These Are the 3 High-Income Skills I’m Currently Building
How I’m working to increase my income
To be blunt, your skills are directly tied to your income.
If the market doesn’t believe your skills are valuable, you won’t make very much money.
You have to consistently build, improve, and offer more value if you’d like to increase your revenue — there’s absolutely no way around it.
Even though I’ve done well in sales and I don’t necessarily need an extra income, adding more value to clients and society at large is never a bad thing.
Making more money in times of high inflation and housing also isn’t a terrible idea.
Below are the high-income skills that I’m learning. Chances are, at least one (or more) will help you do the same if you want to earn money offline or online.
Audience Building
After many readers asked, I finally bit the bullet and started a TikTok (my profile is here).
I’m not sure if I like creating videos or writing better (we’ll find out), but I’m trying out additional platforms for building a community.
Building a community can be both fun and profitable, even if you have no desire to quit your day job.
I had a smaller tech company that does about 8-figures a year find my content and offer me an advisory position on their board in exchange for equity (I work in tech sales as a day job).
Also, it’s worth noting that if you plan to launch a physical product, e-book, course, etc., it’s important to have an engaged audience — after all, you need someone to actually buy your product for things to work out!
My best advice for building an audience is as follows:
- Pick a platform that you enjoy. It can be this platform, a video platform like TikTok or YouTube, Instagram, etc. It doesn’t matter what platform you pick — start with one to avoid being overwhelmed, and expand from there.
- Accept that as you grow, you’ll get crappy comments. I’ve yet to meet anyone happy and successful that leaves rotten comments. Those comments always come from individuals who are struggling, and that’s something I always keep in mind when reading them.
- Pick a niche that you’d talk or write about for free. The reality is, that much of the content that you put out will be for free. Many employees have a difficult time completing tasks at work because they hate their job. If you aren’t getting paid and you hate your work, do you believe you’ll stick to creating content and building an audience long-term? Probably not.
Affiliate Marketing
Now that I’ve built an audience through my writing, I’m starting to work with brands.
Firstly, I’d only recommend working with brands that are reputable and that you genuinely use and enjoy — it’s never worth risking your reputation to make a buck.
If I wouldn’t invest my hard-earned dollars into a brand’s products, I would never recommend them to my audience.
Even though my blog is slightly over a year old, I’ve made thousands of dollars as an affiliate for financial products that I use and recommend to others in their journey to becoming financially savvy.
To be successful as an affiliate, you do need to have an audience. Each niche pays differently, and if you make, say, 10% off a $30 product, you’ll have to make a ton of sales to earn a decent income.
If you have a small audience, keep building and creating until you have a large enough following — if you have 5,000 engaged viewers, that’s enough to do some damage!
I’m Dramatically Improving My Presentation Game
If you work in sales and you want to create mind-blowing presentations, you need a Canva subscription asap!
The screenshot above is from a presentation I built for Stater Bros, and rather easily. If you haven’t used Canva, it’s like a simplified version of Adobe for those of us that didn’t go to graphic design school.
There are massive amounts of templates, graphics, and other elements that you can add to brochures, PowerPoint presentations, print ads, etc. with a few mouse clicks.
It’s also worth noting that they have many free design tutorials on their site to ensure you’re able to make the most of their software.
Everyone from my manager and teammates to my customers has been extremely impressed with my work on Canva.
I can’t stress this enough — showing up better than your competitors is vital. I’ve had customers look at my work and say, “You know, this slide deck is pretty self-explanatory and well-crafted. I don’t need you to present to the CIO or Finance, I feel comfortable selling this myself.”
As a result, I’m also spending less time in meetings which is crucial for me, as I hate sitting in meetings after meetings.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the majority of the photo covers on my blog posts were also created on Canva!
Final Thoughts:
Make sure you’re always building skills to keep the money flowing, whether you’re an online creator or have a traditional job (or both).
Think carefully about what the best skills are to learn, as not all skills will yield the same results.
If I had to pick one skill from the list, I’d focus on building an engaged audience. Once you build a community, the sky is the limit.
- Link to Canva is an affiliate link. As you can tell, I’m a huge fan and use their software frequently!
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This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.