How to turn your skills into profit by starting an online business?

What if it were possible to turn your skills into profit and build a profitable business that you can run from home or anywhere in the world? What if you already have a hobby that you are doing anyways, but are wondering if you could make money online out of it?

Well, there is a way – and I am going to show you exactly how you can do it!

Many of the online businesses that are being launched these days get started at the intersection of passions and skills, combined with good business strategies, they created a path to successful and sustainable online business and found ways how to make money online.

If you want to become a successful entrepreneur, you need to discover your key strengths and passions first and give yourself every possible opportunity to leverage them each day. It goes without saying that you need to be damn good at what you do.

So where do you start?

Identify your hot zone

The first step is to identify your hot zone. A hot zone is a perfect balance between your skills, passions, needs in the marketplace, and what people are already paying for in these areas.

So first you need to identify your zone of genius. Your zone of genius is your unique power. It is a one-of-a-kind quality that you bring to your life and your work and lets you do certain things better than almost anyone else. Oftentimes this is at the intersection of your talents and passions. Often it is difficult to distinguish yourself as unique or special because it comes so naturally. While we might share common skills, interests, or work styles with others — your zone cannot be replicated by anyone else.

So go ahead and write a long list of skills that you are good at.

Before you turn your skills into profit identify what are your passions?

Second, you need to identify all of the passions that light you up. What are the topics that you talk about the most, what would you do even if you don’t get paid for it? And don’t worry if you think it’s silly, just write it all down.

How do your skills and passions overlap?

Now that you have a list of all of the skills and passions, select the top 3 from each category and see where your skills and passions interest, and write it down. For instance, I am good at technology, business and project planning, and event organizing and I am passionate about traveling, learning languages, and a healthy and active lifestyle. So in my case, I could create a new business that would be focused on helping traveling companies set up their technology processes, or create new software to learn languages, or start organizing events for health and fitness junkies … and I could go on and on.

Determine customer problems and challenges in these areas!

The next step is to select the one that rocks your boat, as you need to start researching to see what other people in these areas are struggling with. What pains, problems, and challenges are they having. Now, this is the key as you want to make sure that you are aligning your skills and passions with the need in a market. You can just go on Google or FB and find some other businesses that are already doing the same. Check their websites, read their blogs, spying on them on social media, check what others are saying about their products and services but most importantly try to find the biggest pain points that you see they are helping others resolve.

What are people willing to pay for?

Now that you know what the people in these areas are struggling with your need to identify what people are already paying for. Because after all, you do want to create a profitable business and not just have a new hobby. So look at your competitors, look at the programs they are offering and how much they are charging for it. Now I am not saying that right off the bat, you will be able to charge the same amount of money as you are just starting, but it will give you a good idea of the potential you will be able to take down the line.

Now that you have all these insights about your skills, passions, needs in the market place and what others are paying for in these areas, you have just overcome a first step in selecting your niche and determining in what direction you want to move forward with creating your online business.

Now comes a bit trickier part.

How to validate your business idea to make sure people will buy?

Before you spend time, money, and resources on launching your online business it is key that you validate your business idea to determine if your business will have a sustainable, growing, paying audience in a matter of days or weeks, rather than wasting months or years building a final product or a service that nobody will buy.

The purpose of idea validation is to expose the idea to the real world, to talk to your ideal clients, and to dig deeper into their problems and challenges. Again, your idea must be able to solve a real problem that people are willing to pay for. And validating if your solution can solve that problem is typically the smarties approach.

Talk to your customers!

When you have a good understanding of the problems and challenges in the market, and what solutions competitors are offering, you need to start digging deeper by reaching out to your customers directly to get a better understanding of your target audience. You can start by asking them some questions to thoroughly understand their situation and what problems they face, as well as what desires they have. You can even meet them in person for coffee or lunch, and ask them what problems and desires they have. Sometimes, there’s no better way than to get offline and out of your head, and go talk to somebody in person. Seriously, you need to go and talk to people. You need to ask the market what they want.

Create your minimal viable offer (MVO)

The purpose to build an MVO is to launch quickly, based on your idea, with a small budget. This approach allows you to collect users’ feedback for the primary product and include it in future iterations. With the help of an MVO, one can find the right audience, pull the ideas based on experience, and save time.

Building an MVO implies finding the right balance between what your business is offering to users, and what users need. The purpose of the MVO is to test your offer by minimizing errors. An MVO helps in collecting maximum quality feedback, by targeting specific groups, or types of users.

Pre-sell your service before you build your business

So what do I mean by pre-selling? A presale is a targeted sale before you even go live with your business. It means you don’t need to spend lots of money and time building a fancy website, setting up your CRM and email marketing, maybe you just want to create a simple landing page that outlines what you are offering. And then you want to reach out to your network, reach out within other networks that have similar interests, and promote yourself. Go out there and sell, sell and sell … but don’t be too sleazy about it. Just keep in mind that this is not about you and your business, but it is about a client and what you can do for them.

It’s Your Turn to turn your skills into profit!

There you have it. We have talked about how you can turn your skills into profit and build a business out of your skills and/or hobbies.
Now, I’d love to hear from you.

Have you ever thought about trying to start a business with your hobbies or skills?

I want to know about your journey. Let me know in the comments below.