No skills? Here is what to do
When we started working on talent arbitrage, we were determined to find out ways through which our learners can start earning on the side even before they acquired fully-developed professional level skill sets, which could take 6 months to develop.
Your learning goes to the next level when you see that you are already earning and by learning more you can double or triple your income.
There are few incentives like dopamine hit in your brain that comes from earning.
It helps our learners to build some initial confidence. They learn client acquisition skills. They feel encouraged to learn more high-demand skill sets so that they can earn more.
They also develop some pre-existing relationships and an initial network in the process, which they can leverage later to secure highly paid work and introductions to other clients.
What kind of work can you perform when you are yet to learn any skills? Who will your potential clients be?
As a remote freelancer working from India or another developing country, your potential clients are likely to be early stage startup founders, SME owners, and services professionals.
How can you start building relationships with these clients when you have no skills?
One common pain point we identified that applies to all of such clients is that they need to build their brand and most of them struggle with it.
Having a strong personal brand will help your clients to get more traction, client inquiries, generate investor interest, attract the right kind of employees, and so on.
Your potential clients want to gather followers, publicise their achievements, and be known as thought leaders in their area of work.
However, 99% of these clients are too busy with existing work commitments, and do not have the time to build their own personal brand.
If they are successful, they are usually so busy that they don’t even get enough time to spend with their family.
But they have money to pay an Indian freelancer to do the heavy lifting for them, and they know that building their brand could take their professional success to the next level over time.
They can very comfortably pay USD 10-20 per hour for this sort of work, which translates into 1.5 lakh-3 lakhs per month if you work 8 hrs per day, 6 days a week in India.
You can work part-time as well if you do not have 8 hours per day available for this. Reduce income expectations accordingly.
So what are such tasks for which you can easily charge $10 per hour from foreign startup founders, service professionals and SME owners?
Here is a quick list of 10 key items:
- Get them invited on podcasts and webinars
- Organise Twitter Spaces, Instagram or LinkedIn Live so that they can build an audience & engage with their audience more effectively
- Extract engaging videos from those and publish those as Instagram reels or YouTube shorts
- Get their interviews published on third party blogs and websites
- Write social media posts for them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – you can interview them on interesting topics and post the insights on their twitter as a thread
- Assist them to update their blog – at least write 1 blog post every week
- Write a newsletter for their subscribers
- Be a virtual assistant for them and help them save time that they spend on daily tasks, schedule meetings, track progress of important projects, etc.
- Help them to launch their own YouTube channel (you find topics, interview them, edit the videos, take care of posting, comments etc)
- If you like, you can build a basic no-code website for them using Wix or Notion, which takes around 1-3 hrs once you learn how to do it.
[If you don’t know how to do these things, don’t worry – we will show you how to do some of these tasks in the free bootcamp over this weekend. We will also give you word-to-word scripts that you can use to pitch some of these services. Just make sure that you attend live, because no recordings will be available.]
Can foreign clients not find professionals in their home country to do this?
Most of the foreign clients that we mentioned – SME business owners, early stage startup founders and professionals who run small consultancy firms struggle to cost effectively hire people in their home country to do this.
If you can offer to help them to build their brand by doing some of these things, many of them will immediately agree to see what you can do, just out of curiosity.
Do some background research on their existing brand, shoot a message, invite them on a Zoom call, and offer a short free trial.
That is your opportunity.
Once they find that your work is of a reasonable quality, they would be super happy to pay you $10 per hour – it’s a very small amount for them for the benefit they get out of such branding exercises.
After some time, once you have developed professional level skill sets, you can offer services around your professional skill sets as well!
Isn’t there a more direct way to get opportunities with such clients instead of doing marketing or brand building work?
If you want to get started by working for your own clients, you have to offer solutions for the problems that your clients have.
That is your way in.
Like in India, some of these professionals may also be bombarded by low-value applications from desperate and needy jobseekers, so by offering foreign startup founders and professionals services to build their brand, you will immediately distinguish yourself from everyone else.
You will also have a hands-on opportunity to get real life exposure and learn from the experiences of such foreign professionals and startup founders when you are offering brand building assistance to them.
If you are worried about how you will perform complicated and laborious tasks like video editing, or preparing interview questionnaires, you can use AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
For example you can use AI tools to draft interview questionnaires, create website content, edit videos as comfortably as a word doc, automatically generate captions, and even design beautiful newsletters and brochures!
Offering brand-building assistance in the initial phase of your remote work career has other long-term benefits as well.
After you attain a certain amount of success, say you get to a point where you are earning INR 1-2 lakhs per month, you will also need to start building your own brand.
Building your own brand will be crucial to scale your earnings further, amongst other things like hiring and delegation.