I’ve had a side business for a number of years of printing letterpress stationery and invitations. When I turned it into a hobby, there were several things I hadn’t thought about. As you begin exploring this path, there are some important questions to ask yourself.
First, do you want to make money from a hobby?
This may sound strange, but the truth is that when you turn a hobby into a business, you change the relationship between both you and the hobby and you and the customer. When you’re simply knitting shawls for friends and family, they’re happy to get them and there isn’t much stress involved.
When you start charging for the shawl, the receiver begins looking much more carefully at the quality of the product and the value they’ve received in exchange for their hard-earned money.
You need to realize that people will become more critical and more demanding when they trade money for a product.
Second, how are you going to sell your product or service?
When you begin charging for a product, the pool of buyers shrinks rapidly. You will need to move beyond friends and family if you want to earn more from your hobby. How are you going to reach these new customers?
Many people assume word-of-mouth will move their business along, but if you’re dealing in a niche area, you need to ask yourself how often your specialty will come up in other people’s conversations. If you knit the best wool socks out there, but you live in Phoenix, Arizona, wool socks may not be the conversation topic du jour.
Third, if you market online, are you prepared to take the steps necessary to generate traffic?
Website traffic comes from many sources. You can buy ads through Google or Facebook, you can commit to putting fresh content on your site regularly (which helps with search engine ranking), or you can work to get other sites to link to yours.
Each of these takes time, money, or both to work efficiently. If you set up a blog to drive traffic to your business, are you committed to posting at least three articles a week?
If you buy ads, make sure you have good analytics working in the background. Take a look at Google Analytics (http://analytics.google.com). If you’re using a blog platform such as Wordpress (what The Frugal Couple runs on), there are some plug-ins that allow you to automatically place Google’s code on each page so you can see how your traffic is maturing. (I use Google Analyticator.)
As you think about all of these things, it may be good to seek help from other people who have been successful in the area you’re looking to go into.
If you have questions about any of these topics I’ve raised, feel free to email us at:
frugality (at this domain).
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