My readers know that I have grown to appreciate the minimalist movement, and have even taken steps to minimize my own lifestyle. Part of effectively minimizing, though, is being pretty organized. Making lists, planning meals and using resources like Amazon’s Subscribe & Save can qualify as part of living a minimalist lifestyle. Yet, you can be super organized and not be a minimalist, and whether or not you want to streamline your number of possessions and keep your life generally uncluttered, you can definitely use organizational skills to make money. In fact, more and more people are more than happy to hand over control of their homes and their living spaces to people with strong organizational skills.
However, before you say, “Nope, not interested in finding a way to use organizational skills to make money if it means dealing with a hoarder every week or so!” give me a minute longer. Why? Because you don’t have to use organizational skills to make money in that way alone. Yes, you might encounter any number of folks who just cannot throw anything away, but you will also encounter people in need of many other kinds of support.
As an example, there are ways to use organizational skills to make money providing services to:
- Businesses
- Homeowners
- Addressing people’s behaviors
- Helping to organize closets and wardrobes
- People struggling with shopping and errands
- People or businesses dealing with moving and relocation
- Businesses or individuals in need of design work, and more…
This means you can sell your time by the hour, and you must also consider selling time as a basic consultant. In other words, look at the ways you can market yourself by the hour, but on the phone or through channels like Skype.
And even better, perhaps, is that you can actually use organizational skills to make money through activities like blogging and affiliate marketing.
Start With a Focus
Of course, to most effectively use those organizational skills, you have to focus in on the specific niche or niches where you are going to offer them. As an example, will you focus on offering seniors the use organizational skills to make money? Maybe you want to emphasize businesses or specific types of businesses, such as builders and contractors? The point is that you need to be clear about where you can aim your organizational skills with the most effectiveness, AND where you enjoy using them the most.
After all, you can go right ahead and use organizational skills to make money, but if you hate it, you won’t stick with it or make as much as you could.
So, the first step is to figure out where you will actually apply your know how. Keep in mind that you don’t even have to spend time with real world clients in need of organization. It could be that you offer workshops and seminars online or that you write books and handbooks. It could be that you consult with people looking for help in organizational issues – including people who are not working with tangible items but with concepts and ideas.
As an example, you can easily use organizational skills to make money by helping an event planner to create a fail-proof system for any project. You might help someone to organize their new home by helping them with kitchen design, or you can use organizational skills to help educators design training programs. The point here is that you don’t actually need to do any hands-on work such as sorting items or more cumbersome tasks.
Do you need some help figuring this out? Consider the most obvious clients, and then build on these ideas. For example:
- Homeowners or homemakers – They may need help organizing a kitchen to avoid food waste, best utilize cabinet space, save money on groceries, and so on. They may have a room they want to turn into a workspace for a work from home gig, but have no idea about the best way to do it. They could be looking to reorganize their closets and need help with that. The list is endless.
- Teachers and educators of all kinds – Teachers are not taught systems for time management or optimal organization and can end up really struggling with work/life balance issues. You can use organizational skills to make money by working with educators to help them design time management systems that get all of their work done in a realistic time frame. They may benefit from your skills in classroom and work area organization. Maybe they have a home office that is cluttered and inefficient. As you can see, teachers and educators can benefit from your skills.
- Businesses – Business managers have whatever skills they learned in school and on the job, but it doesn’t mean they are experts at keeping paperwork, projects and other issues organized and on track. Warehouses can be disorganized and inefficient, yet a few days with an expert can turn this around. Office layouts can be counterproductive or disruptive, and a seasoned eye can see such things and restore balance. The business area alone could be your entire focus.
As you can see, the list of people who might benefit from your willingness to use organizational skills to make money is endless.
Getting Started
How do you begin? Well, that can vary from person to person, but it isn’t a bad idea to pay a visit to NAPO, the National Association of Professional Organizers. They can help you get your training and certification. This is valuable because it also puts you on their search engine. This appears on their home page and lets anyone find a professional organizer or productivity consultant in their immediate area. It is like free marketing and something I highly recommend if you are serious about using organizational skills to make money.
Of course, you don’t want to rely on that one channel alone, and so I urge anyone who wants to use organizational skills to make money to also build a website around this goal.
Your Website and How It Allows You to Use Organizational Skills to Make Money
Websites are essential to any sort of business. They are the modern equivalent to the old school yellow pages ads and listings. Without a website, you just cannot be found by your potential clients.
Yet, a website is not a “build it and they will come” entity. It has to have signs pointing to it and leading clients in that direction. This is something you can do with SEO, marketing and word of mouth. The good news is that most of these things are also part of affiliate marketing, and so I suggest you begin to build your site by also integrating an affiliate marketing component into it at the same time.
My regular readers are familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing. This is a system that allows you to serve as a content creator. You make content such as blogs, articles, eBooks, videos and graphics that promote certain ideas, but which are not obvious sales materials. As an example, a professional organizer might write a blog about the benefits of spring cleaning or top tips to make spring cleaning easier and more effective.
That is something helpful and informative. It is given away to readers for free and without any strings attached. There will be, however, keywords carefully chosen to help with SEO. There will also be links in that blog or graphic that send a reader to an affiliate product or service.
As an example, in the blog about spring cleaning, you write about the benefits of making your own cleaners if you are worried about toxins. You also mention that “Brand XYZ” makes eco friendly options, as well. You have an existing affiliate relationship with that brand, and if the reader clicks the link and makes the purchase, you get a portion of the proceeds.
It is fairly remarkable what blending your marketing goals with affiliate marketing tactics might achieve. After all, the content you create has to be of interest and value to your audience if it is to bring them to your site and encourage them to get in touch. Yet, at the same time, almost everything you write could include affiliate links that help you earn steady income.
And here it is important to remind you that organizational work doesn’t always have to be about physically tidying up. Maybe you want to use organizational skills to make money helping different people with time management. This is always going to involve activities like organizing and tidying up work spaces, but is much deeper than that. You can write articles about time management, organizing projects, creating effective calendars, and so on. And at the same time, you can also find ways to link affiliate marketing to this subject, too.
As an example, desktop organizing products, eBooks about time or project management, templates an affiliate program offers for people working on better approaches to project planning…these are all possibilities.
Use Those Skills to Make Plans
To begin, I suggest you use a sort of mental image and mapping concept I suggested in another article about making money from hobbies. In it, I suggested taking the focal point or main subject and writing it as a few words in the center of a blank page and circling them. Then, I recommended drawing lines extending away from the circle and out to words and ideas that are actually associated with main issue.
The items at the ends of those lines or threads are the most logical topics for blogs and other content. As an example, let’s say you are someone who is going to offer your services to homeowners. You want to focus on organizing living and working spaces in the home – such as closets and kitchens. So, begin with the kitchen concept. What sorts of ideas do you associate with organizing the kitchen? It could be all about avoiding food waste and cutting food costs. You could write an article about the ways that Amazon’s Pantry options or Subscribe & Save services save money – but emphasize that they work better when your home is completely organized, right down to predictive weekly shopping lists. You might talk about the ways tidy cupboards keep kitchens cleaner in general, or how a tag sale can help someone make enough money for a dream holiday or kitchen update (and how reorganizing is a huge part of that issue).
The list of ideas is expansive. The point to consider is how you want to talk about it. Then, use those ideas to map out a month or more of blogs and other content. Be sure you are focusing on all of the areas you wish to address. That means doing this mapping exercise for each main idea – such as clothing closets, bathroom linen closets, garages, and so on.
You will have an endless range of options, but if you want to use organizational skills to make money, it is a valuable exercise. It helps you identify where you can also build affiliate marketing relationships. As I said earlier, it never has to be about home or office reorganizing alone. It can be done in a huge variety of ways. The point is to figure out the right subjects and then start creating the best content for your potential audience.
When you do this, everything you create can be shared on social media, email and so on. This is what helps you build an audience and start to get buying customers on top of the affiliate profits. Also, you may even start to make money through paid advertising, promotional and other channels.
Take some time today to visit that NAPO website and see what areas of organization appeal to you most. Then, consider how you might talk about this special interest to those who need your skills. Faster than you might think, you are going to have paying customers eager to have your help!
Source
https://www.brit.co/how-to-get-into-professional-organizing/