20 Great Hobbies that Make Money + Ways to Monetize the Rest of Them!

Everyone wants to make extra money right? So why not try to monetize your hobbies? That’s the main goal of passion fire, after all, to make money doing the things you love. How do you find hobbies that make money, and how do you make money doing them? We’re going to answer all of your questions about making money doing fun things.

What Are the Best Hobbies to Make Money?

You probably want me to tell you the exact hobby that you should choose to make a fortune. That’s the wrong way to look at it. You should choose a hobby that you enjoy. If you are choosing a hobby based on the potential for payment, is it still a hobby? Or is it just another job?

While it’s true that some hobbies are more suited for monetization and others, the main purpose of a hobby is doing something that you enjoy. I’m of the opinion that you can monetize anything if you love it enough, and we’ll explore how to do that!

How Do I Find A Hobby to Make Money

In order to find a hobby that makes money, you should start by finding a hobby. Focus on the money-making part later.

That begs the question – how do you find a hobby?

In order to find a hobby, you should ask yourself “what do I enjoy doing?”. I’m sure there are things that you love to do – that you would spend all of your free time doing, that you would pay to do. Those are the hobbies that you should focus on to start earning money.

Hobbies You Can Easily Start Monetizing

That being said, there are some hobbies that lend themselves to making money far more readily than others. It is important to curb expectations though. “Easily” doesn’t mean easy money. It means that these hobbies are already suited for monetization. It will still take a lot of work and commitment to earn money from them, but the effort can pay off in the long run. 

 

Painting

Painting is a fantastic creative outlet, and a great hobby to turn into a side hustle. Many people sell their artwork on Etsy and eBay, but there are platforms dedicated specifically to painting.

Artspan is a hosting service dedicated to artists. They offer a gallery and print-on-demand services so that people can buy your prints. You will have to pay a monthly hosting fee for this service, but it’s a great way to get your artwork out there.

For a free gallery, you can check out websites like Artpal. They offer artists free gallery space, and they take a portion of all sales. If you want to sell art on your own, you can use a social media site like Instagram to build a following and try to find commissions.

Crafts

Etsy makes it easy to sell any kind of craft that you want to make. The platform is already available for you. It costs twenty cents to list an item, and Etsy takes 5% of all sales. If you create any type of craft as a hobby, you should definitely look into trying to sell it on Etsy. Here are a few great examples of hobby crafts:

Sewing

Knitting

Crocheting

Woodworking

Ceramics

Jewelry Making

Doll-making

There is also a market for seasonal crafts for holidays like Christmas and Halloween. You can create ornaments, decorations, wreaths, and a variety of other festive seasonal delights to sell online. 

Digital Arts

Another easy type of hobby to monetize is anything that is digital. Are you into graphic design? Video or podcast editing? Building websites? There is a huge market for those types of hobbies online.

A great place to start is Fiverr. It’s an online marketplace for people to make money online by selling the things they are good at. Thousands of people look to places like Fiverr and Upwork for help editing, writing resumes, designing emotes and logos, creating websites, and a plethora of other similar tasks that can be done with technology. Check it out and see if there’s a demand for your digital hobby.

Graphic Design

While talking about digital arts, it’s important to talk separately about graphic design because there’s another great way to monetize this particular hobby, and that’s with print on demand. Websites like Teespring, Teepublic, and Redbubble allow artists to upload their designs to t-shirts, mugs, purses, and a ton of other items. When customers purchase the design, these websites handle the printing and shipping and pay the artists a percentage of the sales. It’s a fairly easy way to make money from a graphic design hobby.

Photography

There are a lot of ways that you can monetize a photography hobby. The easiest place to start is selling your photos online. You can upload your photos to websites like Shutterstock, and get paid when someone wants to use your photo.

 

Another way to turn your photography hobby into a money-making venture is to offer photography services in your local area. People want professional photos for a variety of events, including birthdays, engagements, and baby showers. If you can build a portfolio of great photos, you can create a side business out of your love for cameras.

Writing

There are a plethora of ways to earn money through your love of writing. The easiest is to sign up for a Hubpages account. This is an online platform where you can write about whatever you want, and sign up for their ad platform to monetize it. The catch is that unless you have a lot of volume to your post, you won’t make that much money. But if you put a lot of time and effort into it, you can get a lot of pageviews and make some decent money.

A better way to get paid to write is to become a freelancer. You can look for freelance writing work on sites like Fiverr and Upwork, but there are also sites dedicated to writing. Verblio is one of those sites. They are very strict about who they let write for them – potential writers need to pass a punctuation test! Once in, you can start pitching articles to companies. Make sure you do your best work though; the competition is fierce.

Another option, which takes a lot longer but has the potential for higher returns, is to write an E-book. You can sign up for Draft-2-Digital and publish your E-Book across a wide network of retailers. Self-Publishing has never been easier!

Shopping

Shopping is a valid hobby and one that’s usually associated with spending money rather than making money. However, there are two ways you can turn your love of shopping into a moneymaking venture.

First, you can try shopping at a garage sale and flip cool items you find on eBay. It’s hard to know what things will sell on eBay, so it’s best if you go in with a specific niche that you know and love. Some folks find treasures like designer brands, others look for old toys, and still others find antiques to sell. You can find all of these items at garage sales and thrift shops.

Another way to turn your love of shopping into a side hustle is by becoming a mystery shopper. These folks go into stores, interact with the staff, and give a report on how the experience went. Be careful though – some places you find looking for mystery shoppers ask you to buy them gift cards or wire them money. If they are trying to get you to pay for something, it’s most likely a scam. Be sure to use a reputable company.

Gaming

Gaming is a great relaxing hobby, and there is a platform already established to monetize it. You can live stream your gaming on Twitch and start getting paid as a Twitch affiliate in less than 30 days!

Okay, it’s not as easy as all that. Although you can become a twitch affiliate and start monetizing that quickly, most Twitch Streamers don’t make a lot of money. But, if you put some time and effort into becoming a Twitch affiliate, you should be able to make enough money to support your gaming habit. And some people have been able to turn their gaming hobby into a 6-figure income!

There are other platforms outside of Twitch that you can use to turn your love of gaming into a money making hobby, but Twitch is my favorite because it’s the one with the lowest threshold for monetizing.

How to Monetize Other Hobbies

Those hobbies make money on their own because there’s a fairly large demand for them. But what if your hobby is more niche? What if there aren’t a bunch of platforms already dedicated to it, and a ton of people looking for it?

There are three great ways to turn these niche interests (and any of the other things on this list!) into hobbies that make money. You can start a blog, make a Youtube channel, or create a podcast.

Start a Blog

We could have talked about blogging under writing, and yes it’s a great way to make money online if you are passionate about writing. But it’s also a great way to monetize any specialized hobbies that you might have.

Do you love to cook? Start a recipe blog. Eat? Start a foodie blog. Travel? Are you starting to get the idea? You can make a blog about anything that interests you – from money to books, wellness to toys. The great thing about blogging is that it can help you discover other folks who share your interest, even if it is super specific. You can start a blog with Bluehost for as little as four bucks a month, so why not try it out?

 

One thing to remember about blogging is that it isn’t a get rich quick scheme. You can’t throw a few posts up and expect to make thousands of dollars. Like anything, it’s a labor of love. But if you put in the time and effort, you will eventually be able to monetize nearly any hobby by blogging about it.

Make a Youtube Channel

If you don’t enjoy writing, you can also monetize nearly any hobby by making videos about it. Create “how-to” tutorials surrounding your hobby, make passionate stories about why you love it so much, post videos of conferences or conventions surrounding your hobby.

It does take a while to get to the point where you can monetize your Youtube videos. You need over four thousand valid watch hours in the past year and over one thousand subscribers. These numbers seem daunting, but if you post regularly and have great content, you will get there.

Create a Podcast

If you don’t want to spend time making and editing videos, you can always go an easier route and make a podcast. Podcasting is all the rage right now, and if you can talk about your hobby for hours on end, why not break it down into digestible podcast-able segments?

Most podcast hosting networks offer a few free hours of podcast time and then charge a monthly fee. This gives you the opportunity to explore podcasting and determine if you like it before you have to pay. The hosting fees are usually reasonable, most sites cost between $10-$20 per month, and allow you to send your podcast to Apple and Spotify.

Once you get your name out there, you can start working with brands on sponsorship deals. Find brands that are important to your hobby and reach out to them. You’d be surprised at how many smaller brands might be willing to work with you.

Which Hobbies are the Cheapest?

If you don’t have a hobby yet and are looking to start one at minimal cost, I’d recommend writing and graphic design. These are two hobbies that make money that you can start with almost no cost to you.

As long as you already have a computer, you can find free programs for both writing and graphic design. Then, you can write on hubpages for free if you’re a writer, and upload your designs to teepublic for free if you’re a graphic designer.

What Can I do With My Free Time to Make Money?

Hobbies that make money are great, but what if you have some free time and just want to make money? There are a ton of things you can do that might not be as enjoyable as a hobby but will make you a little extra money in your spare time.

Take Surveys and Kill Time Online

There are a ton of sites that claim to offer money and cashback for taking surveys, but Swagbucks is my favorite. You can earn points, called SB, for taking online surveys, watching videos, and doing other fun things online. You can redeem the points for gift cards to your favorite stores. It’s a great way to earn cash online if you have a few minutes to kill.

Check out all these other survey sites that will let you make money taking surveys in your spare time. 

Drive

If you have even more time to kill, you can sign up for Uber or Lyft and make extra money by driving folks around. It’s a fun way to meet interesting people and learn the best routes for getting around your city.

 

 If you don’t like interacting with people, you can still make money driving with companies like doordash. All you have to do is pick up people’s food and delivery it to them.

Play with Pets

If you don’t like interacting with people at all, you can play with pets in your spare time for money. Rover is a great site that pays you for dog-walking, pet sitting and taking care of people’s pets when they can’t.

Help People Out

Task-Rabbit is a great website that connects task doers with people who need things done around the house. Usually, the tasks are simple things, like changing lightbulbs, running errands, or helping hang things. A lot of times people just need an extra helping hand with these things, and task-rabbit lets you get paid to do it.

Build Stuff

Handy is similar to task-rabbit, but it’s more specific to handy-man type work. If people need help installing air conditioners, painting a room, or building a bike, they can post their job and Handy, and people with that skill can bid on the job. It’s a great way to make money in your spare time if you are good at completing small projects around the house.

Start Monetizing Your Hobby Today!

This isn’t by any means a complete list of hobbies that make money. In reality, you can turn anything you are passionate about into a money-making venture if you put enough time and effort in. So what are you waiting for? Start monetizing your hobby today!