So you want to learn how to start a business around your passion that makes money 24/7 and gives you the ability to work where you want when you want. Imagine the lifestyle you would be able to live if you turn your passion into profits. Online entrepreneurship can help you to reach these specific goals, but it’s not easy!
- Six Tips To Turn Your Passion Into Profit Maximization
- Six Tips To Turn Your Passion Into Profit Sharing
To create a business, you need the formula to turn your passion into profits. But first….
Over and over again I have met people who have passion and great talent for what they do, but struggle with getting paid clients. In this workshop I will share with you 10 fundamental principles to turn your enthusiasm for you profession into a viable business. Building a successful service-based business takes more than desire. I’d stumbled into something I really loved doing, figured out how to monetize it and learned how others could leverage my own experiences to do the same. How to Profit From Your Passion. Here are a few exercises you can do to find out just how you can turn your passion into a profit center. Write down your daily activities for one month. We warmly welcome you to our ‘Side Hustle 101: How to turn your passion into profit’ workshop and networking online event. In partnership with “Women Who Freelance,’ our networking night is for ambitious young self-identifying women – whether you are an inspiring entrepreneur, a new side hustler seeking partners or wanting to network, we have. Anything is possible! Once you have clarity on what your passions are, you need to start by focusing on the most fulfilling one, and brainstorm different ways to monetize it. However, keep in mind that passion alone will not make a successful business! You need much more to make a profit with your business. Imagine the lifestyle you would be able to live if you turn your passion into profits. Online entrepreneurship can help you to reach these specific goals, but it’s not easy! To create a business, you need the formula to turn your passion into profits. There are two questions that many books and online resources seek to answer.
There are two questions that many books and online resources seek to answer:
- What’s Your Passion (Business Idea)
- Who’s Willing To Pay For It (Build & Grow Your Business)
I believe that when starting a business, you first need to start with the end in mind. You want to build a business to live a specific lifestyle.
So you need a business plan that’s integrated with that specific life plan. Often we confuse being rich with living a productive way of life.
Through my personal journey with entrepreneurship, I have discovered some core philosophies that I want to share with you to help mold how you determine to turn your passion into profits.
The 4 Hour Work Week
Tim Ferriss is a lifestyle entrepreneur that went through many trials and triumphs before discovering how to build a business designed around his lifestyle instead of the other way around. He later went on to publish his discoveries in a book called The 4 Hour Work Week that became a #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller.
The 3-part mantra that Tim focuses on is “Escape 9-5 Live Anywhere, And Join The New Rich”.
1. The Time Trap
Ask yourself how much is your time worth. Is it worth $50 per hour or $150 per hour? Personally, I feel my time is priceless because it’s the one item you can’t get back. We all feel the desire to follow our passions, but we know that money controls our ability to do them.
To escape the time trap, we must create a way to generate passive income.
There are four types of incomes broken into active income on the left below and passive income on the right below:
My desire is to help you build and grow a business (upper right grid) that gains profits using automated systems and limited manual labor on our part. Tim suggests we eliminate all tasks from our life that aren’t essential until we are at the essence of the problem and solution.
In my life, I used to have a service-based business where I focused on inbound marketing consulting. I made over $3,000 per month working part-time on top of working my full-time job as a digital marketing coordinator, but I soon realized I was trading my hours for dollars.
If I desired to take a vacation or take two weeks off from working my income would stop. So now I focus on creating products (online courses, affiliate products) and doing limited marketing consulting with clients on retainers using HubSpot to leverage my time.
In order to avoid the time trap you must learn to create an business that leverages software, tools, and other people to give you freedom to make money online 24/7.
I address solving this problem by creating business models that leverage time. For now, just remember that you want to create a business that’s based on products. If your product can be purchased to create a recurring month-to-month revenue, this is even better when planning out your business around your passion.
2. Become Location Independent
If you’re reading this blog post, then you’re more than likely to understand that creating a virtual business allows you to work from anywhere. What does being location independent mean?
For starters here are some of the myths about being location independent.
Mostly no one can manage time. Are we all given the same amount of hours in a day? Regardless if you’re Barack Obama or a small business owner.
Gaining the ability to work when you want and where you want is about creating valuable experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.
Imagine if you were able to…
- Able to stay at home instead of having limited time on paternity leave if you are giving birth to your child
- Able to surprise a loved one. Distance often hinders our ability to spend time with loved ones. What if you could visit them when you want?
- What if your sports teams clinched the playoffs and were heading to the championship game. You could avoid the hassle with a flexible lifestyle.
- You could travel around the world while your business makes money around the clock.
I know right now some of these things may be far-fetched. Here are several of my friends that are lifestyle entrepreneurs.
- Nomadic Matt: He started traveling at 23 and managed to travel for 18 months. After that, he finished his MBA and became location independent. Matt has created an online business where he teaches others how to fly around the world first class with an economy-sized budget. He makes income from book sales and his online courses all while traveling the world of course!
- Natalie Sisson: She has traveled to over 69 countries all while living out of her suitcase. She embraces the minimalist lifestyle. What I love about Natalie are her transparency and enthusiasm. If you are longing to be closer to family and are on the fence about starting an online business, then you should read her inspiring story.
- Jodi Ettenberg: She’s a retired lawyer… Well not exactly. She quit being an attorney in 2008 and revamped her lifestyle. She now blogs while traveling the world. Unlike other lifestyle entrepreneurs, she focuses on how you can eat while traveling. This is an essential element that all lifestyle entrepreneurs that decide to take the minimalist approach must consider.
- Samantha Brown: She started blogging to shed light on parts of South East Asia. Her site is organized for tourist who is looking to learn about specific areas to visit. Samantha now has a TV show on the Travel Channel. With blogging, you can gain authority… The sky’s the limit.
- Dan Andrews & Ian Schoen: They successfully exited a tech startup in 2015 with a nice payday. They now podcast and run an online business called Dynamite Circle which focuses on connecting lifestyle entrepreneurs who are location independent.
- Colin Wright: I love the idea of moving and traveling to a new country every four months. Colin does just that while writing books and doing public speaking gigs. Most of all he has a theoretical approach to life that makes you think differently and ask challenging questions like… Why do we work 8 hours per day?
3. New Wealth Perception
Traditionally when we think of wealth, we imagine having to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a wealthy businessman that grew and sold a company. Why do you want to be wealthy?
Six Tips To Turn Your Passion Into Profit Maximization
Is it necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire? Simply put no. The New Rich is a group of people that understand the concept of lifestyle design. They live their lives in a way to have maximum impact on others lives and enjoy life now, not later! We don’t need millions of dollars but only the knowledge required to have experiences that millionaires used only to have the privilege of enjoying.
I’m guilty of having some selfish desires that are good but can easily lead to bad habits that would leave me feeling empty inside. Some of my original wishes before I matured were:
- Material possessions such as a MacBook, iPhone, Jordan’s, & Ferrari
- The power that’s associated with wealth for the wrong intentions
- Respect and admiration to impress others and fill my ego
These empty desires will only provide temporary satisfaction. How many electronic gadgets, & pairs of shoes, do we need? When focusing on building a business in the traditional sense, we get sucked into a money trap where there’s never enough. Lewis Howes is an online entrepreneur (author of The School of Greatness) that had it all but understood that lifestyle entrepreneurship was the only way to fulfill his deep desires to turn his passion into profits. When we begin thinking on a larger scale and focusing on meaningful and fulfilling desires such as:
- Experiences with others instead of material possessions
- Supporting social causes that makes a global impact
- Living a purpose driven life with sincere intentions
So to build a business that’s focused on turning your passion into profits, you need to:
- Develop a way to create passive income
- Create a business that allows you to work from anywhere
- Change our internal definition of attaining wealth
If you want to learn more about The 4 Hour Work Week Then check out Malkhaz Geldiashvili who does an excellent job in his animated book review of summarizing the main ideas.
Now that we have some of the core principles required we could now build and grow an online business to live life on our terms.
Here are the four areas I focus on to help you grow your online business…
Business Models
When starting to build a business, you must plan. My grandfather always says, “If you fail to plan then you plan to fail.” Business plans are great on paper, but by the time you start your business, a lot has already changed; this is even more so now with the Internet and technology that advances at a rapid pace.
Business plans take too long to write, are seldom updated, and almost are never read by others but documenting your hypotheses is key. Lean Canvas is an adoption of the business model canvas. Lean Canvas allows you to build a 1-page business model in a fraction of the time it would take to create a traditional business plan.
You can download the lean canvas-template here.
After properly planning your online business you will need to build a minimum valuable product (MVP) and test your hypotheses (ideas) to see if they work. Screw building a product or investing money into a business that hasn’t been validated. The ultimate goal is attaining product-market fit.“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
Getting Customers
Once you have a proven product and business model, you will then focus your efforts on a mix of growth marketing, inbound marketing, and social selling. The goal at this point is to increase the number of overall customer acquisitions while still keeping down your cost per acquisitions.
I highly recommend setting up Google Analytics with your core conversion goals so that you can measure which marketing channels are giving you the best return on your investment.
Now moving forward we will focus on developing an inbound marketing strategy.
To generate online sales, you simply need qualified traffic going to your website that converts into sales. You have a lot of options when it comes to deciding how to gain sales.
I will let you in on a secret… different forms of inbound marketing will help you achieve different goals along with your customer’s buyers journey.
Personally, I’m focusing on four main things to generate sales. They include in-depth blog posts (3,000 words) around long tail keywords, high-quality guest posts (1,00 words), blogger outreach and creating exclusive resources to grow my email list (eBooks, cheat sheets, courses).
After attracting enough traffic to my website and building up my email list, I can focus on converting and closing website visitors through landing pages and exclusive resources.
I know what your thinking… this will be a lot of work. You want a faster way to generate sales. Well, there’s a faster way, but it will require money.
If you’re selling a product or service and want quick sales to look into Facebook Ads (remember to use the Facebook Pixel to track conversions) or Bing PPC. I recommend Bing because the cost per click is a lot lower the Google Adwords due to lower competition.
In some of my other blog posts, I go into more details about digital marketing. This just serves as an introduction to some of the core strategies and processes we will be using.
Six Tips To Turn Your Passion Into Profit Sharing
Retention Processes
Your best customers are your paying customers that you already have. Besides focusing on sales to gain new clients, think of ways to increase the customer lifecycle of your current clients.
If you plan your online business correctly, then you will have a product-based business with multiple sources of income (in my business my revenue streams are online course sales, affiliate products, and marketing consulting). Here’s where we work on retaining clients by creating recurring revenue streams. Some examples of recurring revenue streams that keep clients are lawyers with monthly retainers, monthly utility bills, and software subscriptions.
Before pivoting to help lifestyle entrepreneurs I solely worked with tech startups. I was a freshman in college in 2009, so I experienced 1st hand the growth of Facebook & Twitter. Saas based companies usually get large IPO’s because of their ability to scale (creating a digital product) and subscription-based business models.
Three great examples of recurring subscription revenue include a premium Spotify account, a premium LinkedIn account, and a NetFlix account. Recently more traditional companies are moving to recurring business models. Companies like Apple & even Audi… I love to look ahead of the curve.
This 2-minute clip from a lecture at Cornell paints a vivid picture of what’s happening.
In some of my other blog posts, I go in-depth over strategies to increase your revenue using your current customers and reveal methods to retain them using what Seth Godin calls the purple cow technique… Ok, he wrote the book but I’m just applying his ideas to teach you practical advice. I figured I would give credit where it’s due.
Imagine when customers purchase a product and land on your thank you page they receive a coupon. Or maybe you send your clients a handwritten note with an item so that you win their trust.
Business Automation
Last but not least is business automation. Once you have your online business operating and begin to gain customers, you will need business automation systems to allow you to scale your company. Most importantly systems are what help you avoid the time trap to live life on your terms.
As a business owner, you can choose to invest in an all in one solution or use growth hacks to create your custom solution. I recommend purchasing an all in one system after your company is generating enough revenue to cover the operating costs.
Here’s the top all in on marketing and sales automation platforms:
- HubSpot: $200 Per Month ($80 if you have an early stage startup)
- The RainMaker Platform: $145 Per Month
- Infusionsoft: $199 Per Month
- Marketo: $750 Per Month
- Pardot: $750 Per Month
In other blog posts, I will share all of my growth hacks that I have learned from startup veterans. I’m not here to just make promises.
IFTTT does an excellent job of using automation techniques to help you save time. You can spend 15 minutes to see what strategies you can apply to your online business or better yet just watch this video by todoist on the top productivity hacks using IFTTT.
I wanted to use IFTTT as an example to help you envision the type of automation techniques you can use for each part of your business and personal life and remember…
If we can’t automate it, then we can always outsource it!
Your next steps…
So are you up for the challenge to change both your personal and professional life? If you’re interested in growing a business that gives you both freedom to work when you want and where you want to consider building a purpose-driven tech startup.
Now get out there and turn your passion into profits!
My fiance, Steve Scanlon, is a landscaper. By trade (and by day), he owns a very successful business designing landscapes and cultivating the best lawns in the area. Steve loves his job, the staff who works for him as well as his clients.
However, little over three years ago he did something pretty cool - he turned his passion into profit and built a photography business simply out of his love for taking pictures. After being recognized by National Geographic as their Photo of the Day on 5/29/13, Steve's hobby turned business changed dramatically after that day in 2013.
However, it took a certain mindset to get there.
An Accidental Success Story?
Whether it is a picture of a Sea Bright sunrise, Sandy Hook beach or capturing the stillness of the Otter Creek Falls, in Vermont, his shots are fantastic.
Lucky for me, I have been witness to this 'accidental success' and have experienced his love and passion for his art spill over, literally, to the world of the internet which began with the support of local friends, family and community. He is an artist. But most of all, Steve is passionate about what he does.
I have watched his hobby grow purely and strictly from his love for photography and his willingness to pour his heart and soul into his passion. From there, he was able to use that drive to further his passion in ways to have a financial gain.
One might think that accidental success is purely that, an 'accidental success.' However, I believe that there are tips and tools you can cultivate so you can be your own success story. I learned so much watching Steve rather unintentionally take his his hobby to the next level and start to monetize from his passion.
Here are five key traits that will help identify if you have the ability to turn your passion into profit.
1. You Love What You Do and Work Hard At It
There is no doubt about it, when you are passionate about what you do, you are bound to be a success. You will be more committed to put the hours in as far as building your business to take it to the next level because, simply put, you enjoy it. Steve is testimony to this. It's his love for his art that gets him out of bed in the morning pre-sunrise to go enjoy capturing the moment.
Steve works weekends and evenings putting in the extra time and effort to cultivate and work at his dream which is selling pictures. You have to be willing to put in the man hours with very little reward in the beginning stages to set the foundation to a business plan that will work and engage your target audience - both on and offline.
It helps tremendously when that effort is fueled by a passion that you love what you do.
Anyone can have an idea, it's having the effort and the drive to taking that idea (or hobby) into a successful business that stops many would be entrepreneurs in their tracks. Anything worthwhile takes effort and elbow grease, so be aware that the business side of monetezing your hobby will take time to create and implement into a successful action plan.
2. You're An Enthusiastic Problem-Solver
If you love your job, you are excited to talk about it. If you love what you do, you will be enthusiastic to discuss it with colleagues and other professional connections. And, as we all know, enthusiasm breeds more enthusiasm.
Don't be afraid to seek answers to the problems you don't know how to solve. Be enthusiastic to grow your business and find solutions.
3. You're Genuine and Walk the Walk
No matter what kind of success you achieve by taking your passion/hobby to the next level, stay true to its roots. Take note in the effort that got you to this next level - most likely a big part of that was your authenticity and your desire to stay true to you being genuine to what you love to do.
I think this lesson could go for just about anything. When you peel back that proverbial onion and get to the reason why you do what you do, you are more likely to be authentic and real with yourself and your success. Steve maintains his authenticity, in my book, due to his desire to show the nature of the area, instead of focusing on the material aspects of life.
His love of the outdoors mixed with his keen eye really displays his authentic view of the landscapes that surrounds us. He is not caught up in what is the trend, so to speak. He is dedicated to his art and what keeps him passionate as to why he started taking pictures in the first place.
4. You Appreciate How You Got There And Show It
Almost each day, Steve thanks his social media fans for their 'likes' and comments.
Don't forget that for every step you take up the ladder of success there were people helping you move forward.
We all doubt ourselves at one time or another, the key is to not let those self-doubts seep in and take over. By showing gratitude for your world at the present moment and the people who helped you get there. will breed more of the same positivity.
5. You Know What Works, What Doesn't and Keep Learning
One key trait to recognizing the difference between hobby and hobby turned profit is to recognize systems - what works, what doesn't and continually have the ability to learn and improve - on many levels.
Know what works and do more of the same.
On the flip side, know what doesn't work when it comes to wanting to grow your passion into a career. Identify key traits as to what has helped you get this far and go from there. Turn to other entrepreneurs who are successful at growing their own business and use their guidance when you feel stuck and what to get to the next level.
Continue to educate yourself on the forefront of you as the business owner in addition to the services/products that you provide. Constant assessment is the key to continual progression, focus, and clarity when looking towards your goals.
The Next Phase
It's been fun being a bystander to watching Steve turn his passion into profit and even more exciting watching his confidence grow as a photographer as well as a entrepreneur.
Accidentally successful? Nah, I beg to differ. I think Steve knew what he was doing all along. As long as he has that lense, he will continually be seen as a success - no matter what.
About Patricia Phelan Clapp M.A.
I am a social media consultant and corporate trainer who helps business creatively market their brand online while continually focusing on overall business goals and target audience. My passion is to combine my experience teaching as an adjunct college professor, writer, entrepreneur and coach with my love of online media. I help my clients to tell their story to build an online referral network in a unique and creative manner to find new business.
For more information or a free consultation, please send me an inbox or go to my contact information located on my LinkedIn profile. I would be happy to help you find creative ways to market your business.
P.S. Thank you all so much for reading my blog posts in addition to your likes, shares and comments. LinkedIn rocks.