Join me to hear about turning your passions into pounds

I’d love to invite you to join me, PR expert Jessica Huie MBE and prolific mummy blogger Vicki Psarias, one of the UK’s most successful bloggers, on Friday 18th of April at the British Library for a talk on how to turn your passion into pounds, leverage the digital space for business success, create a flexible work life over which you have control and even look to building a business out of the things you love doing.

You can book tickets here: Turn passion to pounds 

The world is full of cries of ‘follow your passions’ and certainly it’s a great philosophy. For years we’ve seen an emerging call to ‘live your life on your own terms’ – turning your back on the corporate world of predictable careers and 9 to 5 jobs and just following your dreams.

After all, who wouldn’t want to ‘choose a job you love – and never have to ‘work’ a day in your whole life’?

But can you really make money out of your passions?

I would like to be a lone voice injecting a word of caution into the chants of ‘follow your passion’ above everything else.

I’d like to say this with the caveat that I believe passionately in lifestyle creation, that it is possible to create a lifestyle that you love, that you don’t have to stay trapped doing something you don’t love and that if you don’t love what you are doing you should change direction. 

I myself left one industry I was no longer passionate about, burned ALL my bridges to physically block myself from going back on, and moved on to create a far more flexible life that is in tune with my passions and expertise.

I used to walk around with a leaden weight in my stomach of feeling stuck doing something I didn’t want to do. That weight in my stomach has completely gone and I’m grateful for that fact every day. 

AND I’d like to add in the fact that the digital space makes it easier than ever to drive leads into ANY business, whether that is an online business, blog or real world business, in a way that results in far more flexibility than historically would have been possible.

BUT……!!!

Whether you are wanting to run a real world business, turn a blog into a business or set up an online business, it’s important to bear in mind that profits do not normally arise overnight.

In my research for The Million Dollar Blog, which will be published in September and is all about leveraging digital for personal blog or business blog purposes, I’ve talked to almost 50 of the world’s greatest bloggers. Most have with multi six figures or even 7 figure incomes, and are driven by passion.

BUT all of them will tell you themselves how their success has not happened overnight. In fact it took them many years to get to the incredible situation they are in today. Whilst their passion keeps them going, it was not enough to magic income overnight. 

So look for the opportunity within your passions

My best advice is to strike a balance between passions and dreams and your own circumstances and everyday needs, and also focus where real business opportunity lies within the world and crucially, if you need to generate income sooner rather than later, pinpoint where it can quickly be monetised.

If you tell me what your passion is, I’m going to ask

‘Is there a market in that and what is it?’

before I can tell you it’s a good idea to focus entirely on that.

Now for the good news

Whatever your passion, there is money, profit and wealth to be had, discovered and created from it; that is not in question. Even if you think of the most bizarre things imaginable, there are people out there selling related services, products and information around it.

But your own circumstances might mean one of the following:

• You may need to start your new business around your existing job (which many of the bloggers I am talking to certainly did). They managed both a job and their blog until their blog had grown to a point it could be their full time job.
• You may need to start a new business based around an existing area of expertise, thus driving consultancy work. During our talk, we will explain how to leverage digital to position yourself as the go-to expert, and you will certainly have more freedom and a more flexible lifestyle than as an employee.
• You may need to look across all your passions (most people have more than one!) and take a calculated and well thought out decision based on which passion is most likely to be able to be monetised the fastest.

All of these are still great ways forward.

Bear in mind, even if you end up building a business that is 95 per cent rather than 100 per cent your passion, there are still going to be all sorts of benefits to be had in terms of being your own boss, and using digital to bring in leads make sure you are perceived as the best at what you do.

You’ll still enjoy  all the opportunities and positioning that come from that which will be life changing and enhancing in many different ways.

And remember this fact too: passions don’t stay the same throughout a lifetime.

If I think back to the various things I have been passionate about in the past, it feels like they must have been the passions of a different person (New Kids On The Block being a case in point).

At the moment, I am passionate about small children – because I have two. But I know that before I had kids I wasn’t interested in small children and I’m sure once my small children are teenagers, I will be far more passionate about teen issues than I am those around toddlers. 

Passions and interests are often driven by life stages and, as life moves on, so do your passions and interests.

The real secret of successful people

Remember this: successful people tend to make calculated and thought-out decisions that combine what they know about with what they are passionate about with where the opportunities truly lie and the path they are convinced, having done research, will most likely lead to success. 

You can book tickets here: Turn passion to pounds 

And make sure you come and say hello!