A consultant has a flexible work schedule with an increased earning by offering to sell his or her expertise both online and offline. Thanks to the rise of the digital economy globally, the demand for people with specialized skill-sets is on the rise and consultants are earning big bucks to use their skills.
Gone are the days when consultants have to be renowned experts in a field before they can sell their services. Today, all you have to do is to help someone achieve a goal.
As with every business, picking a good niche to serve as a consultant in will most likely determine how much you earn from it. But the truth is there is absolutely no limit to the amount of cash that can accrue to you via your consultancy gigs.
Tips on being a Pro Consultant
To earn money from any business means you have to help achieve a predetermined goal. In consultancy, the goal has been set by your client and they require your help to accomplish this.
Your job as a consultant is to ensure that this is done seamlessly and smoothly. Your clients won’t appear out of thin air. They also won’t magically become aware of your consultancy gig.
How then can you help yourself as a consultant? Follow some of these tips to help you create the credibility and awareness needed for your business to boom.
Create a niche for yourself and add Value
The question to answer here is “Personally, what can I offer my client in terms of an area of expertise as a consultant?” establishing this fact will help you focus on a niche within to build your expertise and reputation. This will help you create awareness as a seasoned consultant among a targeted population who are in need of the skill sets you offer.
If you do a good job for a client, the chances of you getting a satisfied client just increased. You can then focus on using this satisfaction to market yourself to more clients. Also, a satisfied client is an excellent source of referrals which in turn grows your business. Always strive to add value to your consulting gigs as this is the most assured way of getting customer satisfaction.
Create a digital footprint
Technology has clearly impacted every facet of our lives today and the business of consulting is not an exception. By increasing your digital footprint, you are creating more avenues and chances of clients finding you and your business.
The best and most efficient way for potential clients to reach out is through technology interfaces.
Create a professional website for your business and create relevant content to attract a targeted population. Also, being active on social media will create a sufficient digital footprint for your business which will attract clients and drive revenue.
Having enough digital presences means potential clients now know beforehand about your style of working, areas of specialization, and the successes you’ve had so far
Focus on networking
If you are a newbie or a seasoned consultant, now is the right time to put your network into use. Your personal and professional networks that can attest to your skillset and recommend you to friends and colleagues will help you grow your business.
The key here is to always offer correct and up-to-date information to your networks. You can also offer a sneak peek of your services through short sessions; either for free or for a very nominal charge. This would ensure full comprehension of your business by your network and also guarantee instant marketing of your services.
Offer complementary services
As a consultant, you automatically create loads of content based on your niche and the unique experiences that you have developed. It’s advisable to produce videos or e-books that can serve as complementary to your consulting service and also generate revenues for your business.
As soon as your consultant practice has been established, complementary services can be a great source of inspiration and motivation to others as well as attracting potential clients to your services.
Build lasting relationships
Getting into the consultancy business does not translate to instant earnings for you. You have to keep an open mind as a consultant and build lasting relationships. These relationships will over the years stand as the backbone of referrals as well as new clients for your business.
How to Earn Money as a Consultant
There are numerous ways to earn money as a consultant. The consulting business also offers mouth-watering perks that should tickle your fancy any day. In this article, we will be considering just some of the few ways in which you can monetize your consulting skills to increase your earnings.
Start a Blog
Not many consultants consider blogs as an avenue to earn money as a consultant. Spoiler alert! It is!! Seeing that many people are probably in search of answers in your chosen niche online. Not all are willing to pay a consultant which is why they conduct online research. You can leverage this to target those looking for an answer with a simple solution.
Creating a blog is easy today and can be done in a matter of hours. And by launching your blog, you now have the ability to target a much larger audience effectively.
This offers you an incredible way of reaching new consulting clients as it opens up a whole new communications channel. It will also provide you with a decent passive income.
Write a Book
Writing a book can help you build trust and credibility as a consultant and at the same time, it can serve as a moderate source of income. On occasions, people have gotten rich by writing books as a consultant, but not everyone.
The fact is if you want to earn more as a consultant, you cannot avoid publishing at least one book. To make this work for you, you should consider self-publishing in this instance. There are great resources available to you on the internet to achieve this and your book can be published in few months.
Produce Online Courses
The concept of making money via online courses is easy. As a consultant, you can create online courses on your niche and require your audience to pay a premium fee to access such courses.
You are most likely creating value with these courses and this provides you with additional earnings. The most interesting aspect is that you are only required to work on and edit the course on time. After then you can sell your courses in an infinite amount of time.
Provide Personal or Individual Courses
You can make money as a consultant by simply delivering personal courses or lectures. To do this, partner with someone or some company who is responsible for filling up the audience. You can as well market yourself to the public.
Either way, you get paid directly. To even juice it up more, you can perform this simple trick to increase your earnings. After or during each lecture, take time to promote your other products with incentives such as instant discounts especially online courses. The chances that your audience will be willing to order other materials from your increase.
Create your own Projects
Putting into practice what you are recommending to others is an awesome way of earning money as a consultant. This becomes more so if what you teach others works for them, then it should work for you.
Although being able to scale up as some of your clients might not be possible, nut it should be enough to get you started with an extra side hustle. Consider this analogy to help put things in perspective.
As an online marketing consultant and SEO Expert, you earn most of your income with online courses in the marketing niche. But if you apply some of these techniques to run a few blogs in other niches, you earn more. These blogs will serve as an alternate source of passive income. Not only that, but they are also good proof that what you are teaching is actually working.
Engage Affiliate Programs
As a consultant, your biggest chance to increase your passive earnings is to promote affiliate products or services. The key to this is to ensure that you only promote products you trust. There is nothing worse for a consultant than ruining their credibility for a stipend commission.
Surely, there are a few products that you’re using or offering to your clients and you can earn some commissions on these referrals. The cool aspect, this is not difficult at all. Simply search for affiliate opportunities with the products your advising. An example of where to start is one of the biggest affiliate programs Amazon Associates. Take, for instance, a fashion consultant; you can have a few trendy products in your store itself. This way you can earn money on products sold as well as attract more customers for the comfort provided of not going out to search for those items.
And these don’t even have to be big affiliate programs. You can simply partner with other consultants that are not your direct competition but serving the same target audience.
Bigger Clients equal Bigger Projects
One form of making the really big bucks as a consultant is to partake in big projects. This method is quite old and doesn’t always come with the usual products or commissions or passive income known with modern consultancy.
The one major advantage of this is that it is simply much more lucrative to have a large contract and work with your clients on big projects.
Also, studies show that it takes almost the same effort to sell one hour of consultancy as selling a 6-month consulting project. In other words, it is easier to sell this type of consulting. Why not trade up your income rate when the opportunity comes?
Monthly Contracts
One way of monetizing your consultant skills is to make monthly contracts. This is one of the safest ways of securing long-term income by requiring your clients to stay committed to your service on a monthly basis.
Clients often have myriads of problems that they want solutions for. And it’s going to be pretty difficult to provide solutions to all in an hour’s session. Therefore, dedicate your services to the success of your clients by offering them a long-term relationships with monthly contracts.
By doing this, you earn more money and your clients will be more satisfied as they can count on your help up to the end.
Charge per Hour
This has to be the easiest and most popular way of making money as a consultant. But charging per hour is not all rosy as it sounds and is advisable to not concentrate much of your efforts on this.
To be truthful, charging per hour is more or less being an employee. And since the reason for going into consultancy is to be free, then charging per hour limits that freedom. The reason for this is simple, your time is limited and you can earn only so much money selling your time.
To making charging per hour successful, then you must ensure to charge at least 3x your desired income as an hourly rate. Why? It’s impossible to consult for people 100% of your time. You need to allocate time for making clients, paperwork, and other business errands.
Conclusion
By applying some or all of the above-stated strategies, a consultant can leverage his or her consulting expertise to generating a sustainable source of income stream.
Away from the monetary value of these aforementioned tactics, the application of any can also help assert dominance on a particular niche. And becoming a force to reckon with in any niche means more clients for you to convert into more earnings.
The success or failure of your consultancy business is greatly dependent on your credibility. Be assured, if you’re good with what you do, people will be willing to pay you as a consultant. Find the best method from all these listed above to make money as a consultant, and don’t be afraid to use more or even all of them.
