Tips to Identify your Part Time Money Making Skills

This is the second post in the Series of Part Time Money Making! To view all posts in this Series, you can visit this page. I welcome your suggestions or opinions to make this Series more helpful to you.

In the last post of this series, I mentioned the skill identification as the first step to your Part Time Money Making Plan. Though most of us have more than one skill, it is not very easy to identify the one, that has the potential to Make Money Online.  This post is not a Guide but an Eye Opener, that can help you think through and identify few Skills that can be fruitful!

1. List Down Everything!

Make a list of everything you like to do.

Put special emphasis on your Hobbies and stuff that you are passionate about.  Also try to avoid what you do for a living on the Full Time job, unless you are so passionate about it.

Take time to think of everything non-trivial and put it down on a white sheet of paper.

On an average, I guess everyone should have at least 15-25 items in the list – at the end of this simple exercise.

2. Rate your Skill Level against each Item in the List

Once you have the master list, for each item rate your Skill level relevant to that item.

For example, if Writing is an Entry in the list – rate your Writing skill against it.  It can be a number between 1-10 or a verbal rating like ‘Excellent’, but it doesn’t matter here.

Do this exercise for all items in the list.  For items where you see a need for learning or training, rate yourself a little low.

3. Pick your Top Skills

Pick out those Items where you have given yourself a Top Rating.  The others can wait until we complete the next step.

For illustration purposes, let me consider the following 3 items as the Top Items in my list:

• Writing
• Photography
• Travel

Let me call these as “Top Skill Items” through the rest of this post.

4. Research on the Market, Sustainability and Competition

For each of your Top Skill Items, do good amount of research on the Market.  The idea of this exercise is to see where your Services or Products can fit into the existing Market.

If there is no Market, think twice about pursuing that Skill Item and try to replace it with another Skill Item in your Master List.

As an example, for the Travel Skill Item – an analysis of the Market would open your eyes to items like Travel Portals, Travel Blogs, Travel Applications, Travel Agencies and Reviews etc.

Once you have a perspective of the Market and the opportunities, analyze if the opportunity is Sustainable and what is the Competition.  Spend a good amount of time on this activity, as this will greatly influence the Success or Failure of your Part Time Venture.

5. Choose the Best

Out of the Top Skill Items, choose the best one after the Market Research and an analysis of the above mentioned factors.

This Skill Item could potentially be your best bet to make Part Time Money.>/p>

You might want to run several iterations of this process, to identify multiple Skill Items that you can pursue.

Through the rest of the Series I am going to focus on Online Money Making around Freelancing, Web Development, Blogging and other Internet Marketing Services.  Though the concepts could logically be applied to any Part Time Ventures, the focus will be around these areas.