[Case Studies]: How To Make Money Online With Your Hobby In 2023

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If you want to make some extra cash in your free time, there is no better way than getting paid doing what you love. In fact, there are a lot of hobbies that make money. For some hobbies, you can even turn them into a full-time business if you want. 

How I Made Money Online From My Hobby

Personally, I have turned my hobby into a full-time online business. And you are actually looking at it right now. 

Yes, it’s my personal finance blog.

I love writing and love to talk about personal finance.

When I started my blog, “Earn More Live Freely”, I didn’t expect that it would one day become a full-time business for me.  

But, as my blog audience gets bigger and bigger, I started to monetize my blog with my own information products and services. 

Pretty soon, I grew my revenue to a consistent 4-figure monthly income. And it’s still growing.

The best part is that all my products and services are sold on auto-pilot.  

In other words, the entire sales process from lead generation to closing the sale to product delivery is FULLY automated with GetResponse which is a good yet affordable email marketing service compared to its other competitors.

So, that means I can be making sales even when I am sleeping or out having dinner with family and friends. 

Now, you might be wondering if you can actually do this as well.

The short answer is yes. 

Because I started from scratch just two years ago with no idea and no experience. 

How You Can Turn Any Hobby Into Online Profits

Whether you have a fun hobby or unusual hobby, you can turn it into online profits.

First, let me give you an example of how you can turn your hobby into a profitable online business.

Let’s say you love fishing and enjoy talking about fishing. 

Instead of talking with your friends and family about this topic, what you can do is to talk about it online on your website and reach a wider audience who are looking for fishing tips and advice.

From the screenshot below, you can see that the number of people who are searching for “fishing” on Google is about 389,000 every single month.

That’s a lot of people who are interested in fishing just as you are.

And that just the search volume for one single keyword. 

When you want to talk about the topic “fishing”, there are literally thousands of other related keywords and sub-topics in this niche.

Here are some sub-topics that you can talk about:

• How to choose a fishing rod
• How to fish with lures
• How to tie fishing knots
• Fishing safety tips
• When is the best time to fish
• How to set the hook
• Freshwater baits and lures

And the list does not end that. 

When you add up the total number of people who are looking for fishing-related information online, it is easily millions of people visiting fishing-related websites every month around the world. 

And the best part is that you just need to get a small percentage of these people to your website to make a decent income.

Once you build an audience for your website, you can start to make money with your website in a number of ways:

• Make money with display advertising on your website
• Make money as an affiliate promoting fishing products and services
• Make money with sponsorship from fishing equipment companies who want to reach their customers through your website
• Make money selling fishing products on your online shop
• Make money selling your own digital products such as fishing training or eBooks

What if your hobby is not fishing?

That’s okay because there are hundreds of other profitable hobby niches.

And here’s just some best examples of hobbies turned into profitable blogging niches:

• Play Piano
• Play Guitar 
• Gaming
• Gardening
• Language learning
• Photography
• Cooking
• Baking
• Golfing 
• Fishing

Here’s another real-life case study of how you can turn a hobby into a full-time business.

Below is a screenshot from a website called “Piano In 21 Days”.

When you first saw this website “Piano In 21 Days”, you might think that a pianist or a piano teacher started it. 

Actually, it’s NOT.

The website owner, Jaques, has a hobby – playing the piano. He started to learn how to play piano at a young age as hobby and later went on to pursue an engineering career which is totally unrelated to piano.

He started his website ON THE SIDE, out of his passion for piano, to share his knowledge about piano playing and help beginners learn how to play in a short period of time. 

So, how does he make money from his hobby website?

There are two obvious ways that he earns an income.

But his main income source is from his online course teaching people how to play piano in 21 days.

So far, he has had more than 3,500 paying students. 

His second source of income is affiliate commission from promoting Amazon piano-related products.

How he does it is that he writes a very detailed piano buying guide to help his audience make a purchase decision. 

Inside this guide, he recommends Amazon piano-related products.

If anyone clicks his affiliate link in the guide and makes a purchase based on his recommendation, Amazon is going to pay him a small commission at no extra cost to the buyer.

By turning his hobby into a full-time business, he is able to quit his job and support his family with this website. 

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Free Training: How I Turned My Hobby Blog Into A Full-Time Income In Less Than 12 Months

Can You Turn Your Hobby Into A Full-Time Business?

So, can your hobby business idea become a full-time business and help you replace your day job one day?

That depends on a few factors:

• Is there a product or service that you can sell? ( for example, online courses or consulting & coaching services)
• Is there a demand for it? If yes, how big is the demand?
• How much money are people willing to spend on the product or service that you offer?

Now, you might ask if there is any easy way to help gauge the demand as well as the income potential for any hobby business idea.

Yes.

Let’s say that you are considering starting a website about piano playing.

And you want to know if there is any demand for piano playing products.

What you can do is go to Udemy and then search for courses on how to play the piano. 

Below is a screenshot of one of the best selling piano courses on Udemy. 

You can see that there are more than 200,000 students enrolled in the course.

That is a huge demand.

Other than Udemy, there are other places you can go to find out more about the market demand in your niche:

• Amazon books ( Are there a lot of people buying books in your niche?)
• Your competitors (Are there people who are already doing it? )
• Google ads ( Are there people who are paying to advertise in your niche?)

Now, let’s look at the website “Piano In 21 Days” as an example again. 

The website owner offers different packages that cost anywhere from $97 to $497. 

As he has had more than 3500 paying students, that means that there is definitely demand for his online course. Also, people are willing to pay up to $497 to learn how to play the piano. 

The income potential for this hobby is pretty high. 

What Do You Need To Get Started

To start making money online from your hobby, all you need is a website.

Typically, you can get a decent website up with a $3.95 per month website hosting plan from Bluehost (I used it to set up this website).

There is also another web hosting that I recommend which is NameCheap Web Hosting. And its basic plan starts at $1.44/Month.

Although Bluehost is slightly more expensive, it offers FREE domain name and also FREE SSL (which helps make your website secure) while NameCheap will charge you for both seperately. 

An email autoresponder software is good-to-have because you can use it to build a list of email subscribers.

The reason why you want to build an email list is that you can keep in touch with your audience and send them back to your website whenever you have new articles or videos published.

Having an email autoresponder software also allows you to create a powerful email sequence to help you sell products or services (either your own or other people’s)

If you are having a tight budget, there is an email marketing software called MailChimp which allows you to use it for free as long as your list of subscribers does not exceed 2,000. 

However, my experience with MailChimp is not very pleasant. 

When my free account was still under 1000 subscribers, my free account kept getting suspended for a couple of times for no good reasons. 

The reason why I find this puzzling is that I’ve never had this happening to me again after I switch to another paid email marketing software.

Yes, after getting fed up with the FREE service, I finally decided to sign up for GetResponse which I am still using right now till this day. 

GetResponse is also a much more affordable email marketing service compared to its other competitors such as ConvertKit. 

What Mindset You Need To Have To Make It A Success

Well, you have just seen how one guy turned his piano hobby into a full-time business online while working at a day job.

So, if I tell you that you too can make money from your passion by turning your knowledge into online courses or coaching programs, would you actually go ahead and do it?

Maybe not. 

Why?

The thing that is holding a lot of people from selling their knowledge online is that they think they aren’t good enough or qualified enough to teach other people. 

Many people believe that in order for them to be “qualified” to teach other people, they have to know every single thing about the topic and be the absolute best in the field.

But, that cannot be further from the truth. 

As long as you are knowledgeable enough to help someone who knows less than you get the results they want, then you are considered an expert to them.

Now, let me give you an analogy.

Let’s say you love to bake cupcakes. 

Your friends and family all love your cupcakes because they are delicious. 

If a friend who knows nothing about baking wants to learn how to bake cupcakes, do you think you can help her and show her exactly how to do it from scratch?

Definitely yes.

You have done it more than a hundred times yourself and you have gotten amazing results ( everyone loves your cupcakes!)

That makes you more than qualified enough to teach a beginner baker how to bake cupcakes.

In fact, there are many “experts” who started with no certification and no degree.

They just decided that they wanted to go out and help people in an area that they have knowledge in.   

One example is John Gray who wrote the bestselling book called “Men Are from Mars, Women Are From Venus”.

Before he became this “Relationship Expert” that we all know him as today, he started out by just giving relationship advice to friends to help them out.

You see, you don’t have to be the absolute BEST in the field to feel qualified or good enough to help other people. As long as you can help people who know less than you, you are an “expert” to them already.

Free Training: How I Turned My Hobby Blog Into A Full-Time Income In Less Than 12 Months