6 *proven* strategies I used to make $100,000+ with my Excel Skills

the six ways are freelancing business Consulting Excel products teaching Excel writing about Excel and Excel websites and newsletters and using these six techniques you can earn anywhere from two thousand dollars per year to more than hundred thousand dollars per year hi there my name is chandu and I have used all these six techniques over the last 15 years to make money with my Excel and data skills even though in this video I'm primarily talking about using your Excel skills to generate Revenue we can apply the same concept and use power bi or other data skills as well so what are these six ways number one is freelancing if you are sufficiently skilled in Excel that is you know your way around Excel you can get things done without frustrating or looking all over the web for help then you can use those Excel skills to help others who are not just capable or maybe don't have the time a common freelancing task that you could do is you can go and help somebody with the data entry it might seem very simple but many times the data entry jobs that people want done these days involve comprehensive research online so you'll have to go to websites collect some data or information and then load that into a spreadsheet program whether it is Excel or Google Docs or something else and many times these kind of jobs pay anywhere between couple of dollars per hour to maybe 10 20 dollars per hour and that is really the lower end of the spectrum because you're not even using Excel at this point Beyond typing information but if you take it to a little bit more like you know maybe doing something with Excel rather than just typing information the next level of work would be data cleansing many times businesses especially small and medium businesses what happens is they do have data but it's not completely clean it could be a bunch of invoices that need cleaning up it could be some client data that they want to scrub and make sure that it is in the correct format or whatever again you require more advanced Excel skills at this point like a good understanding of various data cleaning options available in Excel and how to productively and intelligently use them but if you can get these kind of things you can expect to earn more than maybe 10 20 dollars per hour sometimes complex cleaning exercises can pay you even more but if you go all the to the other end of the spectrum and this is where most of the Excel freelancing work that I have personally done comes into picture is building an Excel based solution for your clients so it could be creating a complex dashboard for them or building a VBA application for them or creating a spreadsheet template for managing a business process and when you are going to this end of the spectrum you can expect a really good hourly rates or project rates for example uh when I started doing these kind of works this is thousand it is about thirty dollars twenty five dollars per hour but fast forward to 2022 and 2023 nowadays I am charging almost 200 to 50 dollars per hour for building either Excel or power bi or Power Platform based solutions for my clients so you can see that kind of like a rapid increase in the earning potential when you go and find these kind of things so with this kind of a freelance thing let's say you're able to find maybe 20 hours of work per month and you're able to average somewhere between five and ten dollars per hour for that sort of work you could expect to earn in a typical month anywhere between 100 to 200 extra Revenue by doing this and this just means you know doing some simple jobs like data cleansing or data collection or some internet research and compilation of data ways can you find these kind of jobs the simple freelancing jobs you can find on websites like upwork or Fiverr or other places but more complex freelancing jobs I'll talk about how to acquire those kind of claims towards the end of the video the second one is a business Consulting there is a famous saying that if you give a man fish you will only feed them for one day but if you teach them how to fish then you know you are feeding them for the life what many people don't understand is some people don't want to be learning how to fish nor they are interested in the fish no one wants to eat raw fish anyway what is it that we like to eat we like to eat properly cooked fish salad or a nice plate of fish and chips or maybe a an empty fish curry that's really what we want so instead of thinking as Excel freelancer if you repackage that and position yourself as a business consultant then you have the higher chance of making more money but also helping people with their real business problems so for example imagine you're an accountant and you do have Excel skills then instead of selling your Excel skills you could package that with your accounting skills and offer their bookkeeping skills sell your accounting financial statement preparation kind of thing as a package that's really what we want we want that fish curry here which is the financial statement we are not interested in whether you know vlookup or index match or X lookup or power query that is all irrelevant so if you approach the using my Excel skins to make money as using my Excel plus business skills to make money and then think about what business Consulting you can offer then you have a chance to make more money through those skills and I have done this like initially I was building just extra things but later on I I started telling my clients that I can create a really impressive and beautiful dashboard for you so now this is a different skill and it was a helpful for me because then I could ask for more money per hour and get that in order to succeed with this kind of business Consulting you need not just Excel and business skills but good amount of experience as well because that is when you will really shine as a consultant the third option for making money with your Excel slash data skills is to create a product and this is what I call as a passive income opportunity here what we are gonna do is make a product with either Excel or power bi or something else that can solve a business problem going back to the fish analogy this is like rather than a fish curry they are ordering a ready to eat fish curry so it's not as yummy as a custom made Curry but it is still tasty and you know it will satisfy them so what sort of an Excel products can you create I'll share a couple of examples from my personal life one example is this is a product that I created with someone else as a partner is a Excel wedding planner it is an Excel template where you will fill up all the details about your wedding and it will generate the planning for you it will generate seed plants it will give you a template for maintaining your wedding budget guest lists and gift register everything related to weddings it's a very fun project we had lots of fun building it and we offered it for sale on my website and basically bought this wedding planner another kind of excel template or Excel product that I created is a ready to use Excel dashboard this is where you would put in your business data in the file will generate 16 kinds of different business dashboards that you can readily take and use it in a presentation or a meeting or anything like that in fact that is still available for purchase so if you are interested check the video description to get a copy of that so think about your business skills and data skills and see what business problem you can solve and then create a product again this kind of a thing is something that it is helpful if you have lots of experience because then you can watch the patterns if every client of you is having same problem then you can see that oh this is a common denominator here I can take this and create a product from that and make a minimum viable product initially test it out with few clients and later on you can build up and when you're creating a product because there is no extra time involved once you create it will keep selling even when you are not putting any extra work it works in a great way to create some passive revenue for you a typical Excel product you can expect to sell anywhere from ten dollars to fifty or hundred dollars depending on how complex that product is and what problems it is solving and let's just say you make a ten dollar product and you're able to find 10 people to buy it every month really simple numbers in a year you're really talking about generating twelve hundred dollars just through that and it might take you 10 20 30 hours initially to create that once but once you create it it will keep on generating that revenue for some time it may not be forever but maybe few years so that is a an awesome way to generate some extra money through the Excel skills or power bi the fourth way to use Excel skills to make money is teaching Excel you can for example go to a local college and ask them if they need any Excel trainers or real world practitioners to teach their graduates how to use Excel you can ask within your company itself if you can do some Excel tutoring or training or mentoring or like what I'm doing on my channel you can start a Channel or some other course and teach Excel there as well and I've done all of these things when I when I initially started my blog and wrote about Excel I never thought I know I would teach excel in a more audio visual format or in person but over time people started asking hey chandu can you teach us Excel and that is how some of my courses and in-person classes became a reality and teaching is something that uh it is not for everybody because not everyone enjoys the teaching or not everyone who can use Excel very well can also be a great teacher so if it is something that you feel like yes I can teach I can I enjoy this process and I feel like I can make a difference in someone's life through teaching then definitely consider teaching what you are learning teaching is also a great way to improve your communication skills learn the new things as well as whatever you are learning if you are teaching somebody else you will remember and understand the concepts better this is why many teachers if you watch them over time the teacher is also improving a lot because they are constantly teaching they are getting a lot of feedback from the students and that helps them improve their craft so how do you make money with this kind of a teacher initially if you're just teaching for fun you may not make much money because probably there is not much scope but if you do find some corporate clients or companies willing to train their teams that is a great starting point for example for a one-day Excel training program you could expect to charge anywhere from 500 to 5 000 per day of training so even if you do like five days of that in a year at a lower end you are making 2500 at a higher and twenty five thousand dollars so there is a huge earning potential with doing in-person classes and if you take that online and start teaching online then you can also make it like a passive thing where you create a course and offer it for sale on platforms like teachable Etc and once you your course is there people can constantly purchase it generating revenue for it but it is not that easy to kind of make a mark on all of these I'm gonna talk about how to actually find the clients for teaching in products or freelancing towards the end of the video like I mentioned and of all the things to which I made money in Excel teaching is the biggest thing for me both because it made me a lot of money as well as it made me a better communicator and a better individual so and it gives me a lot of satisfaction because when I teach people I see how awesome they are getting at their work and how happy they are that they're unlocking all of these potential in them and it makes me really joyous that I'm able to contribute to that so yeah if you if you're not really sure which one to pick and if you if you have something cling in your mind that maybe teaching is what I will enjoy then definitely give it a try the fifth option for using your Excel skills to make money is writing about Excel for example let's just say you are HR professional and you do use Excel a lot in your day-to-day work you could create a eBook on essential Excel skills for HR people and then put it out on either Amazon or some other platform where ebooks can be sold and maybe sell it for two dollars five dollars ten dollars or something like that initially it might be hard to find people but once you enough people read and review that book then it will kind of become like this rolling Snowball Effect because enough people have read and given its five star ratings or four star ratings more people will find it and they will also read it and writing books is another great way to enhance your skills because when you are writing uh you just start thinking about how else can I explain this what are analogies can I use here or how I can illustrate this so that it is all making sense and that will make you understand and remember and use the technology better and also it will enhance your profile so it if you are applying for a freelance job you can say Excel Specialist or you can say Excel specialist and author of books and the second one instinctly adds a lot of credibility to an alternative to books and ebooks is you could also write on a website so this actually kind of goes into our sixth option which is websites and newsletters if you are sufficiently skilled in a particular skill or a newsletter or a combination of both and share the information and this is where there is no direct monetary reward when you have a website or a platform where your information is published then what you could also do is you could start thinking of monetizing it for example you could insert some ads onto the page you could partner with some other people who are offering services and mention about those services on the website in return for some revenue or you could use some affiliate programs and other stuff as well and that is a great way to grow your brand as well so I have a website like most of you probably know and that is how I got started into this journey I started my website in 2004 and around 2006 I completely switched it to talking about Excel and that is pretty much how I got launched into this career path if your website gets sufficient amount of good kind of traffic that is in a particular industry or a particular Niche then you can generate anywhere from fifteen hundred dollars per month to five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand dollars per month in just ad revenues alone so these are the six ways in which you can generate the revenue or from your Excel skills you get freelance you could offer business Consulting Services create an Excel product teach Excel write about Excel and maintain a website or newsletter now you might be thinking this is all good I do know these six ways but how do I actually I don't know you know if I go and advertise myself as a freelancer on Fiverr or upwork I'm not getting any projects if I wrote a book nobody is buying it how do I really do that and this is also where the key is to actually build your yourself up and this reminds me of a famous quotation by Abraham Lincoln he famously said if I have eight hours to chop a trade I'll spend the first six sharpening my Acts so think about using your data skills to make money as chopping the tree then you don't want to straight away get on it and chop the tree what you want is you want to have a really sharp aches how do you do that you want to build yourself as a solid individual that have really good skills and Real World Experience so my top suggestion is maybe work for some years while you are working and while you are building that skills think of starting a website or a platform where you can build up your profile don't think of this as a personal publicity place instead think of it like here is my website I'm gonna talk about my work I'm going to talk about the projects that I'm passionate about I'm gonna talk about the skills that I'm acquiring and I'm gonna share that information with the world you might think why make a website I can go and talk about my stuff on LinkedIn or YouTube or somewhere else while those are all good none of those platforms are warned by you so a LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft Google YouTube is owned by Google Etc so if you are going and putting pitching your tent in their ground by definition they own it so you don't really have much control over it so it's better to have your website early on and create that as the main place and use these other things as anchors that kind of point back to the website so once you have that website keep building it over a period of time and then start experimenting with various things this is where if your website is there and it is able to kind of attract people either through search traffic or referrals or something else then over time there will be enough people finding about you and some of them will convert to paying customers whether it is through freelancing teaching or you know reading your book or purchasing your product or asking you to deliver a seminar for their team or whatever may be the case you know enough people will will be attracted to your site that they can do it and you can take this kind of a formula really apply for any industry it doesn't really have to be data industry or Excel particular if the same thing can be done with anything as well if you're wondering how do I create these website or newsletter or something I do have some links in the video description below check them out and sign up and create your own website newsletter course or learn a little bit more about this whole process and the six skills I wish you all the very best in your journey to use your Excel skills and generate this Revenue all the best to you and I'll catch you again somewhere else bye

Channel: Chandoo

Views: 190,853

Keywords: chandoo, chandoo.org, Excel, spreadsheets, how to earn money with excel skills, excel freelancing, how to make second income with Excel skills, excel jobs, passive income, passive income ideas, make money from excel

Id: USU2AzGWu_Q

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023