Small Business

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?
could your hobby be earning 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.

could your hobby earn income?ollars

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!

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could your hobby earn income?

Writing and Publishing Books as a Source of Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 7.

Creating passive income can be challenging, yes, but it can be a fun challenge. One great way to make passive income is through publishing books and today, it’s easier than ever to start writing and publishing books yourself. Who knows, you could be the next Stephenie Meyer. Heck, if you are not a writer, you can hire someone to do it for you! (but where is the fun in that?)

Choose a Niche

This is very important when it comes to creating books for Kindle. Look at the types of books that sell the best and try to create something in that niche if you understand it and can do the research or hire someone who can. Writing and Publishing Books

Hire a Writer

If you don’t want to write, or would rather have someone else do it – then hire a writer. You just give them the idea, a brief outline of what you’d like in the book, and let them do the work. You can use your name as the author or a pen name. It’s up to you how you want to proceed in this case. Note of caution: If you hire writers, run the work through a plagiarism checker.

[Tweet ““A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” ~ Angela Carter”]

Edit the Book

Don’t have the writer edit the book, even if the writer is you. Always have someone else do the editing. You can hire an editor as easily as you can hire a writer. The editor can check for plagiarism issues, grammar, and fact check as well as improve the overall writing in the book before it’s published.

Create a Book Cover

Hire a graphic designer to create the book cover. You can also create book covers using software like Canva.com. Remember, you want the book cover to look really good and professional. When it comes to books, people really do buy by the cover, so it’s essential to get that right.

Layout the Book

A Kindle book needs to be laid out the way that Amazon wants it laid out. They have directions on their site.  It does change sometimes, so it’s best to use their guidelines when laying out a book. It can be challenging to layout a book with a lot of images, so you may need to hire a professional to do that too.

Upload it to Amazon Kindle

Once the book is finished and the cover is done, it’s time to upload the book. Again, you can hire someone to do this for you, making this mostly hands-off other than the up-front financial investment required to get started publishing when you outsource.

The great thing about Amazon is that they take care of customer service, payments, returns, and even sales taxes for you. Each month, they send you a payment directly to your bank account for your sales. With the right types of books, you can build a portfolio that earns six figures a year. You just must find the right niche that is a good seller.

Writing and Publishing BooksWoman sitting on couch writing in a book with laptop and textbook beside her, writing and publishing books

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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

iting and Publishing Books

Any Online Business Can Benefit from Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 3
Online Business Can Benefit from Passive Income

It doesn’t matter what you’re doing right now as your main source of income. You can add passive income sources to it. Having multiple passive income sources will give you some freedom to go on vacation, be sick, and be choosier about the work that you do and who you do it with. Let’s look at a few different examples of small online businesses and how they may benefit from adding passive income to their business model.

Website Designer – While designing websites may be your main source of income, there are things you can add that will boost your income. For example, you can create a recommended tools and services page that lists everything you love with affiliate links and make sure you give that to people on a regular basis. You can also recommend directly to clients with your affiliate links different services such as hosting, domain name purchasing, autoresponder services, and whatever else they need.

Virtual Assistant – As a VA, you provide some form of service in a particular niche to your clients. There are likely products and services that you know work well for most of them. You should become an affiliate for those products and services and, again, make it a habit of recommending them to all your clients.

Writer – If you write content as a ghostwriter, then there are many opportunities to expand your income with passive income. You can recommend services, platforms, and more to your clients. You will get ideas from them based on the types of software and services they use.

Coach – A coach, depending on their niche, has wide latitude in choosing different software, services, and products to recommend to their clients and community. For example, if you’re a health coach, any products that you believe are good for your clients can be promoted as an affiliate.

Niche Blogger – Whatever niche you blog about, there are products and services that you can join their affiliate program and promote to your audience. Promote them in the content, on a special recommended products page, and within autoresponder email.

YouTube Star – Again, whatever niche the YouTube star is in will inform what types of products and services are promoted. If the audience needs it, then you should find a way to promote it. Get people to join your email list so you can promote more there.

Adding passive income can benefit any type of online business in many ways. Making money in six months based on something you did today is a great feeling and can provide the security that you need in the online business world.

Any online business can benefit from passive incomeBenefit from passive income.

P.S. Sharing is caring! So be sure to share this with your network and help fellow female entrepreneurs kick 2021 in the arse!

In case you missed previous and posts, here they are:

Day 1: Why You Shouldn’t Put all the Eggs into One Basket
Day 2: What exactly is Passive Income?

Passive Income Challenge Day 3
Benefit from Passive Income

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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.

how to identify your target audience

 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.

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.

30 blogging for business masterclass, woman working on her laptop with a cup of coffee wearing a pink skirt and high heels, how to craft great blog 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.

[insert page=’business-blogging’ display=’content’]

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).

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

Home Business or Work-at-Home Job – Which Is Right for You?

With the 2020 pandemic rocking the world in ways, no one saw coming – more and more people are working from home. Either with their home business or work-at-home job. Some people started a business or the 9-5 corporations started having the work from home option now available.

Now, many don’t want to go back to the corporate cubicle or have always wanted to work from home for a variety of reasons. Maybe you just had a child and want more work-life balance, or perhaps you have an illness that makes it difficult for you to get out of the house. Or maybe you just like being home and want the freedom to work your way.

Whatever the reasons you want to work at home, you’ll need to choose whether or not you want a job from home, or you want a business from home. Here are eight questions to help you decide.

Are You Self-Motivated?

If you want your own business so that you can set your hours, you will need to be very self-motivated. You’ll need to take time out of your day for marketing, interviewing clients, closing the deal and then doing the work too. You’ll be 100 percent responsible for delivering the work, billing and collecting. You’ll even be responsible for deciding the methods you’ll use to do the work. To do that you’ll need to be a very self-motivated individual.

What Skills Do You Have?

Take a piece of paper and write down a list of the skills you currently have, based on what you’ve already done in the past. Can any of these translate into a business? Label them appropriately. Do any of these translate into common work-from-home positions such as call center agent or transcriptionist? Some skills cross over into both, but which side of the list gets full faster?

What Sort of Lifestyle Do You Want?

With a work-at-home job, you’ll be required to “show up” for work on time each day that you’re scheduled, and you may have little control over that schedule. What’s more, with work-at-home positions it’s a lot harder than typical jobs to call in sick, whether it’s you or a child who is sick. Often the first 90 days you cannot miss your schedule at all if you want to keep the position. Are you ready for that? Or, would you prefer a more family-oriented type of schedule that can be adjusted more easily and is more deliverables-based than hourly-based?

Do You Already Have a Business Idea?

If you have already researched a business idea, and feel as if you want to do that instead of working for someone else, can you pull it off? What steps do you need to take to make it a reality? Are you the type of person to be able to organize and take the steps needed to get your business off the ground? Can you find and afford help if you’re not sure what to do to get the business going? Does the thought of all this stress you out?

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How Do You Feel about Punching a Clock?

For some people the idea of clock-punching is relaxing, for others it feels like a nightmare. Neither feeling is right or wrong as it takes all types of people to make this world work. If you know upfront that you are fine with punching a clock and you’d rather someone else tell you when to be someplace and what to do, then a work-at-home job is best for you. If that feels like a prison to you, then a business is probably better if you can do what it takes to get it going.

Do You Have Money to Start a Business?

Starting any type of business, even an online business, requires an investment not only of time but also of money. Have you worked out a business plan and do you know how much money you need to get started? Do you have that money available? If not, do you have a way to get it? Perhaps working at a job first, while you save for and work on your business on the side, is the way to go if you don’t have the funds to start.

Do You Need Training and Education?

Both working at a job and owning a business sometimes require skills that you don’t have yet. But that’s okay. Decide if you want to invest in the training yourself to get your business off the ground, or if you would like to try to find a work-at-home job where they will train you from the ground up even if you have little experience and due to that the pay may be low.

What Is Your Biggest Dream for Your Life?

When you think of the future, what do you see? Does it sound relaxing to get up in the morning, have some breakfast, and move to your home office where you sign in to work at your job, taking a break when needed by telling your manager that you have to use the restroom, or go eat lunch and so forth, then when you get off work you’re totally and fully off? Plus, each week you collect a certain paycheck?

Or, do you like the idea of being able to do what you want when you want (and likely working more hours than you ever thought you could) without the surety of income each week, but knowing you’re forging your future?

Whatever you decide, neither is right or wrong. They are both good choices for you. Whether you want a work-at-home job so you can sign off after the day and focus 100 percent on your family, or whether you want a business that will cross boundaries into family time and vice versa but that puts you 100 percent in charge – both are good choices and choices that you are fortunate to have in this age of high-speed internet.

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

4 Easy Tips for Brainstorming Blog Post Ideas

Have you actually spent the time to sit down and start brainstorming blog post ideas? There is nothing worse than sitting in front of your laptop, attempting to write a new blog post with nothing but a blank screen staring at you. We all have those days where inspiration just doesn’t strike and we can’t come up with a single workable post idea.

Or maybe you’re in a rush and you need something quick you can write and publish to stick to your blogging schedule and keep your readers happy. You don’t want to spend a bunch of time trying to come up with something to write about.

In either scenario, it’s nice to have a list of blog post ideas ready to use. And that’s what we’ll work on today. I’ll walk you through a simple little brainstorming exercise that will result in dozens of blog posts ideas you can use over the coming weeks and months, or whenever you need a little extra inspiration.

Grab a notebook and pen, and let’s start brainstorming a whole list of future blog posts. I prefer to do this exercise with pen and paper, but if that’s not your thing, by all means, use a word document, spreadsheet or whatever program you prefer for brainstorming topic ideas.
30 blogging for business masterclass, woman working on her laptop with a cup of coffee wearing a pink skirt and high heels, brainstorming blog post ideas

Step 1 – Log Into Your Blog and Make a List of Your Categories 

Start by making a list of all the categories on your blog. You may have a pretty good idea of the main ones or the ones you use the most, but there may be some you are forgetting.

Log into your blogging interface and look up the categories you have set up. Copy them down in your notebook, leaving at least 10 lines of space below each category.

Step 2 – Come Up With At Least 10 Blog Post Ideas Per Category 

Now that you have your list of categories, come up with 10 blog post ideas for each category. Don’t censor yourself, just jot down the first things that come to mind. Remember this is a brainstorm. The idea is to generate ideas. You’re free to tweak, edit, and reject them later. For now, get them on paper and come up with a long list of potential post ideas.

Step 3 – Rinse and Repeat As Needed

One of the best things about this technique is that you can repeat it whenever you need a new batch of blog post ideas. By the time you get back to this brainstorming technique (which means you’ve used up all the previous ideas), it will be easy to come up with fresh blog post topics for each category. And since you’re focusing on coming up with ideas for each category, no area of your blog will be neglected over the coming weeks.

So grab your notebook or download the worksheet for today, whichever is best for you and give it a try! See if this simple idea doesn’t help you generate a long list of future blog post topics.
Brainstorming Blog Post Ideas

Download this FREE Excercise Worksheet

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

Now, hop into the Workshop and tell us the categories that you have on your blog! Then go through and make suggestions to others, who have posted theirs, and let them know what you would like to see!

 

P.S. Do you know someone that would benefit from this 30 Day Blogging Masterclass? Send them over to the sign-up page to join us.

 

[Tweet “”Never put off writing until you are better at it.” – Gary Henderson”]

Brainstorming Blog Post Ideas