7 Free To Start Healthcare Business Ideas

Emma Shapiro

You have valuable skills as a medical professional. Whether you are an occupational therapist, physical therapist, nurse, doctor, sonographer, speech therapist and any other profession, you have skills that no one else has. This means you are in an amazing position to start you own healthcare business.

Unique for this article, we are going to show ideas for side hustles or business that are 100% free to start!

Free business ideas to help start your healthcare side hustle

1. Fitness or Health Expert On Youtube, Facebook, or Instagram

All the social media platforms today are 100% free to use. This is amazing and means that you can start growing your audience and sharing you knowledge today with no investment other than time!

Add to the benefit that millions of people are on social media daily, so you already have a built in audience.  You can boost your audience by using paid advertisements on each of these platforms, but this is much more advanced and you really should only do this if you have your brand and key offering set up so you can monetize from your ads. 

There are amazing healthcare professionals taking advantage of these platforms to make thousands of dollars per year.  Doc Jen Fit and Kelly Starrett are just 2 examples.

Doc Jen Fit is an Instagram fitness guru and physical therapist who has over 540,000 followers on social media.  Through this following, she has been able to launch The Mobility Method, which is an online course that teaches people how to improve their mobility on their own. 

Kelly Starrett is  the owner and creator of the highly successful online company Mobility WOD (now called The Ready State). He is a CrossFit trainer, physical therapist, author, and speaker. His book, “Becoming a Supple Leopard”, was featured on The New York Times bestselling sports books list. His Youtube channel has over 300,000 subscribers. 

We will be diving more into how to launch your healthcare side hustle with each of these channels in later articles. But here’s 3 quick tips:

3 quick tips to grow your social media presence as a healthcare entrepreneur 

1. Just do it. Just make a name and make a social media profile.
2. Post weekly, or at least monthly to the channel(s). The more consistent you are with posting, the more enagenment you will get and the more your brand will grow.
3. Be genuine and helpful. People want help, not sales. Start out this way and then slowly grow into a sales position later. 

2.  Health or Wellness Coach

As of 2019, the health coaching industry is still relatively unregulated. This means that that you can actually provide health coaching without any certification. Many of us already have the medical background to perform health coaching, although there are many certifications that are low cost that you could take to add to your education as well as provide added credentials to help you markert yourself.

Beyond credentials, here are the free tools you could use to get this up and going:

1. Calendly Scheduling Software: Calendly offers a free scheduling tool for one user. It does the job, although you can pay a little extra if you want to remove their branding and add more features. But in the free plan, it allows you to share a link with those interested, for them to pick a time, and reserve that time slot. It’s very easy to set as well as easy to use on the client side.
2. Zoom online meetings: Zoom offers free meetings that can be audio only, or video plus audio, for two people It allows you share your screen as well and record the video for your future use. You can also simply use your phone but if you want added benefit for your clients, than sharing your screen and letting them see you, your ideas and your movements will greatly help the results you provide.
3. Gmail: If you have just a few people that you need to email, then you can simply get a free gmail account for emails and customize the email for your business. For example, we have the free gmail email: [email protected]. 
4. Mailchimp or Moosend as your free mass email tool: If you start having more people that you need to send emails to, then getting mailchimp or better yet, Moosend, will help you reach your audience to share your blog posts, videos, or just general reminders. I prefer Moosend for my free tool as you are able to send emails that are unbranded for up to 1000 subscribers, versus mailchimp has branding at the bottom which makes your emails seem cheap and less personal. 

3.  Personal Trainer:

Personal training is another relatively unregulated field as of 2019. Although many trainers tout having their CSCS or NASM certifications, these are not required and many healthcare professionals already carry the skills needed to be able to provide quality training. 

I would recommend the same tools as the health coaching side hustle above to get your business up and running. 

Most of your clients here, will come from your current clinic if you are an OT, PT or SLP (assistants too) even a physician, at the gym,  or from social media. So you could also think about adding social profiles to help attract people to your training programs.

4. Author:

Self publishing is amazing these days! With Amazon, you can easily write a book, upload it to Amazon, and start selling your books.

It’s a little more complicated of course, when you want to be a best seller or really make a huge profit from your books. But this is a great way to start or add to any current healthcare business you may have. 

Tools you need:

1. Amazon account: 100% free to sign up.
2. Any sort of word processor to type up your manuscript so you can then upload to Amazon
3. Canva.com for your free book cover creator

You’ll also find that growing your website or social media presence will help grow your books but this is something you could do at any time as a self published author. 

5. Blogger:

Wordpress is the most used and recommended platform to create a website. If you don’t mind a wordpress.com website, then you can actually start making your website and blog for free. You can start writing blog posts and articles for free on their free website host and if you start gaining traction, simply switch to a paid account. 

There are relatively low costs once you switch to a paid wordpress host, roughly $100-$200 a year, so even if you wanted to start this side hustle with your branding in the forefront, it’s still very inexpensive to get this business launched.

6. Social media expert/consultant/creator

Yep, even if you are a healthcare professional, you can brand yourself as a social media expert. This is a growing topic, where PTs work with PT clinics on their social media content, or OT’s work with OT clinics, and any healthcare professional could try to help grow a current clinic’s brand because they know what the audience needs much better than a non healthcare professional social media expert. 

I suggest a free gmail account, a zoom account, and to learn how to use free social media graphic tools such as Canva.com or Crello.com. 

7. Healthcare writer:

Freelance writing for healthcare magazines, websites, and other businesses is a growing field as well. Depending on your profession, you could try to provide sample posts to related websites or businesses to see if they would want you to write for them.

Initially, you may have to provide content free of charge until you build a relationship with the company you are writing for. But after several hit posts, you could then begin to charge for your work.

You can also use sites like Upwork or Fiverr to charge for your writing talents.

For this side hustle, I would recommend a gmail account and any word processing tool.  Creating a social media presence to highlight the articles you have written and their success may help you attract more clients interested in your writing skills, so you may want to create several free social media profiles.

Summary:

There are many free business niches that you can explore to start your healthcare side hustle or business. I encourage to think about your talents, your passions, and expertise and what idea would be illustrate your skills. 

I would love to know what your business is and how you got started! Give us an email at [email protected] so we can feature you on our site!