforms ( domain and WordPress hosting):
- SiteGround
- Bluehost
- DreamHost
- Global Domains International
Graphic Design
Graphic design is the skill of combining pictures and text in designs like logo, magazine/ poster layout designs , etc. This visual communication skill is used to convey information or concepts to viewers of the art ( for example the logo designs for popular sodas or breakfast cereal) . You can learn graphic design for free through online courses, video tutorials. Canva offers a great design course.
Graphic designs can become your business by you selling your designs like planner templates, stickers, creating and selling printables, creating designer fonts. You can use free apps like Canva to create your graphic designs and your creations can be sold on platforms like Fiverr, Etsy, Designhill, TeeSpring, RedBubble, etc.
Photography
Photography is the art of recording images on light sensitive film or in the case of digital photography via electronic or magnetic memory. You can improve your photography skills by taking paid or free courses, watching video tutorials.
For digital photography , you can create great images for Instagram, Twitter, FaceBook or Kindle using Canva on Android or iPhone cell phones. Canva is much easier to navigate that Photoshop and does a very good job. You can create flyers, infographics and other web graphics.
Great photography editing apps are Google Photos, Pixlr, Snapseed, Instagram, Prisma. Best sites to sell your photos are : Dreamstime, Shutterstock, Etsy, iStock Photo, Getty Images.
Jewelry
Handmade jewelry is a popular product that you can sell online and at craft shows. Jewelry making is the most saturated category of handmade products, but it still sells well. There is something about wearing a beautiful piece of jewelry !
Jewelry making is an easy hobby to start because you can create beautiful jewelry pieces and the startup costs is relatively low. Best sellers are necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings and can be sold on Etsy, Amazon Handmade, eBay, Artfire, Shopify, etc.
Crafts
Handmade goods and the skill of making things by hand is called crafts. Examples of craft goods are sewing a costume, knitting / crocheting a blanket, carpentry ( creating chairs, tables ).
Crafts best sellers are : Jewelry; Art; Photography; Soap and Candles. These are popular best sellers because there is a constant demand for unique products from the industries such as Weddings; Home Decor; Health and Beauty; Pets; Pregnancy /Baby. You can sell your handmade products at craft shows or online on social media , Etsy, Amazon Handmade, eBay, Shopify, etc.
How to Market Your Hobby
Marketing your hobby as handmade products effectively relies on understanding that your products are unique to you and probably your customers. When people want to give someone a special gift, they look for high quality, unique, and relevant personal items. These are usually seen as being highly valuable. That doesn’t mean you can charge and get a fortune for your creations. It means you can charge a fair, yet slightly higher price than mass-produced similar cheaper products.
Basically to market your hobby’s creations creativity is needed to get the word out to the community. The basics in this advertising or marketing is:
Website
Content
Social Media
Photography
Online Marketplaces
Website
The first thing you need to do when you decide to open a business or shop is to map out the content you’ll house on the site, such as sections, topics, categories, pages, and sections you’ll need on the site. This is the foundation and framework of your online home/shop. Then, set up a website. Your website needs to provide information about your hobby as well as address your potential customers’ questions and problems. You should include an about page, a shopping cart, a blog so that you can include information and content of interest to your audience.
Content
One of the best ways of marketing online is to use content. Content is anything you put on your site in a blog, or an article, or on a sales page. In fact, all the information you provide your audience via your website is content. Content provides information, spreads awareness, and helps with search engine optimization
Social Media
Get an account on every single social media platform that your audience uses and share information to them on a regular basis. The best information to share is anything you put on your blog including blog posts, sales pages, curated content, educational content and more.
Photography
This is especially true when your products are crafts that you’ve handmade. Taking great photographs of your work so that your potential buyers can see the quality of your work is going to go a long way to helping you make more sales and market your hobby so that you can make money from them.
For example, you may be a graphic designer. You can showcase your creations by good photos and also video.
Online Marketplaces
Facebook has a marketplace, and different sites like Etsy.com, DiviantArt.com , Payhip.com and so forth are online marketplaces that allow crafters, artists, content creators to list the things they have for sale. The reason for listing in some of these places in addition to your website is that the more links you have elsewhere the more you’ll spread brand awareness.
Concluding Thoughts
Creating a successful business out of a hobby takes a lot of time and a lot more dedication. Unless you are passionate about the subject, it is hard to stay focused on it long enough to make it a success. So passion and dedication are your two biggest assets. You must be willing to put in long hours and be willing to accept the fact that it will be quite some time before you start realizing a profit…even a modest one.