Do you work in the software development industry?
Big news: programming expertise is an important skill set that will help you accelerate your career. For example, one of the most satisfying and highest-paying jobs are DevOps specialists (read more on my blog article about this excellent job description). But DevOps specialists need to have a high-level of coding expertise—gained through working on practice projects in different developer teams.
However, programming is NOT the most important skill to become wildly successful in the field. Especially, if you are working as a freelance developer online, creating your coding side-business, or looking for other ways to increase your income.
[Article] Learn how to bootstrap your online coding business with no money down.
These two skills are MORE important than programming expertise to earn six figures online:
Sales and Marketing. Without the shadow of a doubt, this is the most important skill you can have as a self-employed freelance developer online. You can even have ONLY this skill and become wildly successful and very rich these days. Countless online marketers do just that. They create their community of like-minded people, offer more value, and are crushing it.
As a programmer, you need to know how to market and position yourself. How would you like to be perceived? Where to focus? How to create your landing page that converts? How to start at freelancing platforms such as Upwork or Freelancer.com? If you are interested in improving both your coding and marketing skills at the same time, check out this life-changing Python freelancer course.
Communication. Again, a no-brainer. But many programmers think it’s only about the quality of code they submit. NO! It’s about being in constant communication with your client. Ask them if you don’t understand the specifications. Figure out exactly what they want. You may need to dive deep for this. For example, a client may tell you they need a beautiful GUI for their back-end—but what they need is to improve their back-end functionality. You need to keep communicating, be responsive, positive, upbeat. This will ensure that you get good ratings and recommendations on freelancing platforms—and your pipeline of clients stays full.
If you want to improve your communication skills, read the excellent book from Dale Carnegie: “How to win friends and influence people.” Just google it.
If you want to become successful, improve these three skills daily:
- Sales and Marketing,
- Communication,
- Coding.
In that order. In the Python freelancer course, I show you exactly how you can apply those three skills to earn $50 per hour on freelancing platforms such as Upwork. Check it out!