If you’re like most people, then you probably have at least one hobby that you enjoy doing! You may love your hobby so much that you’ve considered making money from it, either part-time or full-time. But how do you actually turn your hobby into a business? We hope this article will give you insight on how to do so.
Let’s say you are a part of maker culture and enjoy carpentry. There are many ways one can make money from a hobby:
- You can teach what you know
- You can offer advice or guidance for someone who is having trouble with a build
- You can sell carpentry products that you’ve built and created
- You can get a part-time paying job at a hardware store like WoodCraft
- Enter and win money prizes and sponsorships at competitions such as the SkillsUSA Carpentry Competition
Since we at Ourglass offer a platform that helps professionals make money from their expertise, we’ll focus on the first two ways of making money – teaching or offering advice.
Our first recommendation is to start simple with your first step by asking yourself what aspect of your hobby do you want to teach? If you’re a carpenter, there are probably many aspects you can start teaching including the types of wood, types of tools, and where to buy materials. As we suggested in our How to Teach Online article, simplify your curriculum.
The second step is to find students! This sounds like a very obvious thing to do but you’d be surprised to know that most people overestimate how many people would actually pay for a lesson. You can find students on Craigslist, word-of-mouth, online forum, friends of friends, retail stores that relate to your hobby, etc.
Third, find a place to teach. Naturally, we at Ourglass recommend starting online! The awesome benefit to starting online is that it doesn’t cost very much to start and it’s also safer from a health perspective. You could teach in-person but that means you would have to go through the hassles of finding a public space to teach in, invite possible strangers into your home or go to possible strangers’ homes! If you find a neutral public space to teach in, you often won’t have privacy or the tools you would want or need and it might cost you money to rent that space out. Starting online removes all of those hassles and doesn’t cost you anything other than equipment and a website!
Fourth, determine your pricing. We wrote an article about pricing here and will post more on pricing later.
Finally, schedule and start a session with your first client or student! Once the session is finished, be sure to collect payment from your clients.