Harms: Right now we are in self isolation; we’ve pivoted; we’ve been forced to change very quickly.

Industries are closing, we can no longer physically go to work for a period of time. 

So we may not have the time, skill set or even desire to go ahead and build a business, because an online business is a business fundamentally.

That’s what we were talking about in regards to what am I taking away from this guide.

Kyle: The whole point of this guide is to give people the ability to generate income right now.

Some of these methods you could be generating money within the same day, quite easily, whereas our normal focus with building businesses online and the work we do with clients, and for our own stuff as well is more about building up an actual business.

That takes months to do.

What we’ve been doing is looking at fast ways to generate cash, to generate income which can help with the current situation in lockdown. 

But can also help you if you want to build a business moving forward online.

It is a good way to raise capital just to have some extra cash coming in the door.

We started with stuff that requires no particular skills and with low reward, still works and still worth adding a few of those methods into your portfolio. 

We’re moving into professional skills, things that you have got qualifications, diplomas, or you’re just very good at doing and how to monetise those skills and generate an extra income.

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Harms: Now we are getting furthering into the guide we are probably in the top tier.

We are looking at professional skills.

Identify your skills

Harms: Let’s dive into point number one, which is how do we actually identify the skills in terms of do we have the skills in order to generate this income from the suggestions you are going to give us.

Kyle: This is a great question and we need to frame this before we start talking about skill-based work.

The easiest way to think about what professional skills you have is to look at what your day job is or what your day job was.

What have you been doing for the last few years?

What professional skills have you built up over time?

I’m not specifically talking about the area. For example, Harms if we can use you, you worked in engineering, but a lot of your day-to-day work was project management.

Harms: Yes the job was an engineer, but the skills required to do that job actually if I list them out are quite lengthy. 

That would also be the same for anybody else in that profession or similar kind of professional role.

Kyle: Let’s use the skill of project management, for example. 

Yes, you did it in the railway industry, but you could easily go and do project management in a different industry.

We’re more interested in the skill rather than the industry in which you act. 

You might be thinking I’m a mechanical engineer, or I’m a bookkeeper, but more than that you are going to have additional skills which can be monetised in different industries.

Your diplomas and your degrees, etcetera that’s a really good starting point, but we need to be a bit wider and think if we are going to open up how you think about your skill.

Harms: Take the job and title and say what are the actual skills and a good way to do this if you’re already in a career or a specific job or have done in your journey so far is what skills do they require as part of the job description.

Just pull up the job description and say here is the list of skills and actually eight out 10 of those skills I enjoy, I’m very good and I demonstrate it on a regular basis.

That is my list of a skill set and that’s one way to do it.

Kyle: You can push people and then you start to find out they do have skills, it’s just when we are so used to something when it’s part of everyday existence, when everyone around us is doing it we assume it’s not a skill.

Something like speaking English we assume is not a skill. 

However, if you’re looking for gigs or jobs in china suddenly being able to speak fluent English is a massive skill.

Harms: Because there are 300 million people in terms of market size that require that skill or demand the fact that I need to learn and I need somebody to teach me how to speak English.

Kyle: What you consider not a skill is actually a very valuable economic skill if you’re talking about being a teacher or a conversation partner or even doing language consultation work, helping people fix signs, correcting, proofreading their company brochures etcetera.

Suddenly what you consider not a skill is in the right context.

What is really helpful is not necessarily just thinking about what your skills are yourself, because we’re really bad at identifying because we take them for granted.

Instead, think about what it is that people come to you for, are you the go to for organising parties for example.

That’s a skill and people are coming to you because you’re great at organising parties. That means you have skills to do with logistics, bringing people together, event planning, etcetera.

Ask people what am I good at and it’s a weird question to ask people but it’s going to be a very helpful process.

Or if you’re not comfortable asking that, think about what people come to you for, what they ask for your help with. 

That’s going to be where your skills lay, because other people identify that in you and they’re coming to you for your help.

Harms: Number one is identify your skills once we have done that, where can we now apply this?

Fiverr/Upwork/People per hour/Solidgigs/Freelancer

Kyle: Now you’ve got your list of skills we need to find places where you can sell those skills. The first obvious ones are, we’re going to call them marketplaces, there’s a few different types.

We’ve mentioned Fiverr and Upwork.

These are two different marketplaces for online gigs or freelance work.

A gig tends to be much shorter. It will be a logo design and you pay £50 to get a logo designed. That’s all one and done piece of work whereas freelance work might be a bit more consistent.

I have previously hired freelance blog writers and I’d pay them £50 a week to generate two or three blog articles a week.

You can find both of these jobs on all of these marketplaces but we need to be aware there is the difference between gigs which are one-off and to freelance work which are more like a part-time job online.

Harms: It’s very fluid, it’s very flexible.

Once we complete that transaction the transaction stops if the person has been great you may go back to them in the future. 

Kyle: Until you go on these sites you don’t really realise that people monetise anything.

It doesn’t really matter how obscure your skill is, there will be ways to monetise it

Harms: What is interesting is there’s enough assumed demand for Fiverr as an example to create a category for that section.

Otherwise they would not go ahead and create a category from that, so just knowing there’s a category there, there must be people paying for this product or service that category.

Kyle: The best thing to do is go on fiverr and have a look around and you’ll realise you can literally do anything. 

Whatever your professional skill is, chances are there’s going to be a marketplace for that and you’ll be able to see other people already making money from this.

There are a whole bunch of these marketplaces we are using Fiverr because it’s one the most well-known, it’s been around a long time.

It used to be extremely cheap so the name fiverr was because all the gigs started at five dollars, which is not really the case anymore. 

Which is good for you if you are selling your service. There’s also Upwork. If you’ve heard of O desk or E-lance these were two big freelance platforms five years ago.

They both merged into Upwork so they no longer exist, but the two biggest platforms came together and they made Upwork.

Upwork is a gigantic market for freelancers; it tends to be more long-term stuff than fiverr gigs. 

It will be like the blog writer that I hired for a year and a half, I found him on Upwork. The prices tend to be higher and again I suggest you go there and see what different categories are and see if your skills fit in there.

Again, there are 100 different sites like this.

Once you’ve built a profile, description and you’ve worked out your product offering, you could actually just post it on to all of these sites. 

We are going to be talking about Fiverr but be aware there are a whole bunch of other ones.

Harms: Setting up account basics.

Let’s talk about setting up the account.

Kyle: The main thing you need to do when you are coming to this is you need to think as a buyer, as somebody who would be coming to you and to you as a professional.

Why would somebody come to you and buy your services?

You need to put their hat on for the moment, so when you are exploring fiverr explore it as if you were somebody who wants to purchase a service.

If you’re thinking of it just from your point of view, you’re not going to get very far. 

You need to think of it from the demand point of view rather than the supply point of view.

One of the biggest things you need to nail is your category and your subcategory which means you need to know these categories inside-out. 

You need to know which one are active, which ones have lots of sales going on.

You can see all the categories, shortlist three or four where your services could sit and then explore them in a bit more detail. 

In terms of what you’re actually looking for you’re looking for successful competitors and I know this sounds counterintuitive.

A lot of people will see somebody with 1,000 five-star reviews and think he’s going to get all the business.

Instead of seeing it that way we see it as this guy has done 1,000 gigs at let’s say even if he was doing it at five dollars, that’s $5,000 worth of work.

He probably raises his prices over time, so maybe his average is $50 now, which means he made 50 grand. 

What that means is there is demand, and demand is the most important thing here.

You can enter a market which has no competitors but if nobody wants what it is you’re selling you’re not going to make money.

On Fiverr, Upwork and all these other sites look for a category and subcategory that does have a volume, it has reviews, lots of purchases being made and then we’re going to be finding your niche within that.

Remember the guy who’s got 1,000 reviews and five stars, he has probably got his prices up a bit higher now as well.

So competition is good.

The opportunity for you entering is you know there’s a benchmark for a premium, so you know what you can charge top end at the moment from a competitors viewpoint, you may say to get customers I can set my price there.

The buyer is coming from a different perspective, it’s putting yourselves in the shoes of what kind of buyer do you want to attract?

What kind of buyer do you want to provide a service for?

The main thing with category is you need one that has lots of traffic, lots of gigs and reviews. 

It needs to be busy and we can’t get much more data from Fiverr or Upwork about best categories unfortunately.

But use your common sense plus the fact that there is active business going on in there to choose an active category and you want active.

You’re not looking for something you can dominate, you’re looking for something that has enough volume for you to start building.

Then we’re going to niche down once we enter that category.

Yes, we can come in at a lower price point and that’s a simple way. 

When you’re starting out that’s absolutely fine, but we don’t want you to de-value your services so you need to find another way to define your niche.

Whether it’s providing a specific service, whether it’s your background. 

If you are reading this in the UK that actually does give you a leg up on a lot of services in Fiverr, there’s a little flag next to your name in your profile.

A lot of the time native speakers will be hired above people from other countries.

If it’s a language-based gig you’re doing that might actually help you. 

If I was selling my services, proofreading legal documents, for example, then the fact that you are from the UK or US could be used as a selling point and you see that a lot on Fiverr.

It is a tricky topic to talk about, but the fact that Fiverr does put a flag next to your name and you have to verify your nationality, it does lead into the sale.

That’s one way to niche, but also really narrowing down what your particular product offering is.

Think about what your skills are, of course, and if you do sell services in the real world, maybe just try putting them directly onto Fiverr.

Harms: If you want this as an additional supplement income and you’ve already got a day job, the hours may be reduced right now so you’re able to get work done from nine 10, 11, 12 and one o’clock you’re free.

The rest of the day rather than dive into lots of different kinds of methods, the best thing to do is to say I can do this task, which is systemised and it’s the same thing for the next two or three hours.

That is a lot more sensible in terms of managing your own time and energy because you’re already handling the multitask stuff in the morning with your actual kind of work that pays you.

If you’re that kind of person who needs an additional income then think about just saying, I like these things. I’m very good at them and I can charge. There’s a marketplace for it. Just do one or two things just very, very much, as niche down as possible.

Kyle: Let’s say you do wedding cards, gift cards and birthday cards and you’re offering these three different services, but for each one you have a slightly different setup.

You have different types of paper, different types of pens and if you’re switching between those three different types of products it takes you time, mentally and in terms of physically setting up. To move from task to task.

Whereas if you are just doing wedding cards that’s it, you can do a lot more to a higher standard of quality in a short amount of time, so try to niche down if you can.

Harms: You could be a HR consultant specifically for cases where staff have been accused of theft as an example. So you become a master of that.

If somebody throws a case at you, you can quite easily consult. You pull the facts and say okay, these are the outcomes and that’s a nice simple way to generate three, $400 as part of that gig.

That’s a professional example for a niche.

Kyle: One thing you need to make sure you do is Fiverr has the ability to have multiple packages and most people set the first package as five dollars, that’s how they get people in.

But the real value, the actual sale happens in packages two and three. It tends to be basic, basic plus and premium. Basic might be five dollars or $10, $50 is premium. But you make the basic one almost too basic so people will be pushed up towards the plus.

The figure I found from last year is that by having three packages it boosts your sales by 64%. Try to have tiered packages.

Harms: The other thing to consider is once you’ve got everything so far setup is how can I generate reviews?

Because most people would purchase based on previous work, or reviews based on your previous work.

A nice way to do that is very much start off in a way that you have a low cost product and I would even go as far as, this is my personal opinion is say that you are a new person on Fiverr, and you offer special promotional period or you have a pricing platform which is purely there in order to provide a great service.

But also allow you to start and collect reviews so be very transparent with it.

The alternative is to do it in a way that you have a low price in order to collect reviews and then you increase your price once you’ve banked a handful of reviews.

Kyle: I think be about open about it, say I have 10 years’ experience in accountancy I’ve just started to sell my services online and for this starting off period that price I’m charging 25% of what I will be charging further down the line, so use this opportunity to get somebody who is a seasoned veteran in the industry at a low price.

Harms: I think the transparency is great there and reviews are going to be essential. 

That’s a nice tip in order to go ahead and collect reviews for your Fiverr profile or any of those platforms.

What’s another way to grab people’s attention?

Kyle: This is quite a big one, simple one, but lots of people don’t do it. Shoot a video of yourself talking to the camera so people can see you are a person, talk on camera about services and yourself.

A lot of gigs on Fiverr you think you’re talking to a single person in whatever country but it’s not actually a single person, it’s a front for a larger company. 

Which will have multiple workers working for them and a lot of the buyers on Fiverr know this, so by having a personal video of you saying this is me, this is what I do, these are the services I offer.

It makes it a lot more personal, so you aren’t just a Fiverr farm like a lot of these other profiles.

It just makes you more of a person and people ultimately do business with other people.

Very few people do this so it’s an easy way to stand out.

Harms: I think that’s a tip in general. 

If you’ve got a website, a landing page have a video like this. It doesn’t have to be amazing production just a bit of lighting and a camera and then you’re good to go to just give that personal effect.

Fiverr farming is a business in itself

Kyle: I could set up a Fiverr profile saying it’s just me and I do logo designs for example, but when you send me an order I immediately turn around and send the order off to somebody else.

I charge you $100 let’s say then I turn around to the designers who work for me or just another Fiverr gig and I pay them $20 and I pocket the difference.

This is a business a lot of people do.

It also means when you do see somebody with thousands and thousands of thousands of reviews you have to ask did they do all this work themselves?

Am I actually paying this person for their work?

A lot of the time you will be, but if they have 20,000 reviews for example, in a year, you have to ask that’s not probably one person designing the logo.

This is why having a video on your site is very useful because you are showing you are a person and that it will be you doing the job. 

Because when it is farmed out to other people it means the equality will differ.

You don’t know if you’re going to be getting the same service that the other people who gave five-star reviews did.

Harms: That’s one way to arbitrage in terms of setting up a business, but you’ve also got another bonus here in the notes.

Kyle: I want to keep this more about what people at home can do, but yes, there are ways to build businesses on Fiverr by doing arbitrage.

One thing, it’s more useful on the individual level, so for you at home selling a service is to look at different markets and see what’s being offered on one market, but not another. 

That might help you key in on an opportunity.

So you go onto Upwork for example, and you see there are a lot of people purchasing HR consultation reports.

You go back to Fiverr and you find there’s nobody selling HR consultation reports that gives you an idea of okay, well, something selling on this marketplace will it work on this marketplace?

Harms: It is almost like riding the trend and which hasn’t quite hit yet for Fiverr in that example.

Upwork has an established category within your niche, but Fiverr or other companies they might not have established those categories yet. 

There are not enough customers to serve that or there are not enough people providing the service, which means they also can’t produce the category.

In that case, setting up on the alternative platforms and offering that service because you know a website or marketplace are very similar, is generating that kind of product, service, and traffic.

Kyle: That is a side hacks you could try but it needs to align with your skills.

Just because you find a goldmine on Fiverr which doesn’t exist on Upwork doesn’t mean you can do it if you don’t have skills. 

Harms: Fiverr and Upwork are great right now as short-term.

More long term/Bigger projects

Harms:  Now what if there’s a longer-term project?

Kyle: We have looked at gigs and small freelance work.

What we’re looking at now is something called remote work.

Remote work is much closer to having a part-time or even a full-time job just based on your laptop working from home, these are much longer. T

These tend to be on a contract basis.

The way you get these jobs is by applying like with a real job. 

These are ways again that if you are at home, if you are furloughed, if you have extra hours in your day there are ways for you to take on a part-time or even a full-time job from the comfort of your own home.

There’s a lot of them on the google sheet list.

Two I want to highlight are non-profit remote which is specific for non-profits and power to fly, which is a female focused females. Females in tech. There are niches within this remote work landscape, so whatever you’re looking for, you will be able to find something specific.

A lot of these are the ones I’ve added to the list. 

I’ve tried to keep them as general sites, but a lot of them will be coding. Which makes sense because it’s something that can be done from anywhere.

The ones I want to highlight are accounting, bookkeeping, customer service, data entry, billing. That’s chasing people up for bill’s invoices. 

Research positions and translation, there’s a lot of them. Bookkeeping in particular, for some reason there are dedicated sites just for this, so I think there’s a big demand for bookkeepers skills.

Harms: If you know that 90% of this kind, if the large percentage of these sites are looking for coders, then briefly an opportunity just spark in your head and say, okay, I don’t necessarily need income immediately, I may use this time to learn how to do that skill.

Alternatively, accounting, bookkeeping, customer service, data entry, billing research translation.

These also may be items where you may say, actually I have the skill set the professional skills to learn these quite quickly. 

If I can learn these items quite quickly I can start applying for the job postings and actually make a career pivot and that’s totally fine as well.

Look for the silver linings, the hidden opportunities.

Professional “teaching”

Harms: Number four is professional teaching, but this is not the same as what we discussed yesterday, this is very much that you have a professional skill set.

We’re not teaching the language of English we are teaching or consulting around a professional skill set. It is still teaching, but it is using the professional skills in order to teach.

What kind of websites out there that can help facilitate this?

Kyle: Again depends on your skill set and the best thing you can do is google your skill set, plus coaching or mentoring or teaching and you will come up with things specific to your area.

In the UK for life coaches and for mentors there’s a website called Guru circus which is pretty good and then globally, or US, mainly there is Life coach hub which is similar. 

That’s if you want to mentor that could be business mentoring, it could be personal mentoring and coaching.

Harms: The business they’ve created is to be the middle person between the customer and the person who is a professional.

So you the professional don’t have to deal with the marketing, the sales, scheduling the fact that you have to persuade this client to come in your portal to get coached by this portal’s coaches.

Think of it as a portal, a facilitator, a middle person between you and the customer.

They do the business for you so you can do the job of delivering value. 

Which is in this case, coaching and mentoring.

Now what is a smaller version for that?

“Micro consultation”

Kyle: Number four is coaching and mentoring generally, you would contract for somebody and talk to them every month. 

Now we’re talking about micro-consultation, which is literally talking to a business or answering questions for business as a one-off, like a gig. 

You can do this stuff on Fiverr but I also found some interesting sites.

One is Clarity FM. They collect business experts and link them up with start-ups and businesses who need expert advice.

If you are an expert on mergers and acquisitions, or you’re an expert on HR, for example and this business needs to have a quick call and sort out some issues, they can call you for 30 minutes using clarity FM. You get paid for a 30-minute call, a 30-minute call averages around $50, apparently.

The main benefit is you are on the platform.

The platform will deal with all the marketing for you and your listing is there, the platform is bringing new businesses to its website, they will see your profile and then book a call with you.

There are also some websites called just answer and any question, they’re a bit like surveys we’ve spoken about.

They will pay more; they will be asking questions about specific whether it’s accountancy questions or bookkeeping.

Harms:  They’re assuming that you’ve got a qualification, experience, so that when you answer the question, they’re getting it from an expert who is a proven expert.

Kyle: Another one is Haro, help a reporter out. This is not paid, but this is a way to build up your brand online.

They send an email every single day which will have journalists who are looking to interview people, they’re looking to get full interviews, they are looking for people who have had certain experiences and will talk about those experiences.

You go on and you pick what niches you are qualified to talk about there’s a huge amount of different topics, then each day you will receive this email with all of the journalists from around the world looking to speak to experts in your space.

Not paid, but it’s free PR and it’s worth doing for the brand building.

The free version of Haro you get to sign up for one keyword and I think the paid version first level gets three.

Start creating

Harms: Point number six is all about starting to create something leveraging the time you have available right now, rather than going out and saying, if you don’t need the cash, then anything we’ve spoken about you don’t have to do it.

It is now in your awareness.

But what can you do with the time now available?

This is where we can focus on starting to create something.

Kyle:  We’ve been focusing on things that can generate income right now for you.

What we’re talking about now with creating something is creating an asset which will be able to pay you pretty much indefinitely from this point on.

At the moment a lot of us are at home, we have more times than we’ve had before. 

Whether it’s because you’re not commuting, because you’re working less hours per day, whatever it is we tend to have more time.

We can be using this time to create something from our skills.

We have professional knowledge, professional skills we can start to turn that into an asset, which moving forward can pay us every single day.

So we’re not working hour to hour.

Harms:  What do we mean by asset?

Kyle: The simplest is like an e-book or traditionally it would be a book. 

That’s not really the route you’d take any more, I’m talking about starting a podcast, writing an ebook. It could be creating a course to capture all your knowledge and start to teach people.

Harms: We have done all of these, but the course was quite cool because it was about sharing our knowledge on an online business basis, where we put together a 10-hour course on how to build an online business from the ground up.

Principles first understanding the business side of things first, and then working through the BATON philosophy.

This model we have taught and it is out there, we’ve got it on Udemy, YouTube. 

We have 12,000 people enrolled in that program and over 200 people have reviewed it and it has 4.2 start reviews.

That’s an example of putting an asset out there online.

The idea is that the asset is now in place, so how do we now leverage that?

How do Kyle and I leverage that?

Well actually if we’ve got 12,000 people who have enrolled onto our course, 200+ people took the time to review it that’s what we’re talking about. 

Creating an authority and a level of expertise out there and that’s an asset as an example.

Kyle: That’s our particular strategy with that course but now that you have time, you could be producing podcasts, e-books, courses, whatever it is putting your knowledge out into the world.

With yes, the idea of building up an audience building up the tribe, but also to generate cash.

This is the idea of an asset, something that you create once and then using online marketing, using digital marketing you can put it up and sell it over time.

Again, this could be an e-book, it could be a course, it could be resources you put together.

You can be using this time you have now to start thinking about this, start brainstorming what could I make and put out into the world that people would buy?

Use your time now to start generating cash using the methods we’ve been talking about, but you can also start to think ahead of what could I create that can generate that kind of passive or automatic income over time.

Harms: That’s where we want to leave it with you which is if the income side of things is okay for you and you are thinking, I don’t need to go explore some more income, now is a great time to simply create something.

Podcast, e-book, a short course just explore it for now.

That’s a nice place to spend your time if it’s not just purely income generating.

We’ve spoken about how to make money online leveraging your professional skills.

What you have learned so far:

• 5 ways to make money from leveraging your professional skills
• Discover some unknown ways to make money online
• Plus more

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