In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, Krista Kolodziejzyk chats through 15 entrepreneurial ideas for dietitian side hustles that can help you bring in some extra money each month. Regardless of whether you are working 9-5 and looking to make money on the side, or you’re a business owner looking to add an additional income stream, this episode is for you.
Links:
- Check out the Dietitian Success Center membership here
- Connect with Krista on Instagram @dietitiansuccesscenter and @kristako.rd
- Check out our Freebies here – PES Statement Cheat Sheet, Client Resource Kit & Business Planning Workbook
Episode Transcript:
Hey there and welcome to a new episode of the dietitian success podcast. So this episode is actually based on a blog post that I wrote back in 2021. That. Has been one of our biggest traffic sources to the website and it’s 15 dietitian side hustles to earn an extra thousand dollars a month. And because it’s such a big traffic generator, I wanted to make sure to go in and revamp it and just sort of revitalize it a little bit.
It needed. Some it needed a refreshing take. And so I went in and I did that. And then I thought, well, why don’t I record this as a podcast episode too, to add a little bit more to the content, because I definitely have some additional thoughts. I even have some additional ideas than the ones that I’ve listed in this blog post beyond the 15. And so I thought let’s record this as a podcast episode.
And so that is what we are here to do today to talk about. dietitian side hustles. And first of all, I think one of the coolest things about being a dietitian is just how much variety there is in terms of things you can do. That’s one of the awesome things about the work that we do is that number one. It’s fairly simple to turn it into something that can be an online product or a digital product versus. Something like massage therapy is a little bit more challenging because it’s so much more of an in-person field.
Whereas for dietetics and dietitians, a lot of the information that we give and a lot of the education we do can be done. Through an online format. And so it lends itself to all of these different areas where as a professional, as a practitioner, We can monetize our information and monetize our skillset and monetize our education. And the reason why I love to talk about side hustles too, is because we can kind of think about this in two ways.
We can think about it as the dietitian who’s working full time and just wants to make a little bit of extra money on the side. Or we can think about it actually three ways. I guess we can think about it as the person who is interested in entrepreneurship, but not quite ready to make the jump. And so they’re, starting to build out some of these additional income streams on the side, but then we can also think about it as the entrepreneur who maybe is wanting to combine a number of different revenue streams in order to make. More money or an order to really round out the revenue and diversify the revenue in their business. So maybe they want to work with people one-on-one but then they also want to do some of these other things as well.
And so that’s really what we’re going to go through today is just some different ideas that dietitians, regardless of their area of practice, could explore as ways to make a little bit of extra money every month. Now I want to be very clear because this is one thing that I absolutely despise in the world of marketing is just. How a lot of times people make it sound so easy to just make a thousand dollars like this.
Right. You just put something out there into the world and it’ll sell people will buy it, right. If you build it, they will come. And that is just not the case. All of these things, all of these ideas that I put out there. Are going to require active work and active effort from a sales and marketing perspective.
It’s not just as easy as, Hey, I have an expertise in IBS and I want to create an ebook. I’m going to write it. I’m going to put it on the internet and people are just going to buy it. And I’m gonna make a thousand dollars. That’s not how it works. We need to have strategy. We need to have intention. Around the sales and marketing piece for a lot of these.
So let’s start with number one, which is creating a digital product by digital product. I am referring to things like eBooks PDF copies of nutrition, guides, or recipes that you’ve developed. PDF recipe books. Digital products are a really cool way for dietitians to be able to package the information that they teach and put it into something that could be more scalable.
By scalable, I mean that you create it once and then you can sell it over and over again. You’re not having to go through that. Process of actually exchanging your time for money. So that’s, what’s cool about digital products. I’m going to talk about online courses separately that sort of deserves its own. Number in this list, but I wanted to start with digital products, eBooks recipe books, because again, I think they’re relatively simple versus an online course, which can be a lot more extensive, but. Essentially what this means is that. We can do something as basic as writing out, our nutrition philosophy, some of the content that we teach our clients in a Google doc, save it as a PDF.
And you could technically sell that. I mean, you probably want to make it look a little bit nicer in Canva, but technically that could be something that you sell. The one thing that I do want to mention when it comes to a digital product is. That, like I said before, it’s not as simple as if I create it. People will come and buy it from me. Right. Like we have to make sure that we are intentional around building an audience of people that would be interested in this product.
So. We almost have to think about when we’re thinking about any of these things. And we’re thinking about actually selling because it’s one thing to create, but then it’s another thing to actually sell. We almost have to flip this around a little bit and sort of work our way backwards and think. Who is, and how is the end user going to discover this and how are they going to buy this?
So, If I just put my ebook. Up on the internet. Maybe I’ve created a website, a simple Wix website, and I just put my ebook on there for sale. How are people going to find that first of all, and if they find it just randomly via Google, maybe they’re Googling things. And somehow they come across this ebook, that’s hidden within my website.
Are they going to buy that? Like they don’t know who I am. They don’t know. What I stand for. I haven’t earned their trust. And so are they really going to just give me money for this ebook that they’ve randomly come across on the internet? No. Right. We have to think through that.
Would you ever do that? And I think that’s an important piece is always put yourself into the buyer’s perspective. Thinking about, would I buy something like that? If the answer is no, then we needed to think about these things a little bit more strategically. So when it comes to digital products and online courses, I say that having an. Audience is really important audience of people that are interested in this topic.
And so what I mean by that is I’m basically referring to an email list, having an email list and so an email list, and I talk about this a lot within the dietitian success center, nutrition plus business membership. We have tons of trainings on what it looks like to start an email list.
But it’s basically where we put something out there into the world, whether that be recipes, whether that be a free guide, some sort of a freebie, like a PCOM.
Guide menopause guide, whatever topic you talk about.
And we advertise that on social media, on LinkedIn. All through our blog and people say, Hey, yeah, I want a copy of that. And so we essentially give that to them for free in exchange for their email address. And then we start to build up this email list and I’m not talking about an email list.
Like, you know, when you open up the mail app on your computer and you’re like emailing people directly, I’m actually talking about, um, an email list is run through. software or something like a MailChimp or Wix has a built-in email marketing system or flow desk. We actually pay for these platforms that store all of those email addresses for us.
And so when somebody has opted into our email address, they go onto our email list and then. When we want to send them an email about our work, our business, what we have to, what we’re trying to advertise. Then we do it through that platform. And so we can send it to them all directly. That’s really important because people have to be able to opt out.
Legally people have to be able to opt out of your emails. And so we can’t just send them emails through Gmail because there’s no way for them to opt out of those emails. So we have to use Nimo marketing system. And so in order to have a digital product, we have to build up an audience of people that are interested in our. Digital product or that are interested in the content that we have to talk about.
And we do that through an email list. And again, I’m just going to breeze through that. I know that maybe sounds a little bit complicated if you are new to this topic, but again, I teach that in full detail, um, in the dietitian success center membership. So we do have to have people that are interested in this product in order to sell it.
Like I said before, it’s not just as easy as if I create this thing, then people will just magically stumble upon it and buy it. The other really cool thing about having a digital product and particularly a digital course, which we’ll talk about in a minute is like, If you’re a practitioner who is working with people one-on-one and you find that there’s content you teach over and over and over again, or you feel like you are getting into a session with, with someone.
And you’re like, oh my gosh, I’m so overwhelmed. Because there’s so much content I want to teach. So I know that this often comes up with something like digestive health, which tends to be. More complex. And there’s a lot of, I mean, that’s really the case for any nutrition topic, but like digestive health, FODMAPs, IBS, like the learning curve tends to be quite steep.
We’re teaching people a lot of things. And so sometimes as a practitioner, it can feel really overwhelming. Like we have so much information we want to give that we just don’t have enough time or capacity and we don’t want to overwhelm people. And so. Having a digital component where you actually teach that stuff in a digital format that people can self paced watch on their own time. I can actually be a really great addition to the one-on-one services that you offer, or even group services that you offer.
Number two is working with clients. One-on-one. So I would say that this is probably one of the ways to start making a side hustle the quickest, because it doesn’t necessarily require that you build an audience, like some of these digital product ideas do. Right. We can build up referral networks or a lot of people find that from some of their past experience, you know, they already have other practitioners that would want to direct clients to them.
Like we see this a lot within the eating disorder space. Maybe you have. I had past experience in eating disorders. Um, but now you’re working in a different environment, but maybe you want to start a side hustle where you are working with eating disorder clients in a private practice capacity, and you already have other practitioners in the community that you know, who are looking for someone to refer to. So you don’t necessarily need to have this audience building piece figured out there’s so many other ways that you can market one-on-one services and one-on-one is relatively simple to set up as well.
As long as we have an EMR platform, like practice better, where we can store confidential, client health information. Um, and as long as we have a, again, an EMR platform where we can do things like charting and we can actually conduct the virtual session and we can charge people through that EMR platform, it’s fairly simple to set up.
And just as a side note, we have so much content when it comes to actually setting up a business within the dietitian success center, nutrition plus business membership.
We have something that I referred to as the ultimate nutrition business checklist, which is basically a step-by-step process. Step-by-step checklist for all of the things that you want to consider when you are starting. Growing and scaling a business from just some of the business setup, things, the government, the legal things you want to consider, the financial things that you want to consider.
How do you actually put together an offer? How do you structure an offer pricing? How do you market yourself? It really covers the start to finish process. And so you get all of that within the nutrition plus business membership for only $54 a month. So it is the most affordable way to, learn how to start and grow a business as a dietitian entrepreneur.
Number three is a webinar or a masterclass now. I would say that a masterclass is just sort of a fancy way of saying webinars. There’s really no significant difference there. And so this can be an interesting way to sort of get your feet wet in the world of online education and online paid education.
Without having to, again, come up with any sort of extensive online or digital course, you could just offer a one off. Webinar or class and host it through zoom and accept payments through Stripe or PayPal or whatever payment process or you want to use. Now the one thing to think about here that I think is really important is how is this webinar or masterclass going to be differentiated from information that people can get for free on a platform like YouTube. Right? It’s not enough to just say. Hey, I’m going to teach about label reading and charge for it. When somebody could learn that information on YouTube for free. So we need to think about what is truly the pain point that I’m trying to solve through this webinar or through this class. And how can I demonstrate to people through my marketing, that this class is going to help them overcome a very specific challenge. And we also need to think through things like how long are people going to have access to this webinar or masterclass?
Are they going to be able to watch the recording? How long will they be able to watch the recording for after the session is actually done live. Those are all things that need to be considered when you’re thinking about what you would price, something like an online webinar or a masterclass. And again, having an audience is really helpful for this as. Well, because it’s the same idea in order to get people to come to a class that we’re teaching.
You know, we need to have a group of people that are interested in this toward a sort of topic that we are promoting it to. We can’t just, you know, put it out there into the world on a website and just hope that people magically find it and decide to come. There has to be some strategy behind it.
Now, finally, let’s talk about digital courses also referred to as online courses. This is essentially where we take the information that we teach to our clients, and we package it in an, a start to finish online course, which typically has. It’s typically divided into modules and lessons. So similar to, if you were going to do any sort of online education, you could actually create a course like that is a dietitian and there’s lots of platforms, tech platforms we can use to facilitate this things like Kajabi or teachable or Thinkific. These are all platforms where you can host so you can, um, create and sell an online course through these platforms. And I, again, I think one of the huge benefits here is if you find that there’s information that you’re teaching over and over and over again, it can be a really great, and this is particular for you.
If you already have a business and you’re looking for an additional revenue stream. If you’re, so there’s content you’re teaching over and over again. Could you not automate that piece? And so, you know, people watch that educational component in between one-on-one sessions with you. And then when they come to meet you, you can work more on that strategy goal setting.
You’re not having to overload them with information. They’ve had more time to digest and think about that content. In between those sessions, that can be a great way to use a digital course, or you can sell it as a standalone product to be more of a scalable. Piece to a business model. Now I am always very cautious when I use the word. Passive. When I use the words or the phrase passive income, you’ll see that a lot.
When you start to. Learn about digital courses or online courses as people say, oh, it’s like the easiest way to make money while you sleep. And. Though that there are components of that. That is true. So what I mean by that is that when you’ve created that content, like, all you have to do is. Somebody buys it and then you don’t have to deliver that anymore.
Right? Like you give them the course and all of that information has been prerecorded. And so they watched through that on their own time. You’re not having to exchange time for money in that scenario. That’s a really cool component of online courses, but online courses take work to sell and market. And create an update as well, because that’s a piece. A big piece as well.
We have to make sure the content is good. We have to make sure the content stays up to date. So it’s not just a easy peasy, passive revenue stream. There is going to be work involved in having a digital course, but they can be a really, really awesome addition to a business or component of a business.
Now let’s talk about a subscription or a membership model, whereby basically you put a bunch of content behind a payment gateway and people pay to have access to your content on a monthly or an annual basis. So like dietitians access center, right. We essentially are a membership where dietitians pay monthly or an annual subscription to get access. To all of our nutrition courses, our nutrition, handouts, and our business content as well.
And so long as somebody is paying for access, then they continue to get access to the content. And then once they discontinue their membership, then they don’t get access anymore. And so that’s how a membership. Model works. And one of the really cool things about a membership model. Is that it ends up being something that we refer to as monthly recurring revenue.
So it can be a little bit more of a predictable business model than something like selling online courses where. We can have a lot of fluctuation. In terms of how often we sell them, how many we sell. It’s not always that predictable revenue stream. Um, whereas a subscription service or a membership can be a little bit more predictable because we can start to anticipate that a certain number of people will continue to pay for their subscription month over month.
And so it became, becomes a little bit more of that predictable business model.
Let’s move on to number six, which is building up your social media presence and working with brands in sort of that influencer capacity. Um, but I think the cool thing here to note is that you don’t have to have a massive following in order to work with brands. I think particularly within dietetics, when we’re talking about people who are highly knowledgeable, highly educated on a specific topic.
And even if they have a small audience of a few thousand people. If a brand knows that that audience is their target audience, then they will be more willing to work with a dietitian who’s highly credible, who has a very focused expertise and a very specific audience. And so you don’t necessarily have to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers in order to actually work with brands.
Um, this can be something that can be done a little bit earlier than a lot of people think. And it doesn’t have to be. That you have to wait for brands to come to you. You can always go out and pitch yourself to different brands. We had a really extensive conversation about this within the dietitian success center, business membership, community forum. Where somebody was wondering, how to approach situations, where brands are only coming to you, offering you free product in exchange for posting about their content.
And how do you get into the conversation about actually getting paid to create content for a brand? So there was a really great conversation about that within the forum. And so yeah, building your social media presence can be a really cool way to build your own brand as a dietitian, but then also to, make a little bit of extra money, if you feel like there’s brands that you use every single day, that would want to offer you compensation for sharing about their products within a recipe or whatever that might look like.
Number seven is freelance writing. And now if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that this is actually how I started my business. I was a freelance writer. Four different websites or blogs that we’re looking to hire a credible registered dietitian to write nutrition or health content for them, for their websites. And so if you are interested in doing something like this, you can use what we call freelancing platforms like Upwork, freelancer, Fiverr people per hour,
So these platforms basically work like a marketplace where companies, organizations, people will post projects that they’re looking for freelancers for. And so you, as the freelancer then apply to those projects. Now it can take some time to get started and to get the ball rolling on these types of platforms.
So you definitely need to be using consistent effort to get jobs. But I once landed a $2,000 a month client off of Upwork. So it’s definitely possible. The good jobs are out there. And then also using LinkedIn. As a tool. To advertise yourself.
If you’re interested in doing something like freelance writing is really important too. So making sure that you have words in your LinkedIn bio in your tagline, that indicate that you are a nutrition, freelance writer is really important.
Number eight is recipe development. Dietitians are perfectly positioned to develop recipes, web abouts for food companies that are looking for. Somebody with a nutrition background to create recipes and calculate nutritionals for them. I’ve done a number of different recipe development projects that I’ve gotten through platforms like Upwork.
So for example, I once created a vegan recipe ebook for a company that was looking to promote. Plant-based eating. Um, I contributed to a cookbook that was related to women’s hormone health. I created a recipe for a food company that was looking to create a better for you. Granola, so many different recipes out there.
Um, if you haven’t already make sure and go check out my really good friend, Micah Siva. She is nauseous with Micah on Instagram, and she actually started her business as a recipe developer full time. Um, she even ended up getting a job. I don’t remember if it was full-time or part-time, but she ended up working with Buzzfeed tasty, to help them develop their recipes and the recipe videos.
So she has a really cool background, so make sure and go and check her out. On Instagram, if this is something you’re interested in. Then number nine, let’s move on to medical review. So have you ever noticed that on websites like Healthline for instance, which is a really big website, their articles on the right hand side of the article, they will say medically reviewed by, and then a healthcare provider. Um, and so this means that a credible source will go through the article and make sure that it is factually correct.
And you can get paid for those types of gigs. And again, oftentimes those are going to be posted through platforms like LinkedIn or like Upwork.
And by the way, if you are a DSE nutrition plus business membership, I give you access to the exact pitch that I used to get jobs on Upwork. So you can use that and customize it as you wish to apply for different freelancing roles. Number 10 is affiliate marketing. So affiliate marketing basically means that you act as a sales person for someone else’s product. So generally how this works is you get a personal link that you can use to promote about a product or a service or an online course. And if someone buys that using your link, then you get a percentage of that sale. Now one important thing to remember here about being part of an affiliate program is that you always have to disclose this to your audience.
So you can’t be secretive by saying, you know, Hey, oh, use this link to purchase. You have to say, use this link to purchase. And by the way, I do get a commission on this sale. If you purchase using this link. Um, and so that’s something to be really, really mindful of and really cautious about if you’re wanting to participate in affiliate marketing, and often when affiliate marketing makes the most sense is if you are promoting something that you always use or promote any ways. And so for example, we don’t do much affiliate marketing, but, um, we are part of the practice better, which is an EMR platform that a lot of our members use and that clean life, which is a meal planning platform that a lot of our members use. And so we talk about these platforms a lot anyways, because most of our members use them, especially our business members.
And so for us, it makes sense to be part of their affiliate program, because it’s easy for us to talk about them. We’re not having to create any extra content or like talk about them in scenarios where it doesn’t make sense. We talk about them anyways.
So for us, it’s like an easy way to be compensated for essentially promoting or marketing this person’s product. Now another thing that is so, so, so key to remember here with affiliate marketing is trust. And only recommending brands or products that you actually trust in use. And there’s also a huge opportunity for conflict of interest here.
And so dietitians do need to be very careful if they are wanting to participate in this type of affiliate marketing. Now, a lot of times we see dietitians who are. Promoting things to other dietitians. And that could be a good way to, incorporate affiliate marketing without coming from that position of power
it’s like, Hey, you know, I’m using a platform like practice better. And I know you, fellow practitioner would probably enjoy using this platform too. And so we need to be very mindful of things like trust things, like conflict of interest. Be aware of the code of ethics and what it says for your country around what can be done here and what cannot be done here.
And so make sure and do your research before participating in affiliate marketing.
Number 11 is selling physical goods. Now a lot of people don’t know this, but I have actually done this as well. A little while ago, I had Mo many years ago I had an Etsy shop where I actually sold hand-sewn handmade dog colors, really good quality dog callers. And so I’ve been there, done that.
I know what it looks like to have a physical product business, but in the world of dietetics, I’ve seen a lot of. Really cool stuff, especially on Etsy, things like body positive t-shirts or, memorabilia, you know, fun utensils with food memes. Reusable snack bags. I’ve seen so many things created by dietitian, dietitian merge.
So things like hoodies, um, crew next, we’ve actually done that before too. We’ve sold crew necks and t-shirts that have our logo on them. So selling on a platform like Etsy is a really great place to start. It’s fairly simple to set up an Etsy site and to actually get started there. Just make sure you have high quality photos of your items and you figure out shipping and advance because that is one of those. Issues that could be very tricky and it can be very costly.
And so physical products is a really, really fun one. And through platforms like Etsy or Shopify, it makes it so, so easy to do that. Another thing that we have done. Um, so when we were talking about physical products, when we were selling like quote unquote merge for dietitian success center, we used a platform called print Ify. Where you can actually get your logo or whatever art you want printed on, um, different articles of clothing or different items, and you don’t actually have to pay for a bunch of inventory.
Previously, you would have had to purchase like a thousand t-shirts and then get them printed and just have them stored in your house. And have to mail those out to people directly. You don’t have to do that anymore. You can actually use a third party. Something like print defy or Printful I think it was called, I can’t remember which one we used.
Um, but, um, they will actually like do that on demand piece for you. So somebody orders, one of your t-shirts, you know, you have that t-shirt designed in their platform, they print it and they actually ship it for you. So again, it makes it really easy to do something like having a physical product, branded business. Number 12 is blogging.
So blogging is definitely a long game strategy, but one of the really cool things with having a blog is that once you have a certain amount of traffic and I’m talking like tens of thousands of people coming to your website every month, you can join something called a high end ad network.
And basically what that. It means is that that network connects to your blog and they will essentially place ads on your blog. So by ads, I mean, like when you go to your favorite food blog and you are scrolling down and you’re noticing that there’s ads on the sides of the blog, Um, that’s what I’m referring to.
And then basically you make money based on the number of people that come to your website and see those ads. Now, the important thing to note here is that. In order to apply for an high-end ad network, you do have to have website traffic and website traffic takes time, and it takes consistent effort.
And having an SEO or search engine optimization strategy is an absolute must. Here. You cannot just start blogging aimlessly and. No, that people will come to your website. We have to make sure that we are intentional with the content that we’re writing about the topics that we’re writing about keywords that we’re using.
And we actually have to design our blog posts for that purpose design, our blog posts for the topics that people are actually Googling, actually searching for. And so SEO can be really confusing. At first. We talk about this extensively within the DSE nutrition plus business membership. I have a whole. Course on SEO.
And then we also walked through our start to finish SEO process for dietitian success on or from how do we decide on the blog topics that we’re going to write about? How do we write our blog posts? How do we post them? How do we use key words? How do we know that people are finding us through our blog posts
and our blog actually remains one of the top referral sources for people for finding dietitian success center is just organically. Prickly coming across one of our blogs on Google. So that’s number 12 is blogging. Number 13 speaking engagements. So although these might require some active effort to get speaking engagements can be really lucrative. Especially, if you have a really specific expertise that you talk about or really specific niche, you might actually get approached by different organizations that are looking to invite you as a speaker or even as a podcast guest.
Again, make sure that you are posting actively on platforms like LinkedIn, where different companies or organizations or conference organizers would actually be looking for people with a specific expertise to invite to their conference, to be a speaker. Number 14 is social media management.
Now I’ve actually done this as well, uh, in the world of dietetics, which is basically where a company will hire you to manage their social media for them. And dietitians actually have a really unique skillset here especially if we’re talking about companies like food brands or people that are looking to talk about health , they want to hire someone who has a health background. Uh, to manage their social media.
And so if you are really tech savvy, you’re social media savvy, you enjoy social media. There are definitely jobs out there in the world of social media management. For sure. Number 15 last but not least is a virtual assistant. So being a virtual assistant, whether that’s for dietitian business or not, could be an excellent opportunity for a student or for somebody who’s looking for a side income. A lot of people that have businesses are looking for somebody to outsource some of those day-to-day tasks, like writing emails for an email list or managing their email list or managing their social media, making website, updates posting on social media. There’s lots of little tasks that people in business need somebody to help them with.
And so I think a dietitian is perfectly primed to work as a virtual assistant for another dietitian, perhaps. So. That’s it that’s number 15. I hope that that was a helpful list of 15 different ideas for dietitian side hustles to earn a little bit of extra income every month as usual, I would love to see you in the dietitian success center membership, where we’re talking about these topics every single day.
And we are there to support you as you come across different mindset, challenges or hurdles. That are bound to come up when we’re pursuing side hustles and when we’re pursuing business. So thank you so much. For listening to this episode, I hope you have an awesome week and I’ll see you next Thursday.
