5 Ways to Use Your Skills to Start a Side Business

One of the best ways to increase your income and
give yourself a solid foundation by which to grow
into self-employment in the future is to start a side
business of your own.
If you choose the right business opportunity,
there's room for you to keep growing your
customer base on the side, while keeping your day
job. From there, if you take the right steps, you'll
be able to grow your side income beyond that of
your day job—and launch into the world of self-
employment.
However, before you get started, you'll need to first
understand the different ways you'll be going
about discovering and validating your ideal side
business idea.
From my conversations with aspiring
entrepreneurs, one of the most common mistakes I
see being made over and over again when people
are looking for the right side business opportunity,
is that they completely overlook their single best
resource: their existing skill sets.
As a writer and marketer by trade, I know that
with any business I get into, I'll need to engage my
core strengths of crafting compelling content and
getting it in front of a large online audience, in
order to have a chance of being successful and
competing with others in my space.
If you want to become a successful entrepreneur
within your field, you'll need to engage your
strengths. If you're still unsure about which skills
you'll be able to monetize with a side business,
take the Entrepreneur ' s Skill Assessment today.
Once you've determined which strengths you'll
plan on leveraging, here are five ways to turn
those skills into a side business.
1. Freelancing
If you've built up a set of marketable skills
throughout your career and at your day job, you
should consider the idea of starting a freelance
business on the side.
There's a rapidly expanding demand for talented
freelance help, especially in the US with over 54
million freelancers in 2015.
If your skills include writing, designing,
developing, marketing, social media management,
or another high-demand digital skill, then you're in
a great position to start bringing on freelance
clients. Start with building a high quality portfolio
website to list your skills, showcase examples of
your best work, and display reviews from past co-
workers or bosses as you get up and running.
Create a very clear picture of who your target
freelance client is going to be, and make sure
you're tailoring your website and reach out
experience to what that person is going to expect.
2. Blogging
One of my favorite side businesses, albeit a very
long term investment in my future, has been
starting a blog and building up a loyal audience of
regular readers. If you're comfortable with the
potential that it may very well take you years to
start earning a decent income from one of the
various ways to monetize a blog, and you have a
knack for building connections with people
through your writing, then this may be for you.
Be sure to start with a niche topic that'll give you
the opportunity to become well-respected within a
close-knit community, before you set your sights on
expanding into a very large market. Your
credibility platform will be of great importance
moving forward.
3. Online Coaching
If you have a marketable skill that others want to
possess or get better at, then there's a market for
being paid to coach people, one-on-one, into an
accelerated learning experience. The emergence of
easy-to-use online coaching websites like
Savvy and Clarity .fm already provide you with a
built-in community of people looking to work on
various different types of skills. The most exciting
thing about starting an online coaching business
on the side is that once you've perfected your
teaching experience, you'll be able to easily
package it into a more scalable version—an online
course.
4. Online Courses
As with online coaching, when there's a growing
demand for a skill that you possess, one of the best
ways to monetize that ability of yours, is by
creating a genuinely helpful online course for
others to go through at their own leisure. While the
setup time and upfront investments are huge (in
terms of your time) with this business model, it's
one of the most scalable online businesses out there
today. Teachable has become one of the best
resources on learning how to launch an online
course business, as well as being the premier
online course platform to power your course
content once you have it built.
5. Physical Products
Whether you have an idea for a new-to-the-world
invention, a new spin on an existing product, or
nothing more than selling a product in a new way
or to a new market, there are countless ways to
make money selling physical products on the side.
For example, take Neil Patel, an online marketer
who last year launched a challenge for himself to
create an online business from scratch, in an
industry he knows nothing about (a nutrition
blog). Just last month, he cleared over $22,000 in
sales of a product that he white labels and sells on
Amazon.
If you're willing to get creative, there are a nearly
unlimited number of ways to use your skills and
start a side business that'll have the potential to
launch you into a career of self-employment. Check
out the Launch While Working Formula for more
on how to start and grow a side business while
keeping your day job.