Could Your Hobby Earn Income?

Almost everyone has a hobby, talent, or skill that they enjoy that has nothing to do with their primary income source. A hobby that they love to do that is usually an escape from their day to day work. Do you have one? Do you think your hobby be earning you income?

Could your hobby earn income?

If you are able to answer yes to any of these questions.

Question: Have people asked you to create items or do work for them?
Question: Have you seen similar products or services available from others?
Question: Do you have time to create items or provide services in your schedule?
Question: Does creating items or providing a service excite you when you think about it?

Your hobby might be just the thing you could use to expand your income or create a whole new primary source of income should things take off. Let’s take a look at the possibilities.

Do people ask you to create or do work for them already?

If you have a talent or skill, you may already have people asking you for help or to create items for them. If those close to you are already asking and you haven’t even tried to get the word out, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that there’s a whole market out there that wants what you have.

Have you seen products and services on the market similar to your hobby?

If you already see a market for your hobby, then you may have the proof of concept that lets you know you can monetize the hobby. If you find that you love DIY because you can make things for less money, that means you can charge market value for your time and effort for people who don’t have your talent or time to create.

Do you have time to create in your schedule?

If you are already spending your free time creating, there may be plenty of room to create a bit more for extra money. If taking time to create won’t burden your schedule, you may have the makings for turning your hobby into an income stream.

Does the idea of creating for other people… or for income… excite you?

If you get excited about doing a service or creating something for others, then your hobby might be ripe for making you some extra money.

Hobbies are an excellent way to express yourself creatively and earn extra cash – or, you may find that you have a primary new source of income coming your way. Consider a trial of selling to see if you remain passionate about creating, serving, marketing, and providing customer services. Sometimes creativity is best left for self-expression but many times it is a wonderful way to help others and make some extra cash for yourself.

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Take a peek inside our new accountability group!

Accountability benefits you in several ways as you pursue your dreams. Being held accountable isn’t only for those who are struggling with a particular issue, but for anyone with a goal. Working with an accountability partner or team is a key to success for anyone who wants their business to grow. If this is something you need, please, join us inside the Study Hall!

Become a founding member of the Study Hall community and gain access to exclusive content from the Studio Library, Mentorship, and experts in all areas of small business.

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could your hobby earn income?

How to Know if Your Vision Board Will Work

How to Know if Your Vision Board Will Work
Creating a vision board is a fun activity and some people hold vision board parties filled with friends, fun, laughter, music, and food. Who doesn’t love a party and what’s not to like about cutting out photos of your ideal life?

However, some people are quick to dismiss vision boards as being “woo woo” or magical or as a creative puzzle that just doesn’t work. Whether your vision board will work for you or not boils down to a few simple tips; follow the tips, and you’ll likely see success. Ignore the tips and you’ll likely get distracted, frustrated, and angry that you wasted time making the board.

Less is More

Typically, people like to fill a gigantic piece of cardboard with dozens of photos of their hopes and dreams, everything from the dream mansion by the ocean to the diamonds and private yachts. But how can you focus on achieving all those big-ticket items all at once? Most people can’t focus on multiple goals at once – especially huge ones – so they get distracted and miss important opportunities. Edit the number of photos you use on your vision board and decide which of those goals you want to reach first.

Prioritize Your Goals

What is most important to you: working a 4-hour workweek or living by the ocean? The fancy sports car or the ability to travel around the world? These are just examples, of course, but you need to prioritize each photo you find and really ask yourself WHY you want this on your board. Is it truly important to you or is it a flashback from your childhood? If a photo isn’t important to you, your subconscious will know that and you will only get distracted or confused about what you should be working toward.

Take Action

Vision boards are not mystical or magical; just because you put the photos together and post it in your office doesn’t mean things will start magically appearing. Even if you want to win the lottery, you still need to take the action to buy the ticket, right? The same is true of vision boards. If you want to buy your first home, take some action: do some research or hire a realtor, talk to a mortgage broker to get pre-approved, and then increase your marketing efforts to find more clients.

Believe that You are Good Enough

Mindset is everything when it comes to making goals a reality. If you fall victim to the negative self-talk that says you’re an imposter or undeserving of reaching greatness, then you will be less likely to take action toward those goals. How many times have you talked yourself out of creating a class or program because you think, “Who wants to learn from me?” Changing your mindset and releasing the blocks that hold you back doesn’t happen overnight but when you hear those negative thoughts invading, say out loud, “Why NOT me? Why shouldn’t I be the one to reach success? If not me, then who and why do they deserve it more?”

If you’re willing to take action, you will reach your goals. If you want things to be handed to you, then you’ll remain stagnant in your business and in life. Vision boards are tools used to visualize your goals and dreams and WILL work if you use the tool correctly.

Did you know TVS has launched the Inspired Action Mastermind?

A premium mastermind for mission-driven, service-based women entrepreneurs who are ready and willing to put in the work it takes to reach the next level!

Inside the Inspired Action Mastermind, we are an intimate group of entrepreneurs, all of which are committed to the success of one another’s businesses. It is a mastermind that provides the support and guidance you need to help you move your business forward. Because, when you’re in the right mastermind group, you can start to see your business and yourself through someone else’s eyes as you support one another and leverage each other’s experiences.

If you are ready and willing to shift your mindset and tackle all the hard questions to accomplish your dreams, then join us.

Learn about the Inspired Action Mastermind

How to Know if Your Vision Board Will Work

Mind Mapping to be as Creative as Possible.

When it comes to your business, you need to be as innovative, productive, and forward-thinking. There are many tools that you can utilize in order to be as creative as possible and, personally, I think mind mapping is one of those tools.

First, let’s examine what mind mapping is, mind mapping is a way of brainstorming on paper. It is extremely beneficial as it is a visual tool that stimulates creative thinking preparing you to organize, evaluate, and analyze data you create for your business ideas. It is sort of like brainstorming with yourself on paper.

To start, you place a keyword in the center of the paper that is a sort of the main character in the mind mapping system. Next, you branch out ideas from that internal word and continue to branch out new words in a circle around that original word or theme.

It is similar to choosing a theme and several subthemes or topics and subtopics. The more you extend the circles and branch them out, the more creative you will find yourself being. Mind mapping is similar to choosing a niche and then a sub-niche and then another sub-niche within a sub-niche.

Mind mapping offers several benefits. For one thing, mind mapping is a visual tool. It helps you to organize information, create new concepts and themes while stretching your imagination, and offers the possibility of analyzing and visualizing ideas on paper in a new and creative fashion.

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If you are a regular reader of my blog, you would have seen the article: How to Perform a SWOT Analysis for Your Online Business Idea, mind mapping is a great way to help you do this!

It is an excellent tool to evaluate the strengths of your company or business. By placing several key themes on paper, you can visually pinpoint where your company’s strengths are. From there, you can gain momentum by brainstorming creative and innovative ideas to enhance and maximize those strengths.

Mind mapping is also useful in examining weaknesses. Weak areas are highlighted when using mind mapping. This is useful because sometimes a discussion about weaknesses does not produce any tangible results for improvement. However, using mind mapping creates a visual board for where weaknesses lie.

If you want to explore opportunities that you can take advantage of, mind mapping is an excellent tool for this. If you have one or two tried and true ideas for success, you can create sub-categories and sub-topics for those opportunities. This, in turn, will create even bigger and more advantageous opportunities.

If your company or business has the potential for external threats, using a mind map will clearly hone in on those threats and spotlight them. This has a benefit because you can now see where you need to put your attention to ward off potential outside threats in the future.

As you can see, mind mapping is a very useful tool for assessing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is good for your creativity, your business and your personal growth! So, let’s start mapping!

How to Identify Your Target Audience and Ideal Customer

One of the most important issues to address in your business life is how to identify your target audience and ideal customer. Without honing in on a specific target audience, you run the risk of missing the mark. There are several easy steps to identify your target audience and ideal customer.

Set Your Goals and Keep Your Goals

One of the best ways to identify your target audience is by setting goals for your business. Once you have set identifiable goals, your ideal customer will present him or herself.

Keeping true to those goals will ensure that your target audience and the ideal customer will return time and again.

Measure Your Goals

Once you have established what your goals are, it is important to revisit those goals and measure them on a regular basis.

A great way to measure your goals to see if they are up-to-date is to utilize social media. Have your customers or clients take a survey or enter a contest to see whether or not your company is meeting and exceeding their needs.

Make sure to communicate with customers on social media. Respond to their comments, and communicate via Twitter. See what the competition is doing and what trends are trending. Follow those trends.

Choose a Niche

Once you have set your goals and have established ways to measure those goals, make certain that you stick within your niche. Often times, business owners tend to waiver outside their niche. Sometimes creative ideas just seem to flow and flow; however, you must be true to your niche at all times. This is how you will be able to identify your target audience and your ideal customer. How to identify your target audience.

Create a Sub-Niche

Once you have created a niche, see if you can break it down further and create a sub-niche. A niche would be something like divorced women and a sub-niche would be divorced women with small children. Perhaps your business is a life coaching business that empowers divorced women with smaller children to educate themselves so that they can provide for themselves and their families.

Once you start your new business, you will begin to notice who is responding and who is not responding. In this way, you can measure your target audience a little better and hone in on your ideal customer.

For example, you may notice that divorced women with older children may be in a better position to use your products and services as compared to divorced women with younger children. Your target audience may present itself a little bit differently than you had planned.

Stay flexible, keep an open mind, but once you have established your ideal customer, make certain to keep it there and dedicate all your time and effort to that target audience and its ideal customer.

How to identify your target audience.

How to identify your ideal audience.

5 Ways Vision Boards Help You Reach Your Goals

Do you set goals for yourself, either in your personal life or for your business? If not, how do you know you’re growing or making progress? When was the last time you allowed yourself to daydream about the type of life you want? What is your WHY, the reason behind all the long hours you spend on your business?

Creating a vision board has become a popular activity in recent years, especially as the New Year approaches and people think about the past year and the New Year’s resolutions they want to keep. A vision board is simply one tool that helps you visualize your dreams and your goals. How so, you ask? Let’s explore 5 ways vision boards help you reach your goals…

Vision boards make you focus on what’s important to you.

Whether you combine a personal vision board with a professional one or keep them both separate, thinking about what you want in life or in business forces you to prioritize what’s important. Do you want to buy your first house or move to a warmer climate? Putting a photo of your dream location by the beach will inspire you to work harder and not undercut your prices. If you want to move, you alone can make that happen and you’ll make better business decisions based on that desire to move.

Visualization stimulates the creative side of your brain.

Placing your vision board within sight of your desk or computer serves as a daily reminder of what you want to achieve. Some believe keeping it open by your nightstand helps stimulate your subconscious before you go to bed, which makes you motivated upon waking. With your creativity soaring, keep a notebook handy to jot down any ideas you have for a new course or coaching program you want to create.

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Focusing on goals makes you recognize new resources or opportunities.

Visualizing yourself living in a warmer climate (or whatever your primary goal is) will motivate you to work towards that goal but you’ll also notice new opportunities or resources which can lead you to reach your goal. These resources may have always been present but now that you’re focused on your goal, you will see them in a new light: as a way to help you reach that intended goal.

Break out of your comfort zone by stating a big, scary goal.

Are you stuck in a rut because you’re afraid to break out of your comfort zone? Acknowledging big goals – as scary and outrageous as they may be – will help you step out and take on new challenges, all in the name of reaching that scary goal. If your goal is to speak in front of an audience of 5,000 at your favourite conference, then you’ll start to see more opportunities for smaller speaking engagements. These smaller gigs will give you lots of practice and build your name recognition so when the organizers of your favourite conference advertise they’re looking for speakers, you’ll be well prepared to submit your name.

Seeing a big goal forces you out of the daydream and into action.

Nothing happens without some action on your part. Vision boards are not magic tricks; they are instead a tool that spurs us into action because we finally have clarity and know what we want out of life. Visualize your ideal life then approach each day with action steps that will lead you toward that ideal life.

Aside from these reasons, creating vision boards can be a very relaxing and fun family activity. So grab some glue and some old magazines and start daydreaming!

Vision Boards Help You Reach Your Goals

vision boards help you reach your goals.

How to support other women in business!

Do you support other women in business? Do you know how you can, even if you are not an entrepreneur?

Supporting someone doesn’t mean you have to make a huge commitment on your end. A support group does not necessarily need to be made up of the people you know, it can also come from complete strangers.

Here are four different types of support you can provide, when think you can lend a helping hand — big or small.

Emotional Support

Starting a business is not easy, for anyone. It comes with stress, anxiety, and loneliness to name a few things. Emotional support is important, it makes a big difference in someone’s life when they know others will have her back and be her shoulder to cry on.

Instrumental Support

When you are providing instrumental support it will involve taking care of another’s urgent and immediate needs. This can be as simple as stepping out to grab her lunch, or as big as investing in her business. Both are equally important.

Informational Support

Being able to provide non-judgmental guidance, advice, or mentorship, without expecting a return. This type of support is especially needed from those who have been there and done that, and have a long-time thriving business and can impart wisdom.

Accountability support

I love having an accountability partner, an outside point of view and a person to hold me accountable for my goals. Can you be that person for someone? Providing a gentle push forward, and remind them to stay on track and are capable of moving forward and finding success?

Even if your business has nothing to do with the woman’s business you’re supporting, I am willing to bet you are able to fill the void of one of the above to support another woman in business!

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Support Other Women In Business

How to Craft Great Blog Titles

I’ll let you in on a little secret. The most important part of your blog post is your title. Here’s how to craft great blog titles.

How well you write, how well-researched your content is, or how pretty your images are means nothing if you can’t get readers to click through and start reading your post. And the single most important thing when it comes to getting readers’ attention is having a great blog post title.

It’s also the most important on-page factor when it comes to SEO. So, if you’re hoping for lots of free traffic from Google and all your favourite social media sites, you need to be good at crafting great blog post titles.

Start With Your Keyword

The key with great blog post titles is to strive for a balance between a title the search engines will like and one that your readers will find interesting and engaging enough to make them want to click on it. To get that balance just right, I like to start with a keyword or key phrase that I want to rank for in the search engines.

Open up your favourite keyword research tool – like the Google Keywords for example – and play around with it until you come up with the keywords or key phrases you want to rank for.

For the sake of illustration let’s say our keyword example is “best blog hosts” and the post will be a review of five of the best hosting companies for WordPress blogs. “best blog hosts” is the keyword we want to rank for in this example.

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Make It Interesting

Now that we have the keyword, it’s time to make it interesting for our readers. There are plenty of different ways to turn our example keyword into an interesting blog post title. Here are a few ideas:

· The Three Best Blog Hosts Reviewed – Read This Before You Sign Up

· Looking For a New Home for Your Blog? The Best Blog Hosts Reviewed

· My Top 5 Best Blog Hosts Revealed – Here’s Who I Recommend

· Wondering Who The Best Blog Hosts Are?

· Is Your Host One The Best of The Best Blog Hosts List?

Do you see how this works? Start with the keyword and then try to think about why your readers would be looking for this information. Focus on what’s in it for them by sharing content that will help them out.

Stay Authentic and Stick With Your Style

Last but not least, stay authentic and stick with your own style. This is particularly important if you’re an established blogger. Don’t just copy and paste the blog post titles above. They may not reflect the style and tone of voice of your blog posts. In other words, they may not be you. Balance the need of the search engines to easily find what you’re content is about, the need to keep things interesting for your readers, by using your own voice.

You may find it helpful to write a few different blog post titles down and then chose the one that resonates most with you (and hopefully with your readers).

Download the FREE Blogging Bundle

Also, if you haven’t already, be sure to read 52 Blog Ideas for your business, who couldn’t use 52 blog ideas?

9 Ways to Show Your Expertise When First Starting Out

When you first start out wanting to work from home and start your own business, it can be frightening and even seem impossible. It’s the old conundrum about how you can get experience without having experience. 9 Ways to Show Your Expertise When First Starting Out
But, when you start an online business, you can make your own experience and prove your expertise with just a little work. So, to help you, here are nine ways to show your expertise when first starting out! 9 Ways to Show Your Expertise When First Starting Out

Blog Regularly Toward Your Audience

Start a blog on your website and blog directly to your audience with many forms of content, discussing many issues that the audience has. It’s a great way to get traffic, but it’s also a great way to demonstrate expertise.

To help you get started with this, download my FREE Business Blogging Bundle

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9 Ways to Show Your Expertise When First Starting Out

Write a White Paper about a Problem

A white paper is a long report that addresses a problem and then offers solutions to the problem. If you write a paper or two about individual problems your audience has, you’ll be able to show your expertise even though you’re just starting out.

Publish a Book about Your Expertise

Writing a book and authorship is always a great way to show your expertise. Direct the book to your target audience and answer questions they may have. Address one problem and solve it and then you’ll get more respect that you do know what you’re talking about.

Make Checklists to Help Your Target Audience

If you know the types of things that your audience has questions about, you can create helpful checklists, cheat sheets, or tip sheets that are available for view and/or download on your website or blog.

Share Answers Freely on Social Networks

Social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and even forums and message boards are great places to answer other people’s questions in a way that highlights your expertise.

Become a Contributing Writer

Blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines all want more content and will take well-written, expertly delivered articles. Some of these will even pay you for the content. Write originally for each and rely on your bio to send traffic your way

Get on a Speaking Circuit

Create a couple of presentations that you could easily turn into public speaking fodder. Practice by putting that information on video on your blog, YouTube, and other places that take video. Make a “one-sheet” which is one downloadable 8×11 sheet that tells about what you’ll speak on and your prices.

Create a Dedicated YouTube Channel

Many people have become famous because of YouTube, and you can too. Use YouTube as a way to demonstrate your expertise on the topics of interest to your audience.

Host a Free Webinar or Teleseminar

Technology enables you to do a lot to spread the word about your knowledge and expertise. You can do “how-to” videos, and tip videos and more to show the world and most importantly, your audience, what you know.

These ways to show your expertise when first starting out don’t require you to have a huge client roster, or even a following yet. Doing them and I promise, it will help you gain a following, improve search engine optimization (SEO) and help you build the work-at-home business of your dreams.

Jump into the TVS Leave the 9-5 Workshop Group and tell us how any of these Nine Ways to Show Your Expertise When First Starting Out has helped you! Or better yet – do you have any other tips you can share? We’d love to hear them!

9 Ways to Show Your Expertise When First Starting Out

Tips to Creating Your Action Plan and Business Timeline

Most businesses start out with a dream and an inspiration, but that is where it ends. Even the most innovative businesses can wind up closing their doors because a good action plan and a focused timeline were not in place from the beginning. Tips to Creating Your Action Plan and Business Timeline

There are many benefits to creating your action plan and online business timeline. When you have an action plan put into place and follow it regularly and continue to focus on your business timeline, things will run much more smoothly for your new business, your employees, and your customers.

Streamline Your Path – If you have a dream and a vision – excellent. Now, you must have knowledge of where your business is heading down the line. It is important to focus on a streamlined path when you first start your business. Otherwise, you are likely to find that your business is “all over the place.” Be sure to be specific in where you expect your business to go in the first twelve months.

Put It in Writing – In the early stages of creating your business, it is important to create an action plan in writing. Without this piece of the puzzle, it can get messy quite quickly. Having an action plan in your head or verbalizing it with other team members is not nearly as efficient as putting it down in writing.

Measure Your Goals Consistently – Make sure to check up on your goals often. By measuring your goals, you consistently marry those goals against where you are at the moment. If your goals are not in alignment with where they should be, then it is time to re-evaluate.

Break Down Bigger Projects into More Manageable Ones – When you create your action plan, make certain to break down bigger projects into more manageable ones. In this way, you will be able to get the whole job done without it feeling overwhelming.

Delegate – Do not be afraid to delegate some of your action plan. If you try to do everything all on your own, chances are all those balls you are juggling will come tumbling down sooner rather than later.

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Create a Timeline for Every Task – You may think it is not necessary to create a timeline for each and every task; however, a timeline is essential for success. Creating a timeline will help you to manage your time and your business.

Keep It Real – A timeline should have a manageable date attached to each task. If you create a timeline goal too soon, then you may set yourself up for failure. By being realistic, you set yourself up for success.

Differentiate Your Tasks – Make certain to differentiate your short-term tasks from your long-term tasks. For example, a short-term task would be to hire employees and a long-term task would be to improve your social media status.

Stick to Your Timeline No Matter What – You have to have integrity in this area. You need to stick with your timeline no matter what, as this is the only way to achieve success.

Stay Focused – It is very easy to let a task go because other “stuff” gets in the way. Stay focused and stick to your timeline. Check your progress as you go along the way.

How to Perform a SWOT Analysis for Your Online Business Idea

If you have an online business idea, chances are that you want to protect that idea. You will also want to do anything and everything you can in order to make that business strive and thrive.

Using a SWOT analysis for your online business idea is a great way to assess your business idea. First, however, let us examine what a SWOT analysis is. Put simply, it involves assessing these factors:

Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats

A SWOT analysis is valuable in evaluating a product, service, new business endeavour or even an employee.

Strengths – By evaluating your company’s strengths, you do yourself a great service. By looking through a microscope into what is working, you can enhance that performance and its progress and multiply it.

By mimicking a proven formula that already works, you increase your success two-fold. You can also pinpoint specific areas of success and magnify them innovatively in order to grow those strengths.

Weaknesses – The whole point in evaluating weaknesses for your online business idea is to eliminate or at the very least minimize them. Weaknesses are in every aspect of business and if unaddressed, those weaknesses can fester and grow. Eliminating or minimizing those weaknesses will keep them from detracting from your success in an online venture.

There are two major categories of measurement – internal factors, which are within the organization, and external factors, which are outside the organization – with strengths and weaknesses belonging to internal factors.

Opportunities – Evaluating opportunities is useful in seeking knowledge on how those opportunities are useful to gain momentum for your online business endeavours. Taking advantage of any existing opportunities and expanding them to greater heights will provide more success for your business idea.

Threats – Evaluating threats in the environment is crucial to the success of your online business idea.

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SWOT Analysis for Your Online Business

Opportunities and threats belong to the external factors category. If you are on the lookout for threats, warding them off before they occur is key to maintaining optimal success as a line of defence for your project or business.

Evaluate your online business idea for its strengths by highlighting the areas that receive the most positive response. If you have done a test market on a product or service or have a website with a comments section, check to see where the positive highlights are for your online idea.

Evaluate your online business idea for its weaknesses by answering a negative comment on a website, asking for the opinions of others, and checking the competitions’ websites.

Seek out new and innovative opportunities based on existing ideas that you can expand. Search out opportunities within other businesses to grow and expand your own.

By utilizing a SWOT analysis, you protect and enhance your online business idea.