Thursday, April 5, 2012

3 Steps to Turning Your Hobby into an Online Business | Create an ...


Categories | Online Business,

We all have a hobby. Mine is dancing. One of my friends paints little Dungeons & Dragons models. Another flies model aeroplanes. Yet another works on his vintage car. We are all completely unique in our passions. Why not turn that passion into an online business?

You may think that you don?t have the expertise to do it. You may think that you don?t have the tools to do it. Let me tell you, you are wrong.

The thing that people will pay for more than almost anything else is their passion. I will fly across the world for a single day to attend a dance event, then turn right around and come home. Is that stupid? Yes. Do I do it all the time? Yes.

All it takes is for you to create the market place, and people that are as passionate about your hobby as you are will come. And they will buy.

If you have ever had the thought of creating your own business from your hobby, here it is in 3 simple steps.

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Step One ? Finding Your Market

Giraffe Painting by Contemporary Earth Art on EtsySo, you?re a passionate Giraffe Painter. Fantastic! Surely there must be others like you! Well, let?s find out. If you are the only person in the world that loves the look of a giraffe on canvas, when it comes to building an online business about it, you may be in some trouble. But most of the time, you?re not.

First thing you want to do is get as specific as possible about your hobby. So you love giraffes, let?s jump onto Google?s Keyword Tool and see what comes up when we do a Keyword Analysis. Amazingly, we get these results:

Giraffe Painting ? 2,900 monthly global searches ? Low Competition
How to Paint a Giraffe ? 1,600 monthly global searches ? Low Competition

So, obviously there are a lot of people that love giraffes on canvas! What do you do now? You create a product to sell to these people!

Let?s back up just one little step. Do you notice how specific Giraffe Painting is? We are not trying to sell ?Painting?, we are trying to sell ?Giraffe Painting?. If we were to try and take on the painting market, we would be quickly overwhelmed with competition. But, because we were so specific, we can find something that has little competition, and everyone that is searching for ?Giraffe Painting?, they are definitely there looking for how to paint portraits. You have an instant, highly targeted market. And that is crucial!

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Step Two ? Creating Your Product

Let?s look at the options when it comes to Giraffe Painting in terms of what we can sell. Obviously we can paint up a giraffe and sell that painting. However, is that leveraging our time so that we are free from work? No!

What that is doing is creating more work for us! With every sale we make, we need to paint another Giraffe! You may want to do that, and that is fine, but there can be another way. If you love painting giraffes that much, you can skip ahead to step 3.

The 2nd option that pops into my head would be to sell Giraffe Painting Kits. Or perhaps paints in the colours of giraffes. Or painting stencils. You include the paint, the canvas and all the materials needed to create the perfect painting of a giraffe. This is great! Now, bear in mind that you are going to have to handle manufacturing, packaging, shipping, returns, just to name a few of the aspects of this business you will need to be aware of and handle to make this business a success.

Is there a simpler way?

Yes, how about an informational product? An ebook titled ?How to Draw a Giraffe?. It is digital and instant delivery, plus you can set up the website so that you never need to have a single step in the process except for answering customer queries! People will pay for information. You know from the keywords search that 1,600 people every month are searching for ?How to Draw a Giraffe?, so do you think you could sell a few of those on an eBook that is all about that? Of course you could!

So you have three different products (or ways of creating products) that you can apply to any hobby. You can be paid to do your hobby (painting giraffes), you can sell different aspects of the hobby (like unpainted D&D models, or Monopoly money for people that have lost theirs), or the third way is to create an informational product based on your hobby.

Are there more than different ways to monetize your hobby? Of course! Get creative and come up with your own unique way!

Now, to actually sell those products.

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Step Three ? Selling Online

This is a simple step. Get a website and sell your product. There are a million ways of getting a website up, including hiring a professional such as myself, or you can find free website creators online just by Googling them.

Why would you hire someone, rather than do it yourself? Well, the first thing of course is time. The whole point of creating an online business is to free up your own time, and if you have never built a website before expect it to take a while (particularly if you don?t know what you are doing).

The second and most important reason is that a professional knows how to make your product sell. I?m not talking about just any web designer here, I?m talking about someone like us at Scott Creative who knows Internet Business and can actually create a website that will get bigger results for you than your own website could.

Now if you are doing it yourself, here?s one formula to keep in mind:

1 Website = 1 Product

Don?t try to get every product you can think of onto your website. Keep it simple. ?HowToPaintGiraffes.com? sells an eBook on How to Paint Giraffes. Nothing else. Make it easy for people to find. Give them as much content as you can for free, then sell them the product. Don?t make the mistake of trying to sell someone on a product without any knowledge of what it is and what they can expect.

So there you have it. If you can make money selling eBooks on how to paint giraffes (quick tip: the Keyword results are real, so if you are an artist, maybe this could be your 1st eBook), you can make money selling anything.

Get out there, get your online business started and get the freedom you want from your life!

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April 3, 2012

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