Nathan Hangen

3 Ways to Turn Your Passion into Profits

It dawned on my last night that I don’t talk often enough about how to actually turn your passion into profits. I mean after all, that’s what we all want most out of life right? There’s no feeling like being able to do what you love…each and every day of your life, without worrying about how to pay the bills or never having enough time in the day. I’m going to fix that over the next few weeks, but before I do that though, I’d like to tell you my story:

The reason that I started my online business was because I had been in the Army for 3 years and was tired of having my future planned out for me. Sure, it’s great to be able to serve my country, but I also can’t plan any longer than a year at a time, because I never know when I’m going to get deployed again.

So, I started building a business while I was in Afghanistan last year, in order to be able to my exit without having to get a ‘real’ job when I got out. 12 months later, I’ve grown tremendously, have learned an amazing amount about how to build a business online, and have laid the foundation for the strategic exit that I planned. Life’s great!

So, that’s where I stand on the whole “building a business online” thing, and I see tremendous value in being able to teach people how to transform their passions into profits. Here are 3 ways that I think you can do that.

1. Consulting

Consulting is great because as a freelance consultant, you can set your own price points and create your own value. If you look online at service providers, you’ll see that there are huge gaps between the cheapest and the most expensive. The same will be true of your field, but I can guarantee you that if you create value by presenting yourself well, having a clear plan for your client, and simply asking for the money, then you can reach the upper echelon of that comparison.

I know what some of you are thinking…your business doesn’t fit that kind of monetization strategy. Maybe you are a painter, or you make guitars at home. Here’s the thing, you can charge people for your expertise in almost ANY niche. You can educate beginner’s, help novices reach their full potential, or simply provide a blueprint for success. There are dozens of ways that you can share your knowledge and expertise without having to make a single product, you’ll just have to sit and think about how you can do that.

The only downside to consulting, and one of the reasons that people get burnt out, is that you are essentially trading dollars for hours. Over time, you might want to consider an even larger scale program that teaches your clients how to be consultants themselves. That’s where the real money can be made.

2. Membership Program

Like a coaching program, a membership program involves trading your expertise for cash, but differs in the fact that you can create the content once and charge for it continually. Let’s go back to the example of a custom guitar maker. If you have a skill like that, which is something that very few people have, you could create a monthly membership that teaches people not just how to do what you do, but how to start from the beginning. Why choose different woods, why choose certain body styles, how to design a blueprint for a guitar (is that what they are called even?), etc.

You can create videos on YouTube even that draw customers to your membership page. People do this all the time and it works wonderfully well. Once you’ve got the content, you can set it up to drip-feed to your members based on the number of months they’ve been subscribed. You don’t even need to make it a non-stop membership. Try going for 3 months, 6 months, or any other number that works for you.

3. Sell your $**t

The internet makes it incredibly easy to set up an e-commerce site and start selling products. You can use Wordpress to set up your website (set comments to none and create a single landing page), use any number of plugins that integrate with e-commerce solutions, and start featuring your products. Use a blog for SEO, and use video content to show off what you’ve got. If you need to, you can use PPC, but if your free content is good, you probably won’t need it. Throw up some testimonials, maybe even feature a customer in a video, and pop it on your site. There are so few people that know even the basics of setting up an e-commerce site that if you learn how to, you’ll be able to dominate your market…especially if you are good at what you do.

You can check out problogger sites like David Risley or Problogger to get an idea of how you can monetize, but don’t stop there. Heck, you can do what I did which is create an Amazon store that doesn’t even sell my own products, but satisfies a niche I believe in.

The options for making money online, especially if you are passionate, are nearly unlimited. You’ve just got to be better than half of the competition and you’ve got a chance. Combine that with your passion and belief in what you do, and you’ll be a rockstar.

Oh, by the way, can you comment and tell me if this helped you out? I’d love to hear from you.

image by Paulo Brandao

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