Read Time: 6 Minutes
No matter what you love to do, you can turn your passion into a business.
The key to doing this is to understand what your unfair advantage is, what community your unfair business serves, and how to monetize what you love to do or have extensive knowledge in.
Personally, I love design and illustration and have turned that into a full-time career designing tour posters for country singers, apparel designs for lifestyle brands, and illustrated graphics for advertising.
This all started by understanding that I had a love for illustration, a need to help others, and extensive knowledge of how to create unique drawings for bold businesses. Together I combined these things into a service that has become a full-time business.
Let’s cover how you can turn your passion into a business.
Let’s start by identifying your unfair advantage.
Your unfair advantage is any skill, hobby, or interest you have that goes beyond a beginner level.
A writer who has a deep love for food and cooking. The writer can write about recipes, the history of the food, and different cooking techniques for clients as a ghostwriter, content writer, or as an article writer.
A photographer who loves old vintage cars has extensive knowledge about makes and models. They can offer specialized photoshoots for car meets, car museums, and car dealerships. They can also sell prints of vintage cars they have taken photos of.
A graphic designer who loves traveling. They can work with travel companies, lifestyle brands, and hospitality companies, providing them with tailored design services that revolve around their advanced knowledge of traveling around the world.
The goal of finding your unfair advantage is to identify a skill that you have extensive experience and knowledge in that you can then turn into a product or service that you can sell to a community.
1.) Write down a list of all skills, hobbies, and interests that you have that go beyond a beginner level
2.) Narrow your list down to things you truly love and would do for free.
3.) With your narrowed-down list, start researching how you can turn your knowledge into a product or service
4.) Research online communities that could benefit from your unfair advantage
5.) Last narrow down your list to 1 skill that you can turn into a product or service
Next, we will go over how to validate your unfair advantage into a profitable business plan.
Once you have identified your unfair advantage, you need to start validating if you can turn it into a business. 99% of the time, you can!
You can start to validate your unfair advantage by finding communities online that revolve around your unfair advantage. Using our photographer who loves vintage cars example from before, this is how you can start validating your unfair advantage.
1.) Find public groups online that focus on your unfair advantage (Vintage cars, car meetups, vintage car collector groups.)
2.) Join the group and start asking questions, offering insight, and seeing if anyone needs your product or service (Car Photoshoots, Vintage Car Prints, Etc.)
3.) In the groups, connect with tastemakers, influencers, and highly visible members to start creating authority
4.) Start offering your services after you have completed thorough research on what members of that community need.
Going through this 4-step process, you will validate if your unfair advantage is needed and can be turned into a business that you can scale through joining multiple online communities.
If you receive no feedback or cannot find anyone who wants or needs your product or service, then go back to the drawing board and create a new idea based on the insight you gained.
As you start to join different communities online connected to your unfair advantage, you will start to meet new people who want to learn more about you and what you do.
This is your opportunity to start building your own community of businesses, creators, and fans who you can offer your knowledge to. Start conversations with people who respond to your posts in the groups and start to get to know them.
As you meet more people and learn their needs, you can tailor your service or product to their specific needs. By doing this, you can begin to solve their problems and build a network. As you do this, you can also start building relationships that will create a strong foundation for your own community.
Using all the connections you make, create your own community in the form of a newsletter, LinkedIn/Facebook group, or a paid community that you can leverage.
The goal of building your own community is that you will be completely independent of what's going on in the groups you originally joined and what is going on on social media.
By owning your own community, you can shape it to your vision by creating content and providing your unfair advantage through your services or products.
Once you have your own community up and running, you can begin to serve your community members by solving their pain points.
The number one way to serve your online community, whether you have built your own or joined a community, is to solve the pain points of the community members.
The best way to do this is to understand what are the problems the members of the community face on an industry level. You can do this by going through the post history of the communities you joined and creating a list of common questions that are asked over and over again.
By doing this, you can find common problems that you can create tailored solutions for. You can use answerthepublic.com to see what common questions are being asked about your specific skill, community, or industry.
By finding the most common questions and problems your community members have, you can begin to create tailored products and services that will be the backbone of your business. Here is how to create a tailored product to serve your community.
1.) Create a list of common problems that are being asked that require a solution that you can monetize.
2.) Narrow down the list of problems to just problems that you have expertise in solving.
3.) Create three core concepts that can solve the problem you have identified.
4.) Go to the source of your research and start pitching your ideas for products/services to see if there is organic interest in your idea. (Go to the original post where you found your customer's pain point)
5.) Last, validate if members in the community need the tailored product or service you have identified
If you have done the following correctly, you will have a few potential customers who are interested in your product or service. After validating your concept, you need to start monetizing your passion through the product or service you have validated.
The last step to turning your passion into a profitable business is to turn your knowledge into a product or service. You can do this in the following ways:
- Digital products that solve a problem (Ebooks, Templates, Asset Packs)
- Info products that teach your systems (Courses, Coaching, Webinars)
- Physical products that your customers can use.
- Services that help your customers fulfill a core business need (Design, Marketing, Writing)
- Services that help promote your customer's businesses (Social Media, PPC Ads, Email Marketing)
Once you have validated your ideas and have found potential customers, you need to monetize your expertise. I recommend doing this through digital products or a service-based business that you can scale over time.
Providing both will help you create authority in your community, help you build relationships that you can leverage into referrals, and help you build your own list of customers in 6 to 12 months. No matter what your passion is, you can turn it into a full-time business by turning your knowledge into a product or service.
You can turn your passions into a profitable business online by identifying your unfair advantage and applying it to a community that needs your skills and expertise. The best way to do this is to join a community, find the pain points that community members have, and then create tailored solutions for those problems.
Once you have created a tailored product or service, you need to validate it by interacting with other community members and solving their pain points. Do this over and over to create your own community and an organic referral system that you can leverage into a full-time business.
→This week’s action step: Join three different communities and learn how you can serve the members of that community through your unfair advantage. Brainstorm three potential services or products you can create in monetize in the next 60 days.
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