what skills should I be learning in order to start making a living online?
To earn online there are many ways. I will discus them one by one.
1. Blogging : You can earn by writting blogs and publishing them. The earnings will come from the advertisement required by your blog.
Skills required : Knowledge of the subject , basic computer knowledge and good language command.
2.Website : You can earn by publishing a website of your own and earn by the advertisement revenue.
Skills required : Knowledge of the subject , Designing and publishing websites.
Making a living online is not easy because you can be scammed or may end up with fallen spirit because of various unknown challenges that may undermine your desire to continue with your goals. With my experiences, skills that I can recommend that you must master are writing and research.
Why writing? it is because whatever you do online you need the writing skill to communicate online users, customers, visitors, or audience. Of course you don’t have to be expert in writing, just keep your communication level with others smooth and responsive.
Why research skill? It is because without diligent research activities you can be misled with all “noisy” (unprofitable ideas or guides) in the Internet. Remember, Internet is the largest and most accessible library you can use. Anyone can post or submit any written materials. Therefore, you have to research more and more to make comparisons until you find the best ones.
These two skills are basics in making money online.
To “Make money online” (start with money, then grow it to achieve a ‘living online”, start making a list of the ways people make money online:
1) Selling products that are paid by online customers to you. Skills needed: Online Advertising knowledge and skills, access to a product at a cost that allows mark-up for profit needed for sucessful on-going business, Advertising Technology Skills, Basic business acumen (pricing, marketing, book-keeping/accounting.), eCommerce skills at advertising, inventory management, shipping and handling, credit card operations to bill and collect, online shopping cart operations, customer database management, etc.
2) Selling Services that are paid by online customer to you. Skills needed: online advertising, website design and management skills, knowledge and expertise in the service area you are providing (not necessarily an ‘online skill’)
3) Running websites that charge for membership and perhaps produce advertising revenue – Skills needed: Website design and management, memership database management, customer relationship management, customer acquisition, online advertising, content creation and curation.
4) Running websites that are free, but make money through advertising revenue – Skills needed: Website creation, content creation and curation, on-line advertising skills
5) Creating traffic of consumers who you refer to other sites that sell products or services, and those target sites will pay you a commission or fee for bringing customers to them – This is “Affiliate Marketing”
The list goes on … but know that business “online” is as difficult as any other business, except that online you have immediate access to the whole world, and so, you have the benefit and challenge of things happening very very fast in large numbers (if you are lucky). This requires one to be very clear from the start about how to manage customer response very quickly. IT’s a good ‘problem’ to have, that requires one to have their head on straight about how business really works … and then, when and where do the “online skills” come into play.
Summarizing, let’s take some of the skills listed above, not in any particular order:
Advertising Technology Skills,
Basic business acumen (pricing, marketing, book-keeping/accounting.),
eCommerce skills of advertising, marketing, inventory management, shipping and handling, credit card operations and online shopping cart operations, customer database management,
Online advertising (Ad Tech)
Website design
Website operations management
Customer/Membership database management
Customer/User Experience – Customer Relationship Management
Customer acquisition through online advertising,
Content creation, Content Management and Conent curation.
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No one is expected to be expert in all these things, but when starting out, you cannot afford to pay the experts to take care of these things for you either, and jumping in and getting your feet wet, hands dirty and hair blown back is going to happen!
Since you can not do it all, then you must start with which business model you wish to pursue, either as owner or employee, and then pick out the skills that are key and relevant to that business model approach.
Best,
T.
