6 High Value Skills To Learn If You’re Starting an Online Business

TLDR: In this post, you’ll be finding out about the 6 top high value skills you can learn to really give you a head start in your business! The world we live in today is digitalised, fast-evolving and very different to the world a decade ago. These skills are not just high value, they’re also high in demand too, which makes them skills that will benefit your own business, as well as skills that will allow you to provide a well-paid service to clients!

Being an entrepreneur in today’s age requires a different skillset compared to the entrepreneurs of the previous generation. We live in a fast evolving digital age, where social media and Google reign champion and where the competition for business has never been more fierce.

I have always been and always will be a strong advocate for starting your own business to achieve the work-life balance and financial abundance you’ve always wanted. One of the biggest steps towards that is understanding starting a business isn’t just about developing a great new product or service – there’s SO much that goes on behind the scenes, so your product/service gets the limelight it truly deserves.

The skills I’m about to share with you aren’t just high value – they’re also very high in demand! Learning these skills puts you in a unique, powerful position where you can use these skills for your own business, and also provide your services to other businesses too, on a freelance basis.

High Value Skill #1: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Simply put, SEO is about increasing a website’s visibility on search engines like Google. When a website has increased visibility on Google, you’re getting more eyes on that website. And more eyes on a website means more money 💰 for you!

Let me lay down an example. Let’s say you run a business selling custom travel packages for families living in the UK travelling to Saudi Arabia. Wouldn’t it be great for your website to show up in the search result on Google for people typing in ‘family holiday packages to Saudi Arabia’? Would you rather be the 1st result, or the 20th result? Which do you think would help you get more sales? Being the 1st result, of course! SEO is essentially this – learning about how to get your website in those top ranking results.

SEO is an ever-evolving area, and what works changes very often. In fact, this is what makes SEO such a high value skill! It’s not something everyone and anyone can do well, but the results a business can get from great SEO make investing time and effort into it worthwhile. And in the current times, when many businesses are going all in on social media and neglecting their websites, covering your bases here is an excellent strategy for success.

High Value Skill #2: Copywriting

If this is a new term for you, copywriting is essentially the art of persuasive writing. It’s writing text (called copy in this world) that sells a product or service in a compelling, convincing way, encouraging readers to get out their credit cards and make you a sale! You’ll inevitably have come across those classic sales pages or emails in the past – they give you FOMO, they make you feel like this item is the best thing since sliced bread and they create a sense of urgency and desire just through their words. Yep, that’s a high income skill right there!

The ability to sell using your words has been a high value skill ever since print newspapers and adverts began, and will continue to be a high value skill in the future too. If you’ve ever come across a compelling advert that’s drawn you in inexplicably, you’ll know good copywriting isn’t just a case of stringing words together. Successful copywriting is a delicate art and when done properly, can lead to a deeper connection with your audience, creating desire for what you’re selling and thus, huge profits for your business!

High Value Skill #3: Social media marketing

According to research by HubSpot, 71% of people are more likely to make a purchase based on social media influences. We’ve seen a huge uptick in new businesses, and more people spending money online. The boom of social media over the last decade has meant people have been able to start lucrative businesses that have changed their lives and made waves in their industry, all from behind the screens of their smartphones.

A good social media strategy will get more eyes on your business, increase awareness about your brand and lead to more leads and sales. But make no mistake of it, there’s a lot of strategy that goes into a successful social media strategy! Tasks involved with social media marketing can include: content creation, data analytics, interacting and engaging with comments and DMs and managing spam, just to name some. It’s certainly not a case of posting cute pictures and watching the sales roll in! In fact, it’s a definite case of ‘it looks easier than it actually is’.

One thing you’ll find is, as with high value skill #1 (SEO), social media is always evolving. What works this year is different to what worked last year, and will likely be different to what works next year. No strategy is static! This is exactly what makes good social media strategy such a high value skill – by keeping up to date, you’re positioning your business for success ahead of everyone else!

High Value Skill #4: Video editing

This skills has a lot of overlap with #3 (social media marketing) because video plays a huge role in today’s content consumption and social media strategy. Many users prefer to consume their social media content through video – whether that’s through YouTube videos, TikToks or Instagram reels. If you’re selling a product, you’ve got a much better chance of connecting with your audience and convincing them you’re worth their hard-earned money if you share videos of your amazing must-have product, instead of just images. If you’re selling a service, sharing videos of yourself speaking and talking about your offers will lead to more sales than if you just wrote about it.

Even the world of blogging, which has traditionally been about writing, has shifted over the last few years towards a video-centric approach. Many bloggers have adopted video to keep their readers interested in their content.

Let’s take a real life example – cleaning videos. These are all the rage on TikTok and Instagram reels, with people sharing satisfying videos of carpet cleaners taking a muddy rug from blackened to brand new, or how they’re cleaning their floors with a brand new brush and getting a more efficient clean. Those videos aren’t just addictive, they’re also an insanely smart marketing move that get you thinking you also NEED those products for your house NOW. Pictures do not do justice to these things in the same way a satisfyingly short video can!

But if you’ve ever been the victim of an impulse TikTok purchase, you’ll know not all videos will speak to you. Getting the balance between speed, tone, vibe, colours, voice overs/music etc is critical in creating the right kind of magic that gets you those sales. Anyone can shoot and edit a video – but shooting and editing a video that makes an impact is a hugely high value skill.

High Value Skill #5: Sales and negotiation

From the entirety of this list, this high income skill has preceded and evaded time and generations. Being an excellent sales person is relevant today, it was relevant 30 years ago – heck, it was relevant thousands of years ago too!

Ultimately, being able to persuade someone to make a purchase through your words, or to pay you the rate you want, is an absolute superpower in business – but it’s one not many people are comfortable with. We fear ‘sounding desperate’ or ‘being salesy’ and thus we may not even realise how we’re pushing away sales from our business! Investing time and effort into learning the art of sales and negotiation is an incredibly worthwhile, high value skill that everyone stepping into business should spend time on.

High Value Skill #6: Running ads

Growing organically, whether that’s on social media or as a website, is great, but slow. Running a successful ad campaign is the equivalent to getting a fast track ticket when the queues are obnoxiously long and you just don’t have the time to be waiting.

Ads can help you ramp up the speed of your growth when you don’t want to wait around. And quicker growth = quicker sales. This makes running ads an incredibly desirable, high ROI skill that can benefit your business immensely from day 1. Unlike SEO or social media marketing, results can be quick if executed properly.

Now the thing about running ads successfully is there’s a lot of overlap with copywriting, which is high value skill #2 from this list. Essentially, a successful ad campaign is an excellent, interest-piquing copy combined with the technicalities of ad targeting and optimising done right.

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There’s A LOT that goes on behind the scenes when starting a successful business. There is so much more than meets the eye, and whilst I have shared some high value skills that can massively help you get ahead of the curve, ultimately there may still be areas that feel like blind spots, where you need extra support.

If we’ve never met before, hi, I’m Aaminah Amin! I’m a multi-six-figure business owner, best-selling author and a mother, and I’ve built my business from scratch over the last 3 years! I know first hand the difficult steps you need to take when starting a new business, and the overwhelm that can come with it. But I also understand that raging fire deep within you to start that amazing, successful business you know is meant to be for you.

If you want to start a side hustle but need a boost in confidence, skills and know-how, I’d love to help you along your journey. My utmost passion is to help women, especially women of colour like myself, to achieve financial independence by building smart, strategic businesses. This passion has led me to creating a whole community of like-minded, ambitious, hardworking women who share this same goal.

You can join this community by signing up to the Brown Girl Money email newsletter here (as well as getting my FREE Money Mastery Toolkit!) and by following me on Instagram here. I’d love to see you there!