expertise

How to Turn Your Expertise Into a Side Hustle

Nick Wharton — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 08:30:33 +0000

As the old saying goes, "knowledge is power," and the rise of the internet has created many opportunities to turn your knowledge into cold hard cash. Maybe you're looking for a new career, or perhaps you're just looking to build a side hustle that will bring in a few extra bucks. Either way, selling what you know online could turn out to be a great little earner for you.

There are various ways to sell your knowledge over the internet, depending on what you are selling and the format you use. A few years ago, it might have required an advanced understanding of technology or a load of cash to get your idea off the ground, but these days, there are plenty of ways to get going with minimal upfront investment — making it easy for anyone with a computer and an internet connection to start a side hustle. (See also: How to Build a Side Business While Keeping Your Day Job)

1. Write an ebook

It used to be that if you couldn't find a traditional publishing house that accepted your manuscript, then you'd have no other choice but to pay to have it printed yourself. Luckily, ebooks have blown the publishing world wide open and have enabled almost anyone to produce and sell a story directly to readers with very few costs attached. It also means that books are extremely quick to create. You can have your ebook ready to go not long after it's written.

To go through Amazon, you can write the ebook in your normal word processing software, then format it with Kindle Create, and create a cover for it in a free design program like Canva. You can then self-publish it through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing.

But for wider distribution, look also at NookPress and Kobo Writing Life, which are other self-publishing platforms. For the widest reach possible, it's best to publish with all of the major players rather than sticking to a single one.

2. Host webinars

Hosting live webinar sessions allows you to share your knowledge to an audience without the need for them to be physically present. It's like a conference or seminar but done on a remote basis, saving learners the cost of travel and accommodation. The real benefit of webinars is that you can interact with your audience as you go, by allowing real-time questions or holding a Q&A session at the end. This ensures that everyone gets exactly what they want from the session.

Webinars can be simple presentations carried out on Skype or even Facebook Live, but more advanced tools will allow you to create better, more engaging seminars. Google Hangouts is free to use and has numerous collaborative features perfect for hosting web sessions.

Alternatively, there are various paid software tools such as GoToMeeting or Cisco Webex that are specifically for designing and conducting webinars. You need to have an audience large enough to make it worth your while, so it helps if you already have a following on social media or a website to allow you to publicize the event. (See also: 13 Ways to Make Money Teaching Your Skills to Others)

3. Become an online consultant

For people with a sought after skill set that businesses want to access, online consulting works extremely well. There are many reasons why businesses prefer to work with online consultants rather than those who physically come onto the work premises. These range from not wanting to upset the workforce with an outsider's presence while still benefiting from a pair of fresh eyes, to the simple reality that it's often less costly to hire an online consultant while still receiving an expert level of service.

It helps to have a niche skill that you have proven expertise in, as this will lend you much needed credibility. Getting started in online consulting can be difficult, so it's vital to use any and all contacts you already have to get your first break. Once you have your first few contracts secured, you will hopefully begin to get referrals or recommendations and see a snowball effect.

4. Provide online tutoring

Online tutoring is a great way to share your experience with people who want to learn one-on-one with an expert in their chosen subject. You don't need to have a degree in education, but you’ll need skills or knowledge in something that people are willing to pay to learn. Subjects like English, math, and science, are particularly in demand. However, it's possible to tutor online on other topics such as foreign languages (or English as a foreign language), or even learning an instrument.

There are numerous online agencies that match people with tutors in their chosen subject, so you won't have to actively search or advertise for clients. Generally, you fill out an application and they decide whether they accept you or not. Once you've been accepted and have registered, they will send you jobs as they become available. (See also: How to Earn $1,000 a Month or More as an Online Tutor)

5. Create an online course

If you have knowledge that you want to spread far and wide, and know there's an audience there to lap it up, then an online course may be the right path for you. Online courses allow you to reach more people than you could on a one-on-one basis, both from a time perspective, and also because you can sell a course much cheaper than individual tutoring.

It's a huge amount of work initially to design and build your course, but once this is done, the course should provide passive income with little to no further effort. There are various delivery methods that you'll have to select, depending on what you want to achieve. Courses that email your lessons to students are easy to set up with providers such as MailChimp, or you can put your materials out in module format with the Udemy marketplace. (See also: How I Made $400 in 10 Days by Selling an Online Course I Created)

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This article is from Nick Wharton of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Crappy practice is a waste of time

Philip Brewer — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:40:24 +0000

If you want to get good at something, you need to practice. If you're not trying to get better, and just want to enjoy doing whatever it is, there's no need to practice--do what you love and ignore anyone who wants you to do it better. But if you're going to practice, then practice. Don't do something else and call it practice. That's no good.

A while back I was talking to some friends about the idea (known for some time now, but recently popularized in the book Talent Is Overrated) that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to develop expertise at some skill. I had just written a post about the work by K. Anders Ericsson, the researcher whose work demonstrated that the number of hours semed to be the same over a wide range of activities from chess to tennis to playing the violin.

Ericsson defined a term "deliberate practice," by which he meant doing some piece of the task, monitoring the quality of the performance, evaluating success, figuring out how to do it better, and then repeating that process and trying to do it better. But when I tried to describe it, my friend interrupted me and said, "practice." I backed up and tried again, but once again, my friend insisted that what I was talking about was "practice"--not anything special or out of the ordinary. Just practice.

Ericsson justified creating a special term this way:

We call these practice activities deliberate practice and distinguish them from other activities, such as playful interaction, paid work, and observation of others, that individuals can pursue in the domain.

But my friend was right: It degrades the language to invent a new, special term to mean what "practice" already means. Better to keep "practice" to mean practice. If anything needs to be given a new term, it should be the non-practice activities that sometimes masquerade as practice.

When a musician gives a performance, he's trying to entertain the audience, not get better at playing his instrument. When a worker on assembly line builds a widget, he's trying to build a good widget, not get better at making widgets. When someone plays a video game, he's trying to have fun, not get better at playing video games. As long as these non-practice activities are not intended as practice, all is well.

(It's worth mentioning that any of these activities may, in fact, result in increased expertise--because some amount of monitoring quality, evaluating success, and figuring out how to do it better is going on. But that just means that these other things--performing, working, playing--include some aspects of practice. It's fine to acknowledge this, but don't imagine that these activities are thereby transformed into practice.)

Degrading the term "practice" has a real downside. If you let yourself call it practice, when what you're actually doing is just playing around, you're going to do more playing around and less practice--because playing around is easy and practice is hard. That's bad if you're trying to get better, because if what you're doing is not practice, you're not going to develop expertise.

Practice doesn't need a new name--it has long been understood. Neither do we need a new name for those other things you might be doing ("performing" or "working" or "teaching" or "playing" or "observing" or "reading" or "studying"). Perhaps, though, it's appropriate to come up with a new name for whatever it is that people do when they call it practice, but what they're really doing is just playing around. I've started to call that "crappy practice." And the important thing to remember is that crappy practice is no good way to get better at something.

This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

How to Become an Expert

Philip Brewer — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:04:20 +0000

This article is not about how to fake being an expert, so it's not some quick, easy thing you can do and then be way better at something tomorrow. It's about actually becoming an expert, which will take time and effort. You can spend the time and effort, though, and fail to become an expert. Here's how to spend it and succeed.

Just to be clear, this is about becoming an expert at doing something. People use the same word to describe being an expert about something, but this is about doing.

At any skill that's difficult, becoming an expert will take a long time. The thing is, not becoming an expert takes just as long.

Old joke:

Q: Do you know how old I'd be, if I spent the next twenty years learning how to play the piano?

A: The same age you'd be if you spent the next twenty years not learning how to play the piano.

Developing expertise

So, how do you become an expert at doing something? The answer, of course, is "practice," but there are two complications.

The first is that you can't really practice until you can do your activity, at least at some minimal level. That's one place where all the other activities besides practice come in: taking a class, reading a book, watching someone else do it. (There are also activities that are too dangerous to just jump in and start practicing on your own — clearing unexploded munitions, for example.)

The second is that there's useful practice (deliberate practice) and then there's all the other things you might do that are easier than deliberate practice, but that don't help you develop expertise.

Deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is just this:

performing your skill (or, more typically, a piece of it)
monitoring your performance
evaluating your success
figuring out how to do it better

and then repeating that sequence again and again.

That's it. That's how to become an expert. Most experts have done just that, for hours a day, for years.

Most of the information here is based on K. Anders Ericsson's paper The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. That paper has data for violin players, piano players, chess players, gymnasts, runners, tennis players, and swimmers. The domain doesn't seem to matter — deliberate practice is the key developing expert performance.

Not deliberate practice

Deliberate practice isn't a lot of fun. What's fun is actually doing whatever it is you've learned how to do. You will even get better at your activity through just doing it (because to some extent you will be monitoring, evaluating, and figuring). But just doing your activity won't make you an expert, even if you do it a lot.

Becoming an expert takes deliberate practice, and deliberate practice is what's described above.

Everything else is not deliberate practice:

Taking a class (although some classes might include some deliberate practice in them)
Attending a lecture
Reading an article or a book
Watching an expert perform
Teaching
Most especially, actually performing your skill isn't deliberate practice

Now, any of those activities may be useful, but their use is largely in improving your monitoring and evaluating skills. When you're still trying to learn how to tell if you're doing well or poorly, a teacher can be a big help. If you're starting to feel like you're really getting quite good, watching a real expert can help you re-calibrate your self-evaluation.

Spotting deliberate practice

Once you've been made aware of the difference between "practice" (i.e. just doing your activity) and "deliberate practice," you'll begin to spot deliberate practice all over the place:

A musician playing scales
A kid playing the same level of a video game over and over again
A child learning to walk

Actually, small children do this all the time. If you want to understand the acquisition of expert performance, just watch a child learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to make something work. You'll see deliberate practice in its purest form.

Becoming an expert writer

Happily for me, writing for Wise Bread is giving me a chance to develop some expertise as a writer. There's an internal cycle where I write something, read it, evaluate whether it clearly says exactly what I want to say, and then try to make it better. That is, my ordinary write-edit-rewrite cycle amounts to deliberate practice.

There's also an external cycle where I post it to the web and see if the comments show that people understood it and found it useful. That external cycle isn't deliberate practice, but it helps me get better at the monitoring and evaluating steps — it makes my future deliberate practice more effective.

That's it in a nutshell: Develop expertise through deliberate practice.

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This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: