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How to Turn Your Hobby Into Your Career

Blog | April 23rd, 2019


What’s your hobby? If you could do it more and turn it into a career, would you?


Now more than ever, people have the ability to take matters into their own hands and follow their personal passions. We’ve categorized hobbies and compiled the best ways on how to get building a career out of each right way.


If you’ve ever thought about the possibility of turning your hobby into your career, it’s time to commit. Here’s how.


Art and Design


There are many ways you can put your art and design skills to work depending on how you want to go about it. Regardless of which path speaks to you from the options below, you’ll definitely want to create social media accounts specifically for your art. If you have a following already, start posting more and more of your work to start getting feedback and spreading the word that you are actively producing.


Prints

If you envision your art and design work on people’s walls, there are opportunities to easily post them online for sale. Platforms like society6 allow you to upload your work and they take care of the transaction, printing, and shipping processes. You just collect the profit.


Crafts

For the crafty of you out there, Etsy will be your best friend for getting started making money with your items. Whether it’s knitting, jewelry, accessories, or anything else you can create, Etsy is a perfect platform to connect with people who are looking for unique goods.


Designed Apparel

If your passion is creating designs for clothing and accessories, you don’t have to go to fashion school to start selling it to people. Sites like Spreadshirt and teepublic allow you to easily upload designs and put them on apparel and accessories. They take care of the sale, printing, and shipping.




Entertainment


There are plenty of stages for performing, visual, and musical artists out there. At-home entertainers have more control than ever before to build an audience for themselves.


Musicians

There are so many ways to engage people with your music. If you’re creating music at any level, be sure to post it to Soundcloud. Share your new releases on your social platforms. It’s also good to put your tunes into video form and build profiles on YouTube and Vimeo.


Aside from your online presence, definitely tap into your local music community by collaborating and attending open mic events.


Video Creators

There’s more video content today than ever before. That means that 1) there are more opportunities than ever to share your videos and 2) viewers are hungry for fresh video content all the time. Create accounts on YouTube and Vimeo for your work. Also be sure to make use of the video features on Instagram, like the stories, to rope viewers in. As you start sharing your videos, building an audience is key to building it into a career.


Writing


There are many different writing careers you can pursue. The most important thing is to be constantly producing and putting your work out there. In any writing discipline, you’ll want to make sure you have a portfolio of your best work ready and presentable for opportunities.


Blogging

Many writers choose to blog, regardless of what line of writing work they’re going for. It puts your work online and gives you control over your voice and content. You can easily start a free blog on sites like WordPress and Wix. If you just want to write and publish, Medium allows you to publish on their platform for free.


Writing Services

Of course, you ideally want to get paid for your writing. Businesses are constantly looking for content, social media, copywriting,  and marketing writers to help present their brands and connect with customers. To get started, create profiles on freelance sites like UpWork and Fiverr.


Hands-on Hobbies


Are you a wiz with your hands? Spend more time creating the unique things you love when you start committing to it as a career.

Baking and Cooking

This may be one of the harder hobbies to transition into a business immediately, but it’s still very possible. Decide what you love to make and perfect your craft. Share it with friends, neighbors, and the community as much as possible. Also as important, take high-quality photographs of your finished product and share them on social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.


Woodworking

Is your workshop your second home? You can make it into your home office too. Start sharing pictures of your work on social media. Even more importantly, see if you can get involved in local markets where you can bring your products and offer them to your community. You can also post them onto online marketplaces on Facebook, Letgo, and Etsy.


Active


Some hobbies are more active than others. You won’t have to worry as much about finding time to hit the gym if it’s your office.

Exercise and Training

The value of being into exercise and physical training is that you amass so much valuable information through your hobby that many people would like to use towards their own health and exercise routines. The first step in turning your exercise hobby into a career is to start sharing your journey and knowledge with others. You may choose to get some type of certification as a trainer to give yourself credentials to support your knowledge.


Travel

Traveling for a living sounds like a dream job to most people. If you have traveled a lot, share your tips and experiences online in a blog or podcast. Offer to help people you know who are going on trips with their itineraries. Showcase the benefit you can bring to people. Eventually, you can start working as an independent travel planner or consultant, or you can join an established agency.


Sports

Are you a former high school or college athlete? If you want to stay involved in your favorite sport and make some money, you may be able to get into coaching in your area. Join CoachUp as a coach to see how you can help young athletes in your neighborhood.