A creative hobby, like painting miniatures, can be turned into a business, whether you use it as a side hustle for some extra cash, or make it into your full-time job. Here’s how you can do it.
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Create a Business Plan
No business can become successful without proper planning. A good business plan covers how you can monetize your skills. Start by doing some research. Who else is going what you’re thinking of offering? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the competition? What service do they not offer that you can? You need to know there’s a market.
Think about what sort of business are you going to run. How will you make a profit? What challenges might you face? How will you overcome those challenges?
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Find The Time
You can’t run a business, even a side business, without investing some time. Take a look at where your time is going now and see if there’s anywhere you could free up a few hours.
When monetizing a hobby, it’s easy to think you won’t need more time to do it, but there’s more to a business than the fun bits. You need to find time for the admin parts too. You could get up an hour earlier during the week, or use your commute to work. Make sure you’re not encroaching on your day job or cutting out any time for friends and family.
Build Your Presence
It’s no good having a side hustle if nobody knows about it, so you will need to do some marketing.
A slick, professional-looking website advertising your painting can be set up with very little technical knowledge. Your website doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but it needs to look good. Get the basics right before adding extra details. Make sure you have a simple, easy-to-spell URL that matches the name of your business. Make sure all your basic information is on there; who are you, what do you do, how can people contact you?
Set up social media accounts that fit what you do. Twitter is a fantastic tool for marketing and online networking. Look for relevant chats and hashtags that you could get involved in. Share pictures of your work on Pinterest or Instagram. Short video clips of you working could also be very interesting for people to see, and can be shared on Instagram Reels or on TikTok.
Make sure your business social media accounts are professional and on brand. Use the same handle everywhere, and keep the profile image the same so people can tell it’s you. Use a logo if you have one, or a good quality photo of you or some of your work if you don’t. Remember that these accounts are for your side hustle, not for fun, so they should be professional, not personal.