Monetize your Opportunity

The pandemic has undoubtedly changed all our lives and taught us one thing or another about ourselves. It has also taught the business world its most important lesson: "not everyone needs to come to the office". Initially working from home was more of an obligation but it slowly led to the understanding that most work in an organization can be done from home, conveniently and efficiently. Not only has this opened the doorway for digitalization but it has also opened up companies to outsource more and more. So, what does this mean to you as an individual? This means opportunities! I mean we all knew somewhere that social media is a great tool to earn from but we somehow weren't convinced enough. It was never the first thing that would come to our mind as a possible monetary source. Personally, for me, it felt like this math equation that I knew had an answer but it was simply too complicated for me to solve and it was the smart kid's business to get anything out of it. But as the lockdown extended and the whole "predict when the pandemic would be done and things would get back to normal" game became boring and impossible, I started opening up to digital options only to be surprised as to how easy this could potentially be. I have always believed that lazy people are the world's most genius people since smart work would any day outweigh hard work and the options the digital platform has are a direct reflection of that. We all could be undiscovered geniuses cause the possibilities I have discovered are not only add actual value but are also things that we all are somehow good at one way or another.

I'd like to start my list of possibilities with freelancing simply because it has endless outcomes. Using websites like Fiverr, Upwork, True freelancer as mediums you could put out any skill that you are good at to gain money. Now compared to websites like Skillshare, Udemy, or any other so-called professional websites, these have no pressure. It's all upon you to decide what you could offer. Browsing through their catalogue of what's already being offered can help you realize just how much you can immediately put to work. Of course, learning skills like graphic designing, using editing software to make book covers or company logos, or anything in demand by the creators is on one end while but if you don't want to go the techy way then there is room for you as well. I found how some people were offering "friendship and life coach" services. Now on one end it might seem like a complete joke but hey the pandemic has got some people needy on the emotional front at the least and as they say in economics, the market demands it and so there is supply to meet it. Your sure-shot formula for this one would be: choose some skills your good at (browsing through what others are offering is a huge advantage), have some samples of your work in hand, and if not just create a few to showcase and then start looking through the jobs section in these sights and apply through! Once you build on the reviews and get more clients you can automatically gain more from this.

The second best thing on my tally is social media. The number of things you could make money from are quite literally endless. Hearing terms like "social media manager" and "social media analyst" always made me feel like these were some complicated work titles that required some serious math solving skills but that's so not true. To simplify, you could essentially either offer to manage people's social media accounts (a post for them, reply for them and "manage" for them) or you could go through their stats on a daily and see where the majority of their audience comes from, their age, gender and what post got the most amount of engagement - making you a social media analyst! This works for Instagram as well as youtube. Helping people crack the "algorithm". Most content creators would want to focus on being creative and doing what they are good at - making content! rather than worry about stats and figures which you would be helping them with. You could also be something fancier like a "social media strategist" who essentially helps brands build and diversify their presence across various platforms and formulates a strategy each based on the target platform. And since we all have such good experience with the media, I do believe that this is something most of us are good at.

Has it started to sound convincing and easy already? Then there is the umbrella of marketing too. Affiliate marketing - basically earning money while referencing a product that's already out there. You could partner up with amazon for instance and send out links of various products promoting them and if people end up buying from that very link, you benefit from it. Now that's like copying answers from someone in an exam and then getting terrific results. Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg, linking products to consumers through marketing and advertising has been the next business skill on demand.

Finally, there is the "build anything of your own" idea that combines everything that I have spoken off only with a personal touch. Starting a business is now just a click away. Creating your brand using your freelancing skills and then using your social media knowledge to promote and market it now no longer sounds like a far-fetched idea. Digital skills like "search engine optimization" and "search engine marketing" are ones you should be on the lookout for if you're launching your business online. It's like figuring out the algorithm of google search. When you search anything on google, you only check out the first page right? so these two skills are based on how to help your business appear on the search results higher and what's the formula behind doing that. Although they seem complicated they are not any different from the social media tags we discussed above.

I'd like for you to see this as a list of endless possibilities and I hope the conviction of social media being some complicated thing no longer exists. If there is anything that could take away from here, it would be the ease of it. Go ahead and discover how the lazier version of you finds the genius within and if anything remembers that people are offering their "friendship and life coach" services anyway.