Make money from your hobbies: 5 tips to get you started!

Today’s fantastic guest-post is from Helen Lindop who blogs at BusinessPlusBaby and is the writer of the Earn What You Deserve as Mumpreneur e-course*. Her Facebook page is here and do look her up on Twitter. The formal bit aside, Helen has been a fantastic support and great listener whilst I have been rehashing and writing my plan for world domination so I can recommend her a sound person to follow! Right, less of the slushy stuff and onto a great post!

Nicki x


 

Make money from your hobbies: five tips to get you started

Many mums are looking for ways to earn a flexible income around their families. Some just want a bit of extra cash every month and others are working on building a full-on business.  So if you fancy earning an income from your hobby, here are five top tips to get you started.

  1. Will your hobby still be fun if you’re doing it as a job?

It sounds great to get paid for doing something you enjoy doing. But if you turned your hobby into a job, would it still be fun? And would you end up losing your hobby?

Let’s say you enjoy making jewellery. If you do it as a hobby, you can take as long as you like experimenting with different materials and designs. Once it becomes a business, you’ll have to be much more disciplined about getting items made in a certain time. Would that turn a fun activity into a chore?

  1. Check you can actually make money from your hobby

To give you a really rough, back-of-an-envelope idea of whether it’s worth turning your hobby into a business, try this. Add up the cost of your raw materials and your time (if you’re stuck for an hourly rate, the national minimum wage is £5.93 so you probably don’t want to go below this) and then double it to account for your admin and marketing time and any other costs you might have forgotten about (tax, national insurance, flyers, business cards…) Then divide that by the number of items you can make in that time.

That should give you an idea of whether you can sell what you’ve made at a price people are prepared to pay and still make some money from it.

  1. Check out your competition

If you enjoy your hobby, the chances are that lots of other people will do too. So there could be plenty of competition plus people doing it for fun may be selling their stuff at a much lower price than you.

Don’t despair, though. You could tweak your hobby so instead of (say) selling jewellery, you teach people to make it.Or set up a website selling jewellery made by other mums. Getting creative about how you make a profit from your hobby could really pay off.

  1. Think about how you’re going to sell

Making your products is only one part of making money. You also need to think about how you’re going to reach your customers. The good news is there are lots of low-cost options from craft fairs to setting up your own website and even hosting parties.

  1. Don’t forget to register as self-employed

If you’re earning an income or planning to, you need to register as self-employed or you could risk a fine. It’s quick and easy to do it online here


*Please note that I am an affiliate for the EWYD e-course and the link above is my affiliate link. See my disclosure page for more details.

 

In Need Of Time Management Skills / Work Organisation

As I don’t have any!

No, I’m being unfair to myself – I don’t have a fixed time-management routine, but I need one. I am very tempted to go and buy Time Management for Dummies but I’m hoping that the people who know about multi-tasking the best (ie parents!) will be able to help.

A few things I know I need to address are:

I have no fixed work-space. We sacrificed the office to have a nursery for Taylor so files /folders / everyday work and household paperwork seems to be scattered all over. We have a desk downstairs but this has the main PC on which is Roy’s (and no table space) so it tends to be a laptop on the knee (I know) or kitchen table job for me.

Having a 13wk old baby, a strict time-management schedule isn’t an option but I need to find some way of organising myself and my to-do list more efficiently than with scribbled post it notes,keywords on the family calendar and just “remembering” stuff.

I need to be more efficient because I’m not doing myself any favours. I am working the equivalent of full-time hours at home now, am a full time Mum to Taylor (13weeks), and to Kieran (4.5yrs) who is at school, wife to Roy & run the house. The whole 24hrs in a day rule is a stupid one in my opinion and whilst everything is done, and on time, Roy & the Boys get all the attention they should, this does mean running myself ragged sometimes to ensure deadlines are met, and work is completed promptly.

So any hints / tip? What do you do to organise your time better, what tools do you use, what gems of advise do you have?

Feel free to link to your website / blog /etc if it will help me, or anyone else.

Looking forward to reading your comments, when I get a minute!