We've all got our hobbies—pastimes we dedicate some of our spare time to because we find them fun or fulfilling.
While we don't typically get into hobbies tomake money online, some of them can become a side hustle or thriving business that generates a stream of income. Depending on how you direct your talents and interests, you can get anything from free stuff, toextra spending money,to a full income from your online business—all by doing something you might've done anyway.
We've compiled a list of 12 common lucrative hobbies that make money, whether it's freelancing, becoming an affiliate, building an audience, or starting a business.
12 profitable hobbies that make money
- Writing
- Illustration and design
- Music
- Cooking
- Gardening
- Photography
- DIY crafts
- Comedy
- Coffee
- Pets
- Brewing beer
- Gaming
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Enroll for free1. Writing
Writing and publishing online has the potential to offer you a lot of practical value outside of being a mere hobby. You can use it to further your career and establish yourself as an expert on a topic. You can build a platform for sharing your ideas. Or you can rent out your skills.
One of the most obvious ways to make money writing is to sell it as a service—freelance writing on sites likeUpworkorFiverrorreaching out directlyto blogs for paid gigs. Great bloggers with niche expertise are usually in demand, and even a few clients can turn your writing hobby into a full-time business.
Even better, if you have the discipline and know how towrite a good blog post, you can create your own business as a blogger by picking a niche and building an audience over time.
Whether you care about tech or travel or cooking, our guide tostarting a blog that you can turn into a businesswill walk you through what you need to know.
For more inspiration, check out how:
- Best Self Co.used blogging to sell its productivity tools.
- Wait But Whybuilt a business around Tim Urban’s humorous and insightful content.
2. Illustration and design
Like writing, illustration and graphic design are creative money-making hobbies you can do at home on a freelance contract basis. Fiverr, in particular, features many newer artists with a variety of illustration styles. Clients post projects for which they need to hire these skills, whether it's marketing projects or custom portraits or anything in between.
If you want more control, you can put your art on products—from t-shirts to posters to canvases—and sell those instead. It's important to understand that to turn your art or graphic design into a product, you'll need to cater to a specific market or build a unique brand. The former is usually easier.
Hatecopyis an excellent example of a business that was started by an artist putting their work onto things people can buy.
And you不需要库存的钱either. Print-on-demand services offer a low-risk way to take advantage of your graphic design hobby. You'll just need to create mockups of your products to list online.
Once you make sales and know what designs have the most demand, you can consider investing in your own inventory.
要了解更多,请查看以下资源:
- How to Start a T-Shirt Business: Everything You Need to Know
- How to Sell Art Online: The Ultimate Guide
3. Music
Next up for profitable hobbies that make money?Sell music. You canturn this hobby into a businessin a few different ways.
For starters, there's the traditional approach to making and selling music—recording your own songs or albums and selling them on your own website or hosting them on a platform likeSoundCloud.
You can also create different types of sounds that aren't full-fledged songs or albums, things like beats or samples. Beats are short hooks composed from different sounds and meant to be a background for a musician, while samples are a portion of a sound recording to reuse elsewhere.
You can list beats on third-party sites that work similarly to stock photo sites. Essentially, people purchase your music to use in their own content. These are typically shorter in length and rely more on instrumentals and less on lyrics. There are a variety of sites where you can list your beats, likeAirbitandBeatStars. Airbit paid out $32 million in 2019 to its artists, while BeatStars sellers made an estimated $40 million—double what they earned in 2018.
Samples by Vanityis an online business that sells samples for artists to remix and splice together to create their own music.
You can make your audio exclusive or non-exclusive. There's more money to be made when you sell exclusive rights, but you need to produce high-quality work, likeSoundOracle. His excellent work has earned him quite the reputation—and his sounds have been featured in more than 20 Grammy Award–winning songs. He sells his beats with both exclusive and non-exclusive rights.
4. Cooking
Food has become an art form worthy of taking elaborate pictures and spending the time to perfect the craft. It's not only amateur chefs who are involved, but people with adventurous palettes looking to explore new tastes.
Cooking is one of the money-making hobbies that you can share with the world in a variety of ways, from starting a blog, YouTube channel, or Instagram account , to diving head first into a business with your own food or cooking products. Some even take their favorite hobby on the road with afood truck business.
According to Google,59% of 25-to-34-year-oldstake their mobile devices into the kitchen, using resources on the internet to find and practice new recipes. If you're willing to teach online, there's definitely a market of DIY chefs looking for content (as well as products) you can create to serve them.
For inspiration, check out:
- Spice Girls: From Hobby to Family Food Business
- The Secret Ingredients to Building a 7-Figure Meal Service Business
- Overdraft: Will His Family’s Food Business Turn into a Recipe for Success?
- How to Start an Online Food Business(guide)
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5. Gardening
Gardening has seen a spike in popularity as people spend more time at home. It's a hobby that can make you happier, healthier, and perhaps even richer. Millennials spent$13 billionon plants in 2020 alone.
As with many of the other hobbies that make money on this list, there are multiple ways to make your gardening hobby profitable. If you're an avid indoor gardener, you can earn money selling mature indoor plants from your own home.Leaf & Claysells succulents, either for a one-time purchase or on a subscription basis.
Alternatively, you can also sell products and accessories to help your customers connect with their own gardening hobbies. Technology sellerēdnintroduced an indoor garden to their product line, enabling customers to grow herbs and other plants in a compact space with artificial light.
Finally, you can make good money as a gardeninginfluenceror teacher by setting up your own channel on social media, with tips and resources for the tens of thousands of users searching for good gardening content.
6. Photography
If you own a high-quality camera and know how to use it, you've got a few ways to turn photography into one of your hobbies that make money on the side.
While you can certainly turn your fun hobby into a career or side job as a freelance photographer, this can restrict you to shooting local events and gigs.
For a more scalableside hustle, sell your shots as stock photos or prints. You can also use your photography skills togrow a massive Instagram followingandmonetize it. You need to pick a niche to serve or a “lifestyle” you want to capture in your photos.
Fun fact: Professional photography accounts are thesecond-most lucrative on Instagramin terms of how much brands are willing to pay for a sponsored post. And you don't need hundreds of thousands of followers either.
Check out our guide onhow to sell photos onlinefor a more detailed look at how to monetize your photography.
7. DIY crafts
Crafting is another on our list of profitable hobbies that make money. If you enjoy working with your hands, there are plenty ofthings to make and sell:candles,bath bombs,jewelry,soap, and more. This is a $40-billion industry waiting for your next idea.
“Handmade” communicates a certain quality, care, and uniqueness that department store alternatives often don't offer. You cantest the marketfor your products by selling them on a smaller scale to friends and family, at flea markets, oron Etsy, and think about scaling into a full-fledged business as you rack up customers.
If the idea of crafting the goods yourself isn't striking a chord, you can also make money selling kits that allow customers to flex their own maker muscles at home. Create DIY kits for fun projects, likeFlowerMoxie's DIY bridal bouquets. Or, tap into the home improvement industry—between 2018 and 2019, home improvement spending increased 17%.
Here are a few more inspiring stories about DIY businesses and resources to show you how it can be done:
- Growing a Handmade Brand: One Family’s Journey from Etsy to Shopify
- Etsy and Shopify: How Three Makers Used Both to Grow Their Businesses
- Why JM&Sons Launched Their Furniture Business Out of a Shipping Container
- Etsy Alternatives: 9 Online Marketplaces and Website Builders for Makers
- Craft Your Own Future: 10 DIY Business Ideas You Can Start From Home
8. Comedy
Are you good at making people laugh? Do you know what the hottest memes are right now? Why not take that sense of humor and use it to build an audience on the internet? Comedy is one of the morecreative ways to make moneyon this list.
You can probably think of several Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter accounts that amassed large audiences simply by curating memes and viral videos or tapping into a niche of humor that no one else was serving. Who knew all those hours of scrolling and social media management would be one of the hobbies that make money?
Once you have an audience, you can partner with brands to do sponsored posts or turn your best running jokes into t-shirts and other products.
Examples of comedy as a side hustle that makes money include:
9. Coffee
Selling coffee onlineis a great way to turn a common hobby into a business idea that generates extra money.
Globally, people drinkmore than 400 billion cups of coffeeevery year, fueling an industry worth $60 billion annually. And as coffee drinkers have become accustomed to brewing their caffeine fix at home, it's a prime time to capitalize on this opportunity. If coffee is one of your own passions, it could be next on your list of lucrative hobbies.
Whether you enjoy the hunt for the perfect bean, creating a perfectly frothed cappuccino, or just sitting down to your morning cup with a book, coffee drinkers can take this business idea in a number of directions.
Globe-trotting creatives Jeff Campagna and Tania LaCaria found that coffee mixed well with one of their other passions: motorcycle travel. They opened up their own bike garage,Steeltown Garage Co., complete with coffee shop and merch for sale, and they're cultivating a whole community through their hobby-based business.
Check these out for more inspiration for your coffee biz:
- How a Coffee Obsession Became a Business That’s Doubling in Growth Every Year
- They’re Making Fair Trade Coffee a Bit Fairer
- Overdraft: How This Army Vet Fought His Way out of a Financial Ambush
10. Pets
Many of us love taking care of our pets, watching funny videos of animals online, and giving back by fostering or donating to animal-related charitable causes. But your love of pets can also be a profitable hobby that enables you to earn money in your spare time.
Transforming your pet hobby into apet businesscan take a variety of forms. WithSupakit, for instance, owners Leili Farzaneh and Kevin White turned a personal pet story into their own shop selling cat accessories.
If you have a unique pet story or extensive experience taking care of animals, you can turn your expertise into extra cash by starting a YouTube channel or social media presence devoted to pet-related content, including an online course or funny videos.
Alternatively, you can concentrate your money-making hobby closer to home by starting a pet-sitting or dog-walking business. Depending on where you live, even a local pet-sitting business can generate a surprising amount of extra money.
The possibilities are quite literally endless here—you just need a hobby and some imagination to get the ideas rolling for your own membership-based business.
11. Brewing beer
Homebrewing, or making your own beer at home, is next on our list of hobbies that make money.More than a million Americanshave brewed beer at home, andit's trending upward. In 2018 alone, the global homebrew market was worth an estimated $12 million.
While brewing beer at home is legal across all fifty states, homebrewers can't sell beer directly to consumers without registering as a business entity and obtaining the proper licenses and approvals from federal, state, and local authorities. However, if you love sampling or making craft brews, there are a variety of ways you can turn your love of beer into a money making hobby.
Brooklyn Brew Shop, for instance, sells homebrew kits and accessories so its customers can enjoy the hobby themselves.
If you have experience making unique or award-winning beers, you can set up your own online store selling supplies and recipes to adventurous homebrewers, create an online course, or create your own YouTube channel discussing the finer points of the craft.
Finally, homebrewing is a technical hobby with lots of equipment requiring careful setup and maintenance. You can make extra money from your hobby by building and selling brewing and kegging setups, or tutoring budding brewers directly (in person or virtually).
12. Gaming
You might be skeptical about the notion of gaming being one of the hobbies you can make money with from home. But if there's a pattern in this list, it's that if you can get people to pay attention to you, you can potentially turn it into a profit.
In this case, it's the rise of the “Let's Play” video format that has enabled us tomake money onlineplaying video games, in particular live-streaming onTwitch. Just like learninghow to make money on YouTube, you can monetize gaming by sharing ad revenue.
Additionally, there's also the potential to get one-time and subscription donations from a large community of viewers. This means the amount you earn through live streaming will vary greatly, but that it's relatively easy to start at least making extra income.
While the amount of commitment you need to make a significant income might turn gaming into work for you, you can still have fun with it if you choose to stream a game you love, are good at it, and bring your personality to the table.
游戏是一个fast-growing industry with a lot of passion behind it. If you're an avid gamer who understands the needs of the market, you already have an advantage as an entrepreneur in this space.
You can consider building a business of your own to cater to the needs and interests of gamers, like how:
- PC Gaming Racespeaks to the superiority of PC gamers.
- Corey Ferreira sold gaming glassesinspired by his own gaming needs.
How to make money from a hobby
Tostart a businessbased off your hobby, you’ll need to take the following steps:
- Validate your business idea: Do some market research to make sure there’s demand for your offering.
- 找到一个商业名称:给您的业务一个独特identity.
- Make a plan: A business plan will keep you on track to meet your goals.
- Understand business finances: Set up business accounts,funding sources, and other money matters.
- Develop your product or service: This is where you turn your hobby-inspired offering into something customers are willing to pay for, whether it's a physical or digital product, a consulting service, an online course, or amembership.
- Pick abusiness structure: Legitimize your business and protect your personal assets.
- Research licenses and regulations: Ensure you’re conducting business lawfully.
- Select your software systems: Build your website, set up accounting software, and get the rest of your tech stack up and running.
- Find a business location: Determine where you can operate your business, whether it be from home or somewhere else.
- Plan workload and team size: Bootstrap or hire help, depending on your plans.
- Launch your business: Let the world know!
When will I make money from a hobby?
Turning your favorite hobby into a side hustle or full time job has its perks: you'll be your own boss, on your own schedule, and set your own prices, all while doing work that you love. Nevertheless, it's important to have realistic expectations about the time and work that will entail—most of which is less fun than the hobby itself.
To start, you'll need to build a marketing strategy to let the world know about your side hustle turned online business. That strategy may begin on social media, a freelance marketplace, or a full-fledged Shopify store.
When you start making sales, you'll need to keep track of thecash coming inand the money going out. This makestax timeeasier, simplifies the process in case of an audit, and protects your personal assets. Additionally, tracking your revenue and expenses helps you ensure your money-making hobby turns profitable. It's a good idea to get set up with anaccounting softwareto manage your books.
Even with all of these preparations and more, achieving financial independence or a full-time income from your favorite hobby will likely take months or even years.
Make money from your hobbies today
I enjoy writing, so I started a side hustle as a freelance writer to earn extra cash in school. I also like to dabble in dance, so I started an online storedropshippingLED shoes for dancers.
In many cases, when it comes to discovering a profitable hobby, it's the things we do for free and for fun that hint at the kinds of businesses we can pursue using our own passion and interest as fuel.
So if you have the urge to start something but don't know where to start, ask yourself what you're good at or already know about.
What do you already do in your spare time that could turn into something more?
Header image via Getty Images
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How to make money from your hobbies FAQ
Can a hobby turn into a profitable business?
What are hobbies that make money?
- Writing
- Illustration and design
- Music
- Cooking Gardening
- Photography
- DIY crafts
- Comedy
- Coffee
- Pets
- Brewing beer
- Gaming