It is essential to build a high value skill as a freelancer. Freelancing is built on supply and demand like many other business. A person or business may not be able to achieve a certain task on their own and will have to reach out to someone externally to get it done. This is where freelancers with high value skills come into play…
This video is part of Nick Tubis’s educational series, Freelance University, which anyone can personally subscribe to by clicking here. Additionally, you can subscribe to Nick Tubis on YouTube to keep up with Freelance University and his other videos as well.
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Transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about the very first thing you need to do to succeed as a freelancer. In order to succeed with freelancing you’re going to have to have a skillset thats in high demand and that the market needs.
If you don’t have a skillset that’s in high demand its going to be virtually impossible to make a lot of money, because you won’t be able to charge a premium for your services and there won’t be a great deal of clients searching for the help you provide.
Now the bigger the problem that you can solve the more money you can make.
The more businesses that have that problem the bigger the freelance opportunity will be for you.
So on today’s episode I’m going to show you how to identify a skillset that you leverage or figure out one show you can how can develop what I call a “high value” skillset so that getting clients becomes way easier for you.
If you look at the highest paid freelancers, they tend to solve the biggest problems. Now as a freelancer this may sound a little strange, but you’re really a B2B entrepreneur. If you’re not familiar with B2B it stands for business to business. So as a freelancer you’re really selling to businesses, not consumers.
If you were selling clothing, food, or something along those lines the selling strategy is completely different.
And the single best way to sell to businesses is to tie your skills, knowledge, or experience to align with a businesses priorities.
If you align your product or services with a businesses priorities there will always be massive demand for your services.
This is why freelance digital marketing, accounting, attorneys, IT, and software developers are in such demand. Because really any core business function will always be a huge priority.
So it doesn’t matter if you specialize in accounting, IT, graphic design, PPC advertising, data science, CRM management, recruiting, and the list goes on and on. But you can see that all of those examples will always align with companies priorities.
A lot of you probably already have skills or experience that can solve a big problem. I’m sure a lot of you feel that you’ve been really good at your past jobs so those of you probably already know exactly what services you’ll want to provide as a freelancer.
But for those of you that still aren’t sure or are wanting to learn a new skill that maybe is more financially rewarding, let’s talk about that for a second.
The first thing that you’re going to want to do is see what is happening in the market, which is actually super easy. We want to do this so that we make sure that the skill you develop has a lot of client searching for help with that.
So the way you can do this is by going on Upwork and looking at what the highest paid freelancers do.
Basically what you’re going to want to do is set up a client account so you can see what types of jobs the highest paid freelancers are doing on the platform and how much they are charging.
And you can’t do that from your freelancer account. Upwork’s platform is completely different for freelancers and clients. But the good news is that you can set up accounts for both and just go back and forth from one account to the other.
And if you’re feeling overwhelmed and want help doing this, my team and I have actually created a mini course on how to do this step by step so you can follow along click by click and save a bunch of time instead of guessing what to do.
We’ve put a link to get that training above if that is something you would like access to.
Now in Upwork’s job search filters you will see a variety of categories that you can choose from. You’ll see the category of work which could be for example, web design, web development, finance, etc, you can filter by hourly rate, you can filter by freelancers that have worked over a certain amount of hours on the platform.
The best thing I recommend is that if you have no idea the skill you want to learn is to keep the category of work broad, but set the hourly rate, and hours worked on Upwork to the highest setting.
Because now Upwork’s algorithm will start to show you examples of freelancers profiles that meet that criteria. And you’re going to want to model the highest paying freelancers.
The next step is to get out a pen and piece of paper and really analyze their profiles and look for clues. Look to see what jobs they are providing. Look to see how much they are charging. Write down if they have any certifications. This is a major hack, and very few people actually know about this.
I like to find 5 profiles that resonate with you and then pick one skillset that looks interesting to you that you would like to learn.
We’re doing this to help you bet on sure things so that you have a huge edge over all of the other freelancers out there.
Once you’ve figured out the skill that you would like to learn, I recommend going on Udemy to find an affordable online course to learn that skill.
Personally I’ve had a ton of success with online courses and without them I wouldn’t be where I’m at today.
Again if that sounds techy or overwhelming it isn’t at all, and we walk you through exactly what to do in our Profile Secrets Masterclass, which you can get at the link above if you would like some more help.
And one more key important takeaway point to remember as a freelancer, you don’t need to be the best in the world, you just need to be good enough to solve the problem. As long as you can help the client get to where they want to go that is all that matters.
So go out there and take some action and I will see you right back here tomorrow!
Nick Tubis 