The Skills That Win the Financial Freedom Game
How many of these skills did you learn in high school or even college?
Are you looking for a new direction to head in your life? Are you not drawn to the ‘traditional’ ways of living, like sticking yourself with student loan debt, or dealing with the corporate office lifestyle? There are other ways to get real freedom in your life and in your finances.
This guide will shed some light on which skills win the financial freedom game in today’s expanding gig economy.
Browse these skills to decide which is best for you to pursue your independent career. You may find you already have an interest in some of these areas or have inadvertently been practicing already!
Pick something you are good at and already enjoy. Practice it in a way that can provide value and earn income. Starting small helps you build experience, and will tie in new skills you will need to learn in the process. Start with what you are good at, and build from there.
Learning any skill takes time. But if you put in the weeks, months, or years of hard work on your own, you can enjoy freedom from student debt and corporate suffocation.
Of course, the more technical the skill the more time it takes to learn. While you deal with the learning curve, be prepared with a buffer–another job, savings, or a low cost, but less glamorous lifestyle.
Once you decide in what direction you want to go, download our free step by step guide on how to get there. We’ll help you form a two-year plan to reclaim your financial freedom, social freedom, and political freedom.
What Skill Is Best for You?
1. Content Writing & Copywriting
These are two of the easiest to break into, and fun to practice before you make much money doing it. Content Writing includes blogs, articles, social media content, and web page content. Content Writing can convey information, making conversions & sales, getting people’s attention, as well as moving people through various stages of funnels.
Copywriting is more about selling and advertising. But any good writer studies copy as well. It’s how you draw readers in. Ogilvy on Advertising is a timeless must read, and The Wizard of Ads is great for its more browsable format.
2. Graphic Design
This is a great option for those who are more creative. You’ll just need to be able to learn the Adobe Suite. There are a number of opportunities for those who are fluent in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign especially. People need logos, branding materials, promotional pieces, social & blog headers, and other web materials. Alternatively, Canva is a very good place to get started with demonstrating an ability to create designs. It has more of a drag n’ drop style and is really easy for creating all kinds of images.
3. Web Coding & Development
Don’t even bother with this if you aren’t super interested. Learn this one more leisurely if it is not something you are already good at. There are a TON of different coding languages and to make solid money you need to be fluent in more than just one or two. The first languages you will want to learn will be HTML and CSS.
4. Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), paid advertisement, and social media. More advanced areas include funnels, running full campaigns, affiliate marketing, and conversion optimization. Here are the branches of Digital Marketing that can win the financial freedom game:
15. Website & Landing Page Building
An area that is becoming a necessary tool for all industries, website building is a critical skill with more clients hitting the market every day. But it can be complicated. Like Digital Marketing, websites involve a lot of different parts, from the front-end components to the back-end. Creating websites can be good for those who have a mix of talents or are naturally drawn to integrating moving parts.
Websites require some coding knowledge, design understanding, and maybe a little copywriting. Be sure to learn the difference between websites in general, and specific landing pages. For example, websites are often multiple pages and landing pages are just a single page. A website is the calling card of the business, with all of the important information you might want to know. The landing page has one goal: getting those conversions. They often feature one product or otherwise one main conversion goal per page.
16. Course Creation
Let’s face it, public schools are failing to educate the next generation of workers, and colleges are too expensive… and also not that great at preparing people for the current job market.
Industries are therefore offering online courses, and there is a lot of room for getting involved in the creation process. Either you could take your expertise and turn them into courses that others can benefit from, or you can build courses for other companies.
This is a good option for those who actually have an interest or passion in teaching, training, or general learning environments. There are sites like Udemy and SkillShare that get you started in creating your own courses. Webinars are the new hot thing: virtual seminars and courses that can be live or pre-recorded.
Be aware that there will be a learning curve and you will need time to learn all the parts of creating courses and webinars before getting started working with clients. There are technical components like finding sites to host your attendees, setting up email automation for confirmations and reminders, presentation building if you want slides, and video production if you want pre-recorded videos.
17. Coaching & Mentoring
Are you good at helping people, but in a more personal way than customer service? Do people gravitate to you for advice or direction? Or do you have a bunch of life experiences, professionally or personally, that you feel you could help others overcome similar challenges?
Being a Coach might be a route for you to consider. Coaches help people see their challenges from different perspectives and discover new directions. They offer accountability and organization for reaching goals. Mentors are the ones who have a skill, system, technique, or something of value related to their experience that they help others learn to reach new levels in their lives or careers.
If you have a set of experiences or expertise that you feel that you could help others with, you can get started coaching immediately. This is one industry that actually doesn’t require any specific kind of certification to conduct business.
But like the others, be good at what you do. Get to the core of what coaching is and how it really works. Make sure you are truly providing value before charging people for your services.
18. Virtual Assistant
This is a good option for those who don’t feel like the technical route is for them, but still want financial freedom. If building complicated systems doesn’t attract you, you can always consider being a Virtual Assistant. One of the newer roles emerging in the remote world is Virtual Assistants, who help with an array of tasks from lead generation, account management, to customer service and more. Basically, all the people using a skill on this list to build a business will need an assistant, and it is a great way to build skills without having to lead a company.
Now it’s time for you to decide for yourself. When you know what it is you want, and what it looks like, you can start taking the steps to achieve it. That means investing in yourself and going against the grain. In the long run it will be worth it.
Once you decide the right direction, let us help you build a two-year plan to move from where you are now, to a life of freedom.