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Finding and monetizing a high income skill is arguably one of the easiest ways to make 6 figures in your 20s and beyond.

With more and more people moving away from wanting to pursue traditional career paths and clocking into their 9 to 5’s, there’s never been a better time to find & monetize a high income skill.

So exactly how do you go about finding and monetizing a high income skill in 2022?

In this article, I’ll show you how to make 6 figures in your 20s by finding and monetizing a high income skill.

We’ll cover how to find a high income skill, where to find high paying clients, pricing and so much more.

Let’s jump right into it.

11 Step process to finding and monetising a high income skill

1) Find/identity a skill

The first thing you’ll want to do is to find a skill. This can either be something you’re already really good at or something you’ll put time and effort into learning/becoming good at.

I am not a passion over profit type of person.

I feel like there’s no statement that’s more untrue than find/do something you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

Now while you’ll obviously need to enjoy what you do, I would personally prioritize profitability over passion.

However, I do think it’s possible to have the best of both worlds. 

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re passionate about music and you make music. You understand everything that goes into making a song but your music is currently not profitable.

So you decide to monetize this and sell it as a skill. You decide start writing entertainment news for music websites or even better you start your own. You can do both.

I’ve seen a trend on Tiktok where people who have written popular songs take you through the process and even play the original version. You can do something similar. A behind the scenes into the making of your favorite songs.

You can feature producers etc. There’s so much you can do in line with this but this is an example of something that merges the best of both worlds.

Customize this to fit what you’d like to do. Use Google to see whether this is an existing type of service and how people are pricing their services.

There are so many different type of skills you can sell online and get paid good money in return. I’ll write a separate blog post about it. 

2) Find a niche within the skill

I have mixed feelings about niches and niching down but you can make so much money by specializing. There’s a reason why they say the riches are in the niches. 

Niching down will allow you to find your target audience with ease and charge a premium price for your services.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re really good at social media. And you’re conversant with different platforms.

Instead of selling your services as a social media marketer, choose one platform and structure your services and offerings around it. I.e Tiktok.

Sell yourself as someone who’s highly skilled at Tiktok.

Maybe you have the viral video recipe down, maybe you’re really good at converting audiences if your clients are keen on conversions, maybe you’re really good at turning existing content for your clients into tiktok videos etc. 

This is what I mean by niching down. 

3) Invest in your chosen skill

I know people hate ebooks and courses and often feel like you can find the same information online for free.

I am very pro both. To get to certain levels of income you’ll need to spend money to make money.

Courses and ebooks offer a more structured learning experience as opposed to crowd sourcing information. Don’t worry I’m not selling you anything in this blog post but invest in your chosen skill.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re already really good at what you do or you’re just starting out, there’s always something to learn.

Invest in becoming really good at your chosen skill.

4) Brand yourself

This is the part where you work on selling yourself and your skills.

This can get tricky especially if you already have a social persona or you want to be incognito when you’re starting out. I struggled with this when I was starting out. I’m still trying to figure it out but I know I don’t want to merge my brands. 

Get a website/blog.

You want to look professional to your clients.

A premium price needs a premium look but don’t worry this doesn’t have to be expensive.

You can start a blog/set up a website on a site like namecheap with as little as $10 for both the hosting and your domain name using instructional videos from YouTube.

Figure out what name you want to go by and create a free logo on something like Canva.

Again do Google searches to see what other people in your industry are doing, how they’re pricing their services, their deliverables and borrow one or two things for this in terms of structuring your offers.

5) Get social proof

A key thing that will stand between you making very little money or a ridiculous amount of money is social proof.

People love and trust reviews. Bonus points if you attach names and websites/social media platforms people can reference when you’re writing your reviews section.

How do you get social proof when you’re first starting out? Good question. You use yourself as the guinea pig.

I am very anti doing free work. Free work doesn’t pay bills. I would not recommend doing that. How do you use yourself as the guinea pig? I’ll use myself as an example.

When I was getting started with Pinterest, I created an account as a social experiment.

If you know anything about Pinterest you know it can be very white centric. There’s no other way of putting this. That’s just the case even with the current improvements.

I got tired of adding black woman after a search term in order to get my desired results so I created boards that had content in this niche.

Shortly after that the account took off and the growth blows my mind to date.

So whenever someone would say okay, so you claim you’re really good at Pinterest, show me proof, where are the numbers? I’d show them that account.

If it’s applicable to you. Do something similar.

Have all the necessary data ready to present to prospective clients and add it to your website/service page too.

5) Price your services accordingly

This is a tricky part/topic.

I don’t think market rates should be applicable to service based businesses.

I feel like we’re all different & we’ve all invested varying amounts into our skills so why do you need my prices to look like the next person’s prices? 

You don’t want to price yourself too low because trust me there’ll always be someone who’s willing to go lower than you and probably already is.

The goal is not to be the cheap/cheapest option.

You also don’t want to price yourself too high when you’re starting out.

Not because you’ll lock out certain people- this is where target audience/ideal client mapping comes in, but because your deliverables might not match that price.

Make sure your premium price comes with a premium service. 

6) Find clients

Where do you find clients? High paying & international clients (for my non US folks)? This is the million dollar question. 

You can find international/high paying clients everywhere.

Facebook groups, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, online forums, Twitter, cold pitching (this is my least favorite one), referrals from industry friends or former clients. So many places.

I know people hate Facebook but you can make so much money just from being in the right Facebook groups.

Especially niche specific ones.

Always join groups in your niche, there’s no shortage of such groups on Facebook.

Use online forums wisely by joining in on discussions in your field of interest. The key is not being too salesy.

Look for people talking about a problem, provide a solution and then sell yourself to them.

7) Scaling

How scalable is what you’re currently doing?

I’m not sure whether scaling fits here in the traditional sense but what I mean is can whatever skill you’ve invested in/you want to start selling online be turned into other income streams?

Let’s use our tiktok person for example.

They’ll start off with offering tiktok services. Over time they can create and ebook in line with this or a course.

They can also do consult calls/strategy sessions with brands & businesses.

In the long run, they can also start a blog where they share Tiktok marketing tips.

This can be monetised using Ads and affiliate marketing.

Make sure whatever you’re doing can bring in money from more than one thing.

8) Ceiling amounts

This wouldn’t be a video/blog post by me if I didn’t touch on this.

I have a video on being intentional about your goals/manifesting your dream life on my Youtube channel where I talk about how much of a key ingredient working on your relationship with money is when it comes to scaling to certain income levels.

It’s important to not go in with a ceiling amount.

Ceiling amounts and this is my personal definition
-I checked and the internet says something different- is an amount which you think is too high/too good to be associated with you.

If you’re coming from an environment where you weren’t earning much it can be hard to think of certain amounts as achievable but they are.

No amount is too big or too good to be attached to your name.

Try starting  with these amounts in your currency first and then scale to setting the same amounts in your target currency if it makes it easier for you this way.

Make 100,000 in your currency first then jump to thinking about $100,000. Make 1,000,000 then jump to $1,000,000.

I’m not saying this is how big of a jump you should be making but set these as goals regardless.

You’ll be surprised how easy it is to hit certain goals once you stop thinking of them as unachievable. 

 9) Getting paid

If you know anything about PayPal then you know they can wake up one day, freeze everything and hold your money for 6 months and sometimes more if they wish.

I can’t think of anything that’s more frustrating than this. They closed my account and it wasn’t because I did anything wrong but because one of their customer service people Ill advised me.

I had to do a lot of back and forth with them to get my money even after the 6 months mark.  

I get it, PayPal is popular.

But, working hard to make your money then having to fight with PayPal to get the money is just not it.

There are a lot of businesses and affiliate platforms who use PayPal as a payout method which makes it difficult to completely separate yourself from the platform.

If you can, please do.

I currently use Wise to receive 80% of my payments. I love Wise.

It’s so easy to use and they don’t just randomly wake up and decide to close your account and illegally hold all your money like PayPal.

The set up is really simple.

You’ll just connect your card and make sure it has $20 on it. This amount will then reflect in your account after the sign up process so worry not.

They’ll then ask for your details, verify everything and you’ll be up and running in no time.

My favorite thing about wise is that they give you US bank account details among many other countries so you can receive your money without having to part with huge sums in fees.

Their conversion fees are also pretty low compared to other platforms so it’s a win win really.

Get fee free transfers of up to 500 GBP on Wise here.

There are obviously so many other payment processors out there but I don’t have experience with any of them so I can’t speak on them. 

11) The legal side of things

Protecting yourself legally is of extreme importance.

Consulting a lawyer and getting customised legal templates can get very expensive.

I often see influencers complaining about getting late payments from brands even after the ridiculous net 30 and 60 windows.

A good workaround for this is investing in a sponsored posts legal template written by an actual lawyer.

The good thing about this sponsored posts legal template is it comes with a clause that lets brands know they need to pay you on time or pay an extra fee for everyday they delay payments.

After a brand sends you their contract, you send them yours too.

If you’re not an influencer and you’re getting into the freelance world, there’s a freelance legal bundle that makes sure you’re legally protected too.

If you prefer just a single template, then check out the independent contractor legal template.

Pro tip, you save more money when you buy the templates as a bundle 😉.

That brings me to the end of this blog post. Let me know if you need further pointers on anything in the comments.