Women typically have many hobbies, whether it is reading, writing, knitting, exercise, or cooking. But how can you monetize your hobby so that you can be one of those people, “Making money doing what they love?”

What your hobby is will help dictate how to start going about generating income. Below are some ways that you can turn your hobby into a profitable, money-making venture.

You Have Options

Maybe you want to make money with your hobby by way of teaching others how to do it rather than selling anything. This is perfectly acceptable. This can mean creating a tutorial or writing an e-book for instance.

Perhaps you want to sell a finished product. This can be done if you’ve made the product yourself or if you bought the product already made but you did so with the agreement that you are going to put your name on it, also known as private label rights. This is popular amongst ghost writers for instance, someone else writes the article but they allow you to market it as your own.

Affiliate marketing is a nice compromise to both–you can integrate affiliate products on a site with your own products or you can create relevant content around your hobby of choice and use affiliate products. This is still making money with your hobby and is quite possibly one of the easier ways to go about it depending on your time.

Adsense and ad space, also good choices, but be forewarned that this is not as easy as it might sound. You need to market your site and have incoming traffic to see any revenue coming in. But it can be done! Find like blogs and leave genuine comments. Networking is the single best way to get your new hobby site started.

Barter Your Skills

If money is hard to come by to get started, find other bloggers to barter with by swapping talents. If you are a member on any forums, start there. If not, visit SwapTree.com and GoSwap.org which can help you find someone to trade with.

Get Hired

If you want to do something involving your hobby but you don’t particularly want to own a business or blog, you have the option of getting paid by other business owners that share your hobby or topic of interest. Going back to the ghost writing sample, find someone that needs articles and blog posts on the topic of your interest and get paid for writing.

What You Need to Get Started

What you need to get started will obviously depend on the route you’ve picked. But below are some general things to keep in mind when getting started.

• A domain name. NameCheap.com is my favorite.
• Hosting. Please be prepared to spend a few dollars if you really want to give this a go. A domain name and hosting are essential although free is tempting.
• An online payment service if you are selling your own products and intend to process credit card and/or debit card payments. If you are going the route of affiliate marketing, payment services will not be a concern.
• If you are going the affiliate marketing route, you need to research affiliate programs that match your hobby and sign up for them so that you can promote products.

Almost anything can be turned into a money-making venture if you go about it the right way. Take your time to research and then figure out what avenue will work best for you, because the beauty is there is more than one way to do it and to do it well.

This is a guest post by Melissa, a freelance writer for FundraiserInsight.org. She’s a tech geek that specializes in all things electronic and mobile. Some might say she has a slight addiction to mobile apps and social media. In her free time, which is rare, she can be found snuggled up on her over-sized chair with her Kindle in one hand and a coffee in the other.

Photo by camera shy momma/Flickr