10 Ways you can Turn your Skills into Cash

Ever wondered if it is possible to make a living out of your skills? Absolutely, it is!

“Use what you have to get what you want” might sound like a cliché, but take a minute to think about it. What if you could make more money from your skills, knowledge, passions, talents, or whatever greatness embedded in you, and make a good living out of it? How does that sound?

This isn’t a pick-up line commonly used by those motivational sweet-mouthed speakers. It is a practical way of earning an income through cultivating your skills and proper strategic planning.

Those successful small business owners you admire didn’t become successful overnight, they started by using their skills and passions to build a profitable side hustle. You too can.

In this article, we’ve gathered the top 10 ways of making some cool cash from what you know or what you have.

Let’s get right into it:

1. Offer paid consulting

Do you ever find yourself providing solutions to the problems your friends bring to you all the time? They even refer their friends, family, and neighbours to you. “I’m just glad I could be of help” you happily say with a smile. Newsflash! Your brain is being picked, and you should be making money from it!

There is an easy way to start. Set up a link where people can pay to consult with you for blocks of 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour depending on what suits you. Thanks to technology, there are appointment scheduling apps that make it easy for your prospects to book sessions.

See our top 5 apps:

• Calendly: We listed Calendly as one of the best apps to boost your productivity in 2021. Calendly is an automated online collaboration and appointment scheduling tool. With its simple software and an easy-to-use interface, you don’t have to be tech-inclined to navigate it. Calendly helps you connect to your best contacts, prospects, and clients, and also ensures you don’t lose them.
• Wix: Let your clients book appointments or services and pay online, offer your services as a membership or package, host sessions online with Zoom to reach clients anywhere, get analytics to track your business performance, and simply run your business from any part of the world with the app.
• Simplybook.me: This is the best appointment scheduling app for international businesses. It is available in 32 different languages and supports international payment options.
• Acuity: If you’ll love to have a customised booking page, Acuity is the appointment scheduling app to go for. Here you can design your booking page, allow your clients to choose recurring appointments, and pay in advance for service – if applicable.
• Dubsado: Our favourite is Dubsado. Although it is paid, it has a free version that works well, and it is an all-in-one business management tool.

2. Teach

There’s a high chance you once found yourself in a situation where you needed an answer to a tough question, but then, the information you got from Google wasn’t just enough – you yearned to talk to an expert whose knowledge and expertise would be of great help and satisfy you.

You could be that expert too – sharing your valuable knowledge about your interests or subjects you love so much that you could talk about it all day long. Whether it be Fashion design, fitness and nutrition, rabbit breeding, content creation, or legal services, there’s room for you to teach people what you are skilled at and get paid for it.

Getting started is easy. You can record your online courses – say on Zoom – and give people access to the recordings. One tip is to use slides. Slides help you stay on track and keep you focused. These 5 apps will help you get started:

• Teachable: Teachable has some powerful online creation and selling tools that help you – the course creator – build, market, and sell your courses and coaching services through their platform.
• Thinkific: This is one of the more popular online course platforms to create and sell courses and membership sites under your brand. It allows you to easily upload videos, build quizzes, and organise all your learning content in one platform.
• Learnworlds: Are a powerful, easy-to-use and reliable online course platform for creating, selling and promoting your online courses. It also has an academy where you can learn how to monetise your knowledge and teach online. It also has free e-books for a quick intro to the e-learning industry.
• Kajabi: Kajabi offers you customised pricing, delivery, and packaging. Most users say it is a perfect platform if you’re looking to sell informational or digital products, coaching services, courses, or membership sites.
• Zoom: Zoom isn’t just an online platform for hosting meetings and holding conferences. It is also an online learning platform that allows you to audio record, video record, share your screen, and chat with your students. It is also a great way to do one-on-one or small group training. Tip: if you are using Zoom, use Zapier to connect Zoom to your payment processor, so once a payment is made, access to the Zoom recorded session is sent to the email address of the person who made that payment.

3. Put your knowledge into an e-book

Another popular way to use your skills to make extra income is to impact your knowledge to others by writing and selling e-books. E-books are also easy to create. One important tip is to get an editor from freelancing sites to proofread your books and make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors. You can either design it yourself using apps like Canva or get a graphic designer to do it for you. The great thing about e-books is that you can use them as a funnel for your other offers as well.

These 5 websites are great for selling your e-books online:

• Paynip: An easy way to sell digital downloads and memberships – Paynip helps you sell and promote your e-books, memberships, software, design assets, music or any digital products directly to your customers.
• Fiverr: Is probably one of the most popular places on the web to sell digital products or services. Fiverr is a popular website that gets a lot of traffic, and you can leverage its popularity to promote and sell your books there.
• Amazon: Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing helps you get to the market fast, keeps control of your rights and set your list prices, publishes your books in digital and print, and helps you make more money. Amazon is the most popular and largest place on the web right now to sell your e-books.
• Gumroad: This is a very flexible platform to set up your online shop, and you can personalise your store to your taste. You can create subscriptions, memberships, direct sales, provide extra benefits, and give discounts on actions, customisable DRM and more.
• E-junkie: You can sell anything on e-junkie: from file downloads for comics, eBooks, art, music, video, software to codes for games, tickets, gift cards, to tangible items which require shipping calculation. You can sell on your website, blog, social networks, WhatsApp, Messenger, and so on.

Note that all these e-book selling websites offer DRM – Digital Rights Management – protection for your e-books.

4. Paid memberships

Do you have a skill in developing great food recipes? Then you could create a membership site where you regularly update your members on your latest recipes and get paid for it. A paid membership is a concept where you build a membership site to teach – using your skills – members who subscribe to your site in exchange for a payment.

These are some of our top niche membership sites to inspire you:

• The Black Curl Magic Digital Salon: Is a digital hub dedicated to educating Naturalistas on the art and science of their curly and natural hair.
• KetoConnect: This is a go-to resource site for people looking to lose weight using the keto lifestyle.
• Scale Exclusive Circle: The Scale Exclusive Circle is a community of ambitious entrepreneurs and professionals in Africa and the Diaspora helping each other navigate all the issues in growing a business, side hustle or career.
• Tilly And The Buttons: This is a sewing workshop and resources site for DIY dressmakers.
• The Point Magazine: The Point is a print and digital literary magazine that delivers thoughtful and philosophical essays on subjects such as literature, culture, politics, and the arts to its loyal subscriber base.

Are you ready to start your membership site? Check out these platforms you can use to host your memberships:

• Xperiencify: Xperiencify is an online course and membership site platform that makes it easier to engage students, motivate them, and keep them moving toward their goals through your courses or training.
• MemberPress: This is an easy to use WordPress Membership Plugin that will help you create, manage, track membership subscriptions, and sell digital download products.
• AccessAlly: This is a WordPress plugin allowing you to gain access to everything on your WordPress site. It has specific features to create video courses and integrates with popular video hosts, like YouTube and Vimeo.
• Wild Apricot: Wild Apricot is a web-based software that automates and simplifies the management of your memberships and your website.
• Simplero: This is an all-in-one platform that makes it simple to sell more courses, coaching programs, memberships and digital products.

5. Subscription services

If someone had told you people would subscribe to receive food delivered to them every day, you might have doubted. But then, that is the reality. People would subscribe to receive services that make their lives easier and comfortable. What services are you skilled in? Are you an accountant? Start selling your accounting services online and monetise your skills.

Our top subscription services:

• Netflix: is a streaming service that offers a wide variety of award-winning TV shows, movies, anime, documentaries, and more on thousands of internet-connected devices.
• Lynda.com: Is an online learning platform that helps anyone learn business, software, technology and creative skills to achieve personal and professional goals.
• FounderSuite: This is ‘the ultimate funding stack, a complete set of tools for startups looking to raise capital.
• Hubspot: HubSpot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service with a completely free CRM at its core.
• MasterClass: MasterClass is an eLearning website that offers video lessons from some of the world’s best actors, chefs, athletes, and more.

These subscription tools will help you get started:

• MailChimp: Features include subscriber tracking, engagement analytics, email personalisation tools and design templates.
• GoSpaces: GoSpaces lets you create a landing page and accept payments directly via your landing page too.
• Instapage: Features include a drag-and-drop editor, multiple platform integrations including Salesforce and Constant Contact, and each landing page you create is automatically mobile responsive.
• Recurly: Recurly offers at-a-glance dashboards that instantly let you view everything from customer details to order status and billing dates.
• KillBill: KillBill’s open-source platform lets you create a payment processing system according to your company’s specific needs.

6. Affiliate marketing

According to Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income, “Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s or company’s products. You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.” If you’re able to convince someone to purchase a product through your marketing skills, you should go for affiliate marketing.

7. Upsell to former clients

Upselling is a sales technique used to get a customer to spend more by buying an upgraded or premium version of what’s being purchased.

To start:

• Have a relationship with your customers.
• Make your offer relevant to the original purchase.
• Ensure it solves a problem for your customer.
• Focus on your customers’ needs.
• Provide value as soon as possible.

8. Increase how much you charge your current clients

If you started offering your services to clients at a lower rate – maybe to entice them, which we all do – it is inevitable that you will increase your charges at some point in your career. Earn extra income by letting your clients know the worth of your skills and the value they will continue getting from you.

9. Work as a Freelancer in your extra time

Now that most people are working from home, it is easier to get some more free time. Many companies are looking for freelancers, and with third-party sites like Fiverr.com, Upwork.com and the likes, you can start monetising your skills. You get to choose how and when you want to work and decide how much you want to make.

10. Get ready!

You know you’ve got the skills, now is the time to productise those skills to make it marketable for sale to the public. Read all about how to package your service as a product here.  If you are certain that there is a market for your services, then you need to confirm that people will be willing to pay for your services. Validate your product idea by sharing it with a few people to go through it and give their first impression. Share your services with friends, family, your neighbours, the people you interact with on social media platforms if you have to.

Whether you believe it or not, everyone possesses valuable skills that can enrich the lives of others and your pocket too. Did you recognise any skills or skills you think you have? Then start making your money right away!

***

Featured image: istockphoto