How to make money with your passion
Understanding how to make money with your passion is one of the most important things you can do in life. The younger the better, but better late than never.
When you develop a purpose based on your passion, you’re able to do what you love everyday and also make a living. It’s the best of both worlds. You might not love every little detail that surrounds the business side of things, but if you’re passionate about something then that’s going to far outweigh any technical or business thing that pops up. It will make it worth it.
Knowing how to make money with your passion allows you to have financial freedom and day to day fulfillment in what you do. You’ll be a much more happy and positive person if you can learn how to make money with your passion compared to other people who are unfortunately stuck in a terrible reality of going to a job they hate.
Choose your passion
Passions change, but you need to start off by identifying something you’re passionate about right now.
If you have nothing you’re passionate about, then you need to explore different things.
Having a passion doesn’t mean you need to love every little thing about what you do. I enjoy martial arts but drilling the same thing over and over again can become annoying, even though it’s necessary. What you need to love is the overall process and the actual doing. If you’re a math person, you may enjoy engineering or programming. If you’re an artsy person then you mighty like graphic design or video game design. Maybe you’re competitive and might like competing for real estate deals.
Figure out what kind of things interest you and then pick something to try out. And if you already know something you have passion for, then you need to think about how you’re going to make money with it.
Brainstorm ways to make money
If you love martial arts, you can make money by being a pro fighter, a teacher, a media reporter, having a blog / instagram on martial arts, developing a product, and so on. Each have their pros and cons, but they all involve your passion. Some will take longer than others and have different risk to reward ratios.
For example, the chance of you being a pro fighter and making a good living is extremely small. However, if you become the best in the world then you’ll get a lot money and status. The downside is your odds are close to none and it will take 5-10 years before you get there.
On the other hand, if you out 5-10 years in, you can likely become an instructor even if you’re not the best fighter if you’re able to communicate your ideas. Or if you’re analytical you can develop your own blog or YouTube channel.
Finding an intersection
There’s a lot of ways to learn how to make money with your passion without having to be the best fighter, dancer, and so on in the world. But you need to find an intersection. You need to have decent knowledge and skills with your passion, and then connect that with something else. Like the examples above, a good martial artist can become a teacher if he intersects martial arts with teaching. Or if he can interest martial arts with analysis he can start a YouTube channel and break down fights.
You can definitely make money with your passion, even if it’s only on the side at first. But it’s not going to happen like magic. You need to think of ways of monetizing it. Don’t get me wrong, patience is vital. Especially if you’re building an audience and selling a product, you’re going to need to wait at least a 1, most likely 2-3, before you’re really able to monetize your efforts. But if you stay persistent in providing value to people you will be able to. And likewise with a service business, it will take time (although not nearly as long) in order before you start making real money.
Start thinking about monetizing
But start thinking about it. Will it be a real product? A course? Will you be teaching people things in real life or coaching? Will you be doing web design for clients or will you be doing affiliate marketing on your YouTube channel? The options are endless and you can always thing of new ways, but it’s critical you imagine some of the ways now. A big part of learning how to make money with your passion is visualizing it before it happens. This will keep you motivated in the first few years of grinding when you haven’t made it yet.
Decide on what aligns with your timeline
It’s time to decide on how you’re going to make money with your passion. Again, this can change, but you need to pick a strategy now and stick to it for the next few years so you can put your work on.
Which brings us to your timeline. Develop a timeline for your business for the next 5 years. It’s all about building the vision. Your vision is going to keep you motivated when no one watches your videos, reads your blogs, or buys your services. It will help you stay focused to making money with your passion and not giving up. Trust me, I had barely any traffic on here the first 6 months, and even 1 year into it, things seemed very slow. It wasn’t until 1.5 years that I started to get noticeable traffic. And with my marketing company, that took a good 2 years to really get off the ground.
What I recommend
Build a business with a timeline of 5 years, with at least the first 2-3 on the side. Meaning you don’t quit your day job just yet. You need to build up your side business. This is how you turn your passion into profit. Because if you quit your job and don’t make it, you could end up worse then you started out. This means that you’re probably be putting in 60-80 hour weeks for a few years, with 40-50 at your day job and 20-40 on your passion.
Year 1
There’s tons of different types of businesses for you to monetize your passion. But the main two are product / influencer businesses and service businesses. Product / influencer businesses take lots of time (for blog or YouTube organically) or money (ads) to build up your brand. Service businesses can make money much quicker but still take a few years to scale. And these too can also grow much quickly if you have money for ads.
But I’m going to assume you don’t have much money for advertising yet and are being nimble.
In that case, for year 1 you’re going to need to:
- for product / influencer – produce content
- for service – cold calls / emails
Product based business
Product based businesses and influencer based businesses need a shit ton of content. Whether it’s blogs, videos, or both, you need to just produce content the first year. In fact you’ll need to do this for more than a year, but Year 1 is only about content.
Service based business
For service based business, you need to cold call and/or cold email. Basically a lot of outbound in order to get people to talk to you. The advantage a service based business is that if you’re good at sales, you can generate revenue in the first 6 months and then have money for ads, which means no more cold emailing or calling. And it’s also a low risk model.
Product / influencer businesses that are building an audience with no money can ultimately build an incredible business, but you run the risk of building lots of content and never blowing up. That being said, if you deliver quality content and don’t give up, you’re probably make it at some point. It takes a long time, and all of year 1 should be focused on that solely.
Year 2
Year 2 is still a grind.
- for product / influencer – produce content, start to monetize
- for service – use revenue to pay for ads
For product and influencer businesses, it’s still mainly about content production. You may be able to monetize 2nd half of year 2, but don’t expect to get rich or make good money yet. It’s always possible you blow up this early, but it generally takes much longer. Stay consistent by providing value top your audience and growing your following.
For service based businesses, it’s time to scale up. You can still do outbound if you need to or prefer it. However, even if you’re making money with your passion, it’ll be more efficient to just get most of your leads through ads. Or even better yet referrals. You can hire other people to do outbound sales for you, but you should be focused on growing the business and higher level engagements in your 2nd year. Of course you’re still need to be a sales guy and follow up with leads, but outreach shouldn’t be main focus anymore. Automate with ads and client referrals.
Years 3-5
Still produce content if you’re a product based business or influencer. But now you should be able to monetize and either quit your job or have the option of doing so.
If you’re a service based business then you can either have an ad machine and have a lifestyle business where you only work 20 hours a week or you can grind and hire more people to scale up.
Regardless, you should now be at a point where you’ve learned how to make money with your passion ands are starting to reap the rewards.
You’re still not at your prime. You can continue to scale this business up for the next 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, or for life. what you do from here is up to you. Some people have the same passions for life and others want to explore new arenas. But you’ve already built up some wealth for yourself at this point and you have options.
Make money with your passion
Life is too short not to learn how to make money with your passion. Find something you love, educate yourself and gain skills, and then figure out how to provide value to others. That’s how you’re going to monetize. You’ll either need an audience for a product / influencer business, or you’ll need high paying client for a service business.
But whatever it is, don’t wait. Start right now pursuing your passion and then working to make it into a business. Even though you might love your actual passion, it’s going to be hard as hell the first few years working on it when you’re tired as fuck after work. Just put the in the effort, stay persistent, and you will get to where you want to be in due time.
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