So now you know what your passion is, or narrowed it down to a few ideas. You have some options. If you create your own products or provide services, you can work offline and promote it by going to craft shows or trade shows. You could even go door to door. You could also place ads in newspapers and magazines.
But honestly, you’ll still want an online presence. Even local businesses need an online presence as so many people use Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to find local businesses. Let’s talk about how to start making money with your passion online.
Affiliate Marketing and Online Presence
If you don’t create your own products or offer services but want to share information, you could start a blog and write articles sharing information about your passion for your niche audience.
To start monetizing it, you provide links and ads and if someone clicks on the link and purchases, you make a commission. The idea though is to write articles and share information with a targeted audience, those also interested in your passion or wanting to learn more. Eventually, you could create ebooks or courses and give them away or sell them on your site. But let’s stick with the basics for now.
With a blog, you can help others learn, solve a problem and give value with the information you are offering. The links you provide either solve a problem or are related to the topic you are writing about in that article.
And, over the long term, you can create residual long-term income. This is affiliate marketing in a nutshell. You can even add advertising space and make money from people just visiting your site. There are people making a good full-time living with affiliate marketing.
Don’t worry, it’s not that hard. Most of the work is in developing traffic. But I’ll share with you how to do all of this. And you may not feel great at writing at first. That’s okay. It just takes practice and learning who your audience is. And there are tools for grammar and spelling. 🙂 I use Grammarly. It points out any spelling, punctuation or grammar errors.
This post was proofread by Grammarly.
One of the best platforms for writing blogs is WordPress. It’s easy for anyone to use. You can add almost unlimited features and design your site any way you want. You can even make it a store!
Training and Hosting
The other thing you’ll need to get started is a hosting company. A hosting company provides servers from where your site is accessed by the internet at large. Your website address (domain name) will allow visitors to access your site from that server. So you’ll want a dependable hosting company. I’ll be reviewing many hosting companies here and other services.
I go through Wealthy Affiliate for hosting and training. They offer unbeatable training on how to do everything. And the community is over 2 million strong, full of wonderful people who also want you to succeed and are more than happy to help. It uses WordPress. Here is my review of Wealthy Affiliate.
What Does This Cost?
Startup costs for a blog and affiliate marketing are quite low. You’ll have to pay for hosting no matter what service you use if you’re serious. Wealthy Affiliate allows you to start for free, including some training. You can have 2 free websites to get started. They have a premium membership which includes hosting for up to 50 websites for the price of one.
There are a few others that offer ‘free’ hosting but you can’t use your own domain name like https://yourdomainname.com. You have to settle with a subdomain. This is fine to get started but if you want a real long-term business, you’ll need to go the paid hosting route. Costs vary but please, please do your research before you jump on one. I’ll be providing reviews of other hosting companies before long.
Siterubix is a reliable hosting company. It is used by Wealthy Affiliate too.
Domain names are generally pretty cheap. From $4.99 to $15 per year. If it’s extremely popular or rare, it could cost a lot more. But really, you shouldn’t need to spend more than $15 for a domain name. Wealthy Affiliate offers domain names for $13.99 for a .com per year. .Com is the best way to go because it’s easy to remember.
How Do I Sign Up for Affiliate Programs?
Becoming an affiliate is free. Free! 🙂 There are thousands and thousands of companies offering affiliate programs. It’s really remarkable. Even Amazon has an affiliate program. So you potentially could sell any product on Amazon (or other affiliate companies) and make money. You just sign up and after they approve your site, you can start adding links.
Start looking at the websites you visit and enjoy. Many have affiliate programs. Even Target and Walmart have affiliate programs. You can see if they do by going to the bottom of their pages and see if they have a link saying something like Affiliates or Become an Affiliate.
Conclusion
So now you can see how you can create a legitimate, long-term income stream online with your passion. When you care about it, it makes all the difference in the world. Your passion is the driving force behind your determination to succeed. It takes work, but it’s enjoyable work. Probably a lot more enjoyable than the dreaded day job you have now.
I hope you learned a lot about how to start making money with your passion. Thank you for reading today. Please leave any questions or comments in the Comments section below! I’ll be sure to answer as quickly as possible. Thank you!
Hello Paula,
This article addresses a real concern. So many people are passionate about one thing or another but most of these people do not understand how to go about it. I know because I once in that category. Affiliate marketing surely, is a viable way to monetize a passion over the web and as you rightly pointed out, a good training would definitely make the process a whole lot smoother.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Rhain. Thanks for your comments. I agree training saves a lot of time.
Thank you for sharing this post on how to start making money with ones passion. I have several stuffs that I am interested in right now. I am interested in music and affiliate making. So I will venture into affiliate marketing and music niche website first. During this period I will learn a lot and create a digital product based on my experience and what I have learnt. Thanks for sharing.
Regards!
Music is an awesome niche! I wish you much success with it. Stay tuned here for more on how to get it done.
Enjoyed reading your post Paula and the importance of connecting what your passionate about with your business goals if you want to succeed online. It’s much easier to keep motivated when starting out with a new blog if you write about the things that matter to you. We often worry that our chosen niche to start a blog may not interest others, but I think if we’re passionate about a topic then this makes our content shine and always interests potential readers of our blog. Thank you.
Thanks for reading and commenting. You sound like you have some experience. Basing a website on a passion definitely makes it easier to research when it’s something you enjoy.
Good advice on how people can make money with their passion. Personally, I think blogging/affiliate marketing is one of the top ways to make money online. It doesn’t always happen fast, but it’s still worth doing it. I think people just need to be consistent with posting content. As long as they’re consistent and follow along a good training program (if they’re beginners), then they should be alright.
Thanks, Nate. I agree completely that consistency and training for beginners is key.
Making money while doing something we love is in fact an enjoyable work. Affiliate marketing is one of the many great ways to make money online, and definitely anyone can benefit from this business model.
When I first started out online, I knew nothing about coding and all the programming headaches but soon, I learnt what the big guys knew and was able to partake in the slicing of the pie. But though this always comes with hard work. This could be very enjoyable when you love what you do.
So true, Kell. Thanks for visiting and chiming in.