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Best Skills for Income Stacking - Part I

Best Skills for Income Stacking - Part I

Learn these to make bank this year...

Chris Laub
August 07, 2024

In partnership with

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Today we’ll be discussing the top business skills for earning a living online.

In particular, which skills you should develop if your goal is to create an in-demand B2B service offer as a freelancer or agency owner.

Further, we should note this is Part One in a Two Part Series.

Let’s dive in.

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As Napoleon Dynamite once said:

"Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills."

While I'm not sure how true that statement is, this I do know:

Skills pay the bills.

Especially in modern times, when competition for freelancing and agency work is more competitive than ever.

Question is: Which skills should you learn?

On the one hand, skills like sales and copywriting revolve around human behavior and deep-rooted psychological patterns. And because of that, they will remain relevant until AI programs take over the majority of our buying decisions.

On the flip side, other skills increase and decrease in their importance as online business trends change.

For example, understanding how to blog and do SEO was a highly valuable skill in the 2000s and even 2010s.

However, as Google has put more emphasis on rewarding mega-sites while continually pushing down small business micro-sites, SEO has become increasingly dominated by large corporations.

Many of which have their own SEO employees, thereby decreasing the need for consultants and agencies.

As another more recent example, prior to TikTok going mainstream, short-form video editing wasn't really a thing (given there weren't any online platforms focused on short-form vertical videos).

But with the explosion of Tik Toks, Reels and Shorts, short-form video editing became a highly in-demand skill (especially for true video editors who brought more to the table than just splicing existing videos and adding captions).

So which skills are more relevant in 2024?

#1 - Cold Email

If you're not involved in the tech or corporate business space, the ideal of getting unsolicited emails from strangers may trigger an immediate SPAM flag.

In the corporate B2B world, however, cold email is still one of the largest drivers of new leads and therefore revenue.

Admittedly, cold email is much harder now than it was even five short years ago. Mainly because of how saturated it's become, and the anti-SPAM safeguards email ISPs have put in place.

Despite the difficulties involved, companies are willing to pay big money to marketing agencies who can help them make even more.

And regardless of how you feel about it, cold email (done right) is an incredibly powerful revenue driver in the B2B space.

#2 - Website Design

Despite being the oldest service on the entire Internet, the web design space can be incredibly lucrative. Why?

Because website design requires a combination of multiple skills, including:

UI / UX
Coding
Graphic Design
Copywriting

On top of that, because web design requires such a wide variety of skills, it's commonplace for legitimate website design firms to charge 4-5 figures (and even $100,000+ for a custom site).

As you likely know, selling services at a higher price point makes it easier to achieve reasonable profit margins. Which, in turn, makes it easier to hire the right people.

And in the agency world, hiring the right people is everything.

Yes, pursuing this model requires you to hire staff (you can start off contracting freelancers instead of full-time employees in the beginning).

But because this service isn't tied to producing revenue, web design is arguably one of the least stressful services you can offer online.

#3 - Video Editing

For better or worse, society is moving away from written text and toward video.

As a reader and writer, I find this unfortunate.

With the exception of a handful of fiction niches, like Romance, consumption of books and blog content declines further and further every year.

But where one opportunity shrinks, another expands.

And nowhere has that been more true than with video.

Even better, while most anyone can spin up an article and call themselves a writer, video editing requires actual skills. And because of that, there are dramatically fewer people working in the space relative to the number of copywriters / content writers you'd be competing against.

Sure, there are fewer companies doing video compared to the number who publish written content. But given how amateur most so-called "video editors" are, this is one space where real skill can take you far.

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And in our next issue, we'll unveil three more skills you can develop to build a high-profit service offer.

That issue will arrive to your inbox on Friday, so watch out for it.

💡 Takeaway: Skills pay the bills. And in 2024, three of the highest profit skills you can sell as part of a service offer include cold email, website design and/or professional video editing.

🎁 Resources: