Follow Your Passion and Make “Do What You Love” Profitable

If you feel like there’s something out there that you’re supposed to be doing, if you have a passion for it, then stop wishing and just do it.
— Wanda Sykes

“Do what you love” is one of those quotes that’s 1000x easier said than done. There’s a reason why most people aren’t doing what they love, maybe yourself included.

It’s not a guaranteed path to success and a girl’s gotta eat, right?

Being able to make money off something you love—something you’re truly passionate about—is a dream for a lot of people.

As our workforce shifts more and more towards freelancing and working from home, it’s clear more people are looking to use their passion to gain the freedom and flexibility of entrepreneurship.

However, running your own business comes with all the responsibilities of, well, running a business.

The truth is, doing what you love actually involves a lot of doing what you don’t love: marketing, accounting, paperwork, shipping, data entry into a site that’s not so user-friendly.

Yeah, that last one is a bit personal for me.

But I still do it because it enables me to enjoy want I’m working on, and I only have to answer to my customers, not some looming boss.

5 tips to truly do what you love in your online business

To make your business more profitable and a lot more fun at the same time, you should tap into your passion. Focus most of your attention on work centered around what you love to do.

Again, this is easier said than done, so here are some tips to help you find and use your passion or what you love as your online business.

Realize what your passion really is

Ever notice how sometimes the work you do just seems to flow and you don’t mind working long hours on a project? These are the things you love to do most. Your passion. What you love.

Often these are also the things that end up making you the most money. The reason for that is simple: the passion you have for the work you do shines through in the end result.

You might have a pretty good idea of what you think your passion is, but you may actually have a hidden passion that you’re unaware of.

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.

—Yo-Yo Ma

For example, while Stay Goal’d is one of my oldest brand ideas, I never thought I’d have made it into a full blog with tips for entrepreneurs, even though I’ve always known I wanted to help inspire other people who wanted to build a better life.

I started out with just posting motivational quotes on Instagram, but as I began to surround myself more with other entrepreneurs, I realized I wanted to help them feel more motivated and share my productivity tips with them. And Stay Goal’d became a blog.

So you first need to do a little soul-searching and figure out what you love to do or who you love to help. This passion will make the time you’ll be spending working on your business feel much more enjoyable.

Find a market and niche that you enjoy serving

Once you have an idea of what your passion is, it’s time to figure out how you can make it profitable. Figuring out what your passion is and how to make it profitable (or which can actually become profitable) are often the hardest parts of doing what you love.

Start by finding a market that you enjoy working in. Within this market, you need to find a niche that’s going to be profitable. That means it has products or services that a good amount of people are willing to buy.

I understand that might seem a bit confusing, so let’s take a look at yoga as an example.

Trying to build a business simply around yoga will be pretty tough. With over 1,830,000 searches worldwide each month, it’s clearly a hot topic, but broad topics online are really hard to build momentum with.

It’s going to take a lot more time and effort to make money if you try to focus on everything about yoga. So instead, focus on specific things people want to know about yoga, like honing in on a specific type of yoga, how to do yoga at home, or ways to incorporate yoga into a lifestyle you’re familiar with.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

— Neil Gaiman

Resources for finding a niche

Online entrepreneurship often comes in the form of physical or digital product sales, information or entertainment through content creation, or coaching—here are some resources to find profitable niches in each of these.

The content creation section is worth taking a look into no matter which of these methods you’ll use because they give a good insight into what kinds of information people search for online. The more people who search for something, the more opportunity for making money!

Actually, all of these categories have some pretty good suggestions for any type of business, so you may want to check all of them out. I’m actually inspired just from collecting these resources.

Finding an Online Shop Niche

• Top 10 Most Popular Niche Markets for Making Money Online
• The 15 Best Niche Markets To Make Good Money From
• How to find a niche market for your online store + 115 niche market ideas

Finding a Content Creation Niche

• 8 Popular Blog Niches That Drive Traffic and Make Money (That Aren’t About Blogging Tips)
• 7 Blog Niches That Get Good Traffic and Make Good Money
• 100+ Profitable Niches List for 2019 & Beyond!

Finding a Coaching Niche

• 21 Proven And Profitable Coaching Niches
• 3 foolproof steps to finding your profitable coaching niche
• The Ultimate Guide To Finding Your Coaching Niche [2019 Edition]

You’ll be creating a lot of content and talking a lot about whatever niche you chose to be in, so it shouldn’t be something you’ll easily get bored with.

Your enthusiasm and love for the market will shine through as you write and talk about it. It will help establish you as a knowledgeable and credible source of information. That will make gaining the trust of your potential customers much easier.

You can use keyword research to judge how popular each niche idea is. Pay attention to what products or services people are selling and keywords based on product searches, too. You can also use this information to discover ideas for products you can create or promote as an affiliate.

“When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.”

— Meredith Hill

Attract your ideal customers

It’s helpful to get a clear picture of who your ideal customer is. Be as specific as possible when it comes to gender, age, how well off they are, if they are married and have kids, etc.

This is often referred to as an “avatar” for your customers or clients.

Once you know what your ideal customer or client looks like, it will be a lot easier to find places where you can find them. This means you’ll also be able to do research on what sort of products or services your ideal customer is dying to purchase.

Since you’ll be spending a lot of time interacting with, helping, educating and entertaining your customer base, you want to pay attention to the type of people you attract and make sure they fit this profile.

If they don’t align with what you want, you can either make adjustments to your content or where you look for customers, or you can make changes to better serve the audience you’re currently attracting and continue your current marketing efforts.

Using keyword research to attract customers

One of the most difficult things to figure out when you’re first starting out is knowing what people actually want to learn about the thing you’re passionate about.

Keyword research is a good way to discover what people want, especially if you don’t have a direct way to survey your audience yet. By targeting exactly what people want, you’ll be able to build traction in your business much easier because you’ll be serving a direct need.

The basic idea is that you create content and products around topics people search for—the keywords. You then use these keywords to rank higher for organic searches or target them in paid advertising so you’re able to receive traffic to your site from visitors who are already looking for the solutions you’re offering.

Focus on what you love doing

Okay, so, maybe this one’s a little bit obvious but it’s still an important part of the equation.

As I mentioned before, online businesses have a lot of different parts which means you’re going to have a lot of different responsibilities. Some you’ll enjoy working on a lot more than others.

If product creation is what you love, focus on that. If you prefer talking to writing, start an audio or video podcast instead of committing to writing daily blog posts.

Try to focus on what you have fun doing the most.

Yes, there will be times when you have to do stuff that isn’t as fun (taxes, anyone?), but make sure you have some enjoyable work on your plate at all times. It’ll keep you going and makes the day go by much faster.

For all those things that you really don’t enjoy, you can hire other people to do it for you.

“Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.”

— Peter F. Drucker

Outsource what you don’t love

Start to outsource anything you absolutely hate doing as quickly as possible. You might be hesitant to pay someone else for a variety of reasons, but without having to do these tasks, you’ll find that your business will thrive.

Maybe “hate” is a strong word here, but if you start doing something you don’t want to do enough times, you’ll understand what I mean.

It’s highly likely that people who specialize in certain areas will also complete tasks much more quickly than you could. Remember, when you’re paying someone, you’re paying not just for the result, but for their years of experience and expertise.

If cost is something you’re worried about, start with something small. As your business grows, keep adding to the list as you can afford to until you’re only left with work you enjoy.

You can find freelancers on places like UpWork or Fiverr. Do a test project first to make sure whoever you plan to hire is a good fit.

Don’t feel like no one is out there doing what you need, either. I’ve seen a lot of people asking if there are people who will take on various tasks, and usually the answer is yes. You can hire a virtual assistant to do any sort of task in your online business, even if you need to train them a bit first.

With all the tedious parts removed, it’s amazing not only how much fun running your online business will be, but also how much faster you’ll move forward with projects. The end result is a more profitable and enjoyable business.

If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.

— Katherine Hepburn

Now that you a better idea of how to turn your passion into a business that you love, what’s next?

Well go out there and do some research! Find ways you can turn what you love into a way to help other people. You can start with sharing on a blog and social media and build up from there if you like.

The important thing to remember is that you want to become a business. This means building an audience and coming up with ideas for products and services. You can also take advantage of affiliate marketing and share offers for products that would fit with your audience.