Ideal Steps To Follow In Turning Your Hobbies to a Real Side Hustles

Making your hobby a second source of income without leaving your 9–5 job.

It can seem overwhelming when getting started to create something new that could evolve into a money-making business or venture. I will share my 8 steps you need to take in order to build a side business based on something you love and have passion for. These steps will give you guidance on how you can discover that unique skill, what’s the landscape of making money from it as a side hustle.

You can start this after your day job and on the weekends! It’s incredibly exciting to be building a better future, especially one that you love!

Here are the steps:

Conduct a self-evaluation

Begin by being specific about what you’re great at, passionate about and what you want to tap into as the skill, hobby, or passion of yours that will grow into that ultimate idea. Do a self-evaluation to determine your personal and professional strengths, what you love or enjoy doing in your leisure, and your unique attributes or you can ask close friends and family for help.

You can also try asking yourself these vital questions:

• What kind of assistance do people often ask you for?
• What are things you feel you know more about than most people in your life?
• What is a topic or category that you are wholeheartedly interested in?

If you find yourself feeling stumped, try asking friends and family to help you answer these questions. Their insights might help you spark an idea.

One thing I do when I’m brainstorming the newest thing I want to launch: I spend time each week jotting down ideas. I make a goal of writing down one thing I enjoy or am good at that I could turn into a side hustle.

This is how I decided to start my podcast. During this weeklong brainstorming session, I wrote down, “I love to give advice and inspire people.” Another day, I wrote about how much I love to listen to podcasts and the enjoyment I get from doing speaking engagements.

By the end of the week, I paired these two ideas together and that was phase one of creating my podcast, which I was able to monetize through advertisements and a newsletter.

Understand your target audience

One of the first things one shouldn’t forget when they are brainstorming what kind of skill or hobby to turn into a business or side hustle is the need to consider your target audience. Who are your potential customers? Think about who your target audience is when researching who would be a perfect fit to consume your product or service.

Your side hustle or business should solve the problems of people. Identify who your ideal audience is by tapping into data, studies, news reports, and analytics to find out who are facing these problems. After you’ve discovered your ideal audience, immerse yourself in their world.

Ensure to stay up to date on trends they care about, other products or services they consume or tend to consume, and what platforms they spend their time on. You can tap into both free and paid resources from social media websites that often track analytics, such as Buffer and Sprout Social.

Strategize Your Offers and Know Your Competitors

As you start thinking about what kind of product offers you want to put out there, begin to research other people in your space that might be doing something similar to what you are planning to do. Analyze potential competitors and find out about their pricing, packages, and products or services they offer. This helps you to be different in some way and that’s how you will stand out. With your notes of what your competition is doing, figure out how you can stand out from them.

Is there something unique about your products/services? Is there something you know and can teach that others cannot? Do you have an experience that nobody else virtually has?

These are a few things that can really separate you from your competition.

To do this, you need to search for other similar companies through Google search and social media or you can scroll through LinkedIn to find individuals who are similar to yourself and who have started a business in the same kind of niche.

Begin to think about what you want to offer and also how you can tap even more into who you are and your skill set to find ways to make your product/service unique. As well as considering how much money you might need to invest in the business when you start.

Build your business plan

As the pieces begin to come together and you’ve solidified your idea, your audience, and your product/service, map it all out. With your business plan, you will be able to strategize even more deeply about your target audience, your products or services, plan for progression, and as well draft out your marketing plan for launching and for series of months after.

When you’re starting to work on your detailed marketing plan, also begin to plan out your strategies for the pre-launch, which should incorporate things like:

• How you intend to build out your initial service or product.
• The marketing channels you will use.
• Budgeting plan for customer acquisition, whether through paid ads or search engines.
• Your launch strategy on how you plan to market and put out the news of your new business.
• Post-launch goals so you can keep the momentum going/burning.

Figure out what tools you need

Your next step is to determine the tools you need to help get your side hustle business up and running. Most of the time, even if you’re creating something you plan to offer or sell in person, you’ll want a website. That way, you can create a digital home base to showcase your idea, products, and services. The costs are much lower than any other way, and you can work and promote your business from anywhere in the world.

A website is an excellent tool to introduce people to what you are about and how you can help them. People search online for all sorts of things, which can be related to your hobby idea. And you want to be a big source of this information they need and help in solving them.

Building a website is easy with all the tools available today. There’s a lot of free advice on the internet on how to get started with this. Just do your research on it or you can outsource it to someone to design it for you.

Determine how you plan to spread the word about your business. If you plan on tapping into social media, know that you don’t have to be on all platforms; it’s OK to focus on one or two where you can connect with your audience.

You might even want to make decisions now about how you will accept payment. Consider looking into payment processors, their terms if they offer seller protection and their transaction free.

Create your products or services

This is a whole process and it is about creating your product.

It can be very tasking creating a product for people to buy. But it is a challenge you have to embrace in other to make money from it as a side hustle.

Your product might not be perfect when starting off because actually, no product is. So don’t stress for perfect, rather go for execution.

Your product will be determined by how you best feel you can help your potential buyers and what your competition is doing. And there is room for improvement along the way.

Promote your website and products or services

When done creating your product, the next is to promote your website and products or services. You will need to promote it to as many people as possible who could be interested in it.

You can run paid ads or work on your SEO to get organic traffic to your website. You can start with sharing it with friends and family and as well ask them to share to their friends too. Also you can join relevant groups related to your niche on Facebook and begin to drop relevant content, which will open up the medium for you to tell the members of the group about your products and give them the link to your website.

Continually improve your product by providing value

Another important thing to bear in mind when turning your hobby to side hustle is to always work on improving your products and services so it can be relevant to your customers. Remember, you have competitors and the only way for you to make it in your chosen niche is to keep providing value to your customer so they will keep coming back. This means you have to keep updating it when you see fit, creating more relevant content to add on, and anything else that will keep your product relevant.

Just simply, keep being innovative.

Nobody knows how to “start” when they begin something like this. Don’t worry about that! Remember, it’s not about perfection, rather it’s about execution.

You’ll make mistakes and you’ll do it smarter next time. But it’s so important to start taking steps in the right direction.