5 Most Profitable Strategies for Monetizing Your Data Science Knowledge

In Brief

Data Science is a hot field that is in high demand. This post is about the 5 Profitable Strategies for Monetizing Your Data Science Knowledge. It analyses the following monetization strategies: Consulting, affiliate marketing, startuping, eLearning and e-challenges.

Let’s start by the big picture 

Let’s uncover the 5 most profitable online strategies in 2020 for monetizing your data professional knowledge !

This post analyses each category from different conceptual aspects like difficulty, expected yearly income and estimated time to generate profit.

Then a practical overview of its implementation is provided.

All the provided strategies focus on online solutions for building a digital nomad data professional !

Consulting

Let’s begin by the first strategy which is consulting.

It’s often one of the first solutions that a data professional should think about. Indeed, he most powerful aspect of Consulting is time to profitability that is almost instantaneous !

The most difficult part is to find out the first contracts.

On the other hand, the consulting business model is to sell your time and knowledge.

That’s why the consulting path is one of the least lucrative among the proposed strategies. But it’s still a very good starting point towards data professional digital nomadism and freedom !

More practically

Let’s now take a more hands on view about consulting:

The most needed skill to be a successful data professional consultant is certainly coding. Whatever expertize you choose whether front-end or back-end development, machine and deep learning or IT and DB management.

The marketing skill is also very important for a consultant. Especially if you decide to make the prospection and projects proposals by yourself which is vastly the case when starting. Communication is also key during the project execution stage until its closure. Very often, product maintenance and project extensions start once the customer is big enough and satisfied by your deliverables !

Among the major online platforms for freelancing for data professionals one can cite: Upwork, Freelancer and Fiverr. With an adequate digital marketing strategy, LinkedIn can also be a highly lucrative platform for data professional freelancers.

Affiliate Marketing

The second proposed strategy among the 5 Profitable Strategies for Monetizing Your Data Science Knowledge is Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is based on a principle that exists since the very first ages of human being. It simply consists in being the intermediate between a product owner and the final buyer. Then you take a commission for bringing the leads and triggering the sales.

Think about all the digital products and especially data products that exist on the web. And that are eligible to an affiliate program. Think about Data science and coding courses and softwares, the same for IT and data management ones. One can easily see how the opportunity is huge and how the model is interesting.

You can start selling products immediately and make profit with it without having even to produce them ! In addition, commissions for digital products range generally between 20 and more than 70% in some cases which makes affiliate marketing a great opportunity.

The main advantage of affiliate marketing is certainly that it builds passive income for you. That passive income can reach very high levels through time since it corresponds to a cumulative value depending on the effort that you invest in promoting valuable products and finding the right audience for it !

On the other hand, its main lowlight is time to profitability. Indeed, building a mailing list or an efficient organic research ranking among the research engines may take between 6 and 12 months.

More practically

For a data professional to be a successful as digital marketer, you need to be well trained and motivated as marketing and sales agent as well as highly aware of the current trends and needs and what products are the best to sell for which audience at a given point of time.

As data professionals, it’s honestly not the kind of skills that we focus on during our knowledge building and throughout our careers.

On the other hand, the good news is that it’s something that is easy to master in addition to the fact that it’s addictive and highly fascinating !

Personally I loved it and I don’t feel the time going by when reading about it or implementing affiliate marketing strategies

Among the major online platforms for affiliate marketing for data professionals, one can cite: Udemy, Coursera and Clickbank as sources for eLearning and digital products. Amazon Associates and ShareaSale mainly for almost all sorts of physical and digital products and JVZoo for marketing software products.

Startuping

The 3rd proposed strategy is the dream target of many data professionals: it’s startuping

For this one, all indexes are at their maximum

Indeed, digital startups as well as the biggest tech companies like the GAFA ones are all relying heavily on data.

Consequently, data knowledge is definitely a gold mine for implementing disruptive startups and building new digital empires !

On the other hand, difficulty and time to profitability are also at their maximum.

That challenging side is certainly one of the main reasons why startuping is still one of the major dream targets of a majority of data professionals sooner or later !

The needed skills are also all at their maximum !

On the other hand, that does not mean necessarily that a data professional should have all the skills at the same time. In fact, you can co-found your startup with other complementary profiles. Most successful startups are built by 2 to 3 members and more because it’s nearly impossible to find one single individual having all those skills at their maximum.

In addition to the fact that co-founding is definitely a lot of fun and an amazing experience !

Among the main online platforms for startuping for data professionals, one can cite Kickstater for crowd funding. Flippa on the other hand provides a very interesting concept based on buying and selling websites. finally, CodeCanyon and Codester should be interesting for data professionals aiming at whether selling their own codes or being in the entrepreneurship side by investing on others codes in order to transform them into startups.

e-Learning

The 4th strategy among the 5 Profitable Strategies for Monetizing Your Data Science Knowledge which is one of my favourites and it’s very likely that it’s also the case for you too as data professional : That’s e-Learning !

Indeed, we Data Professionals consume a lot of online trainings and contents and have large knowledge in pretty various domains. Consequently, a big step towards producing e-Learning content is knowledge acquisition. The income to difficulty ratio is one of the highest among all the presented strategies but this does not mean that it’s easy to succeed here. Indeed, competition is increasingly high but demand is also continuously increasing. The e-Learning market is worth more than €300B and continues to increase at a high rate !

The time to profitability is relatively high for e-Learning since it takes time to build courses of high quality and find the right niche where the course is adequate to its audience and brings a unique value.

To be successful as a e-Teacher, mastering the taught technique is key. This should be considered in addition to several other soft skills like clarity in explanation, charisma and good communication skills. Marketing is also a key skill for an e-Teacher since once the course is created, it should be very well pitched to its potential audience.

The marketing process lasts during the whole user experience of the course starting from the very first pitch of the course until the final 5 stars review of the student. Indeed, referencing is one of the key success factors of online courses !

One can cite among the reference online courses platforms that a data professional can use: Udemy, Udacity, Clickbank and the personal web site where the eTeacher can host independently his own courses.

e-Challenges

Finally, an innovative strategy of monetizing your data knowledge is: Online challenges !

This is definitely the least lucrative and one of the hardest but it’s worth keeping in the mind for data professionals.

Indeed, those e-challenges push you behind your limits and they are great opportunities for being aware of the current biggest data challenges. It’s also a golden opportunity for getting in touch with the data community and making high quality networking 

The main and almost needed skill for it is coding.

One can cite among the main online challenges platforms: Kaggle, topcoder and drivendata. Challenge.gov is also a very interesting e-Challenge platform that corresponds to contests organised by the government of the US.

To conclude

Comes then time to wrap up the 5 Profitable Strategies for Monetizing Your Data Science Knowledge which are consulting, affiliate marketing, startuping, eLearning and e-challenges.

Those 5 strategies can be combined in order to make an even more efficient global hybrid strategy which is proposed as bonus top tips !

A proposed optimized chronological actions can be the following:

First start with consulting since it has an almost instantaneous Return On Investment (ROI) and provides some initial and very precious cash flow.

The second step is to carry on with consulting and launching an affiliate activity on the go.

The affiliate activity will take some time to generate revenue but it’s fine during the first months since the cash flow is brought mainly by consulting.

At the 3rd stage, the affiliate efforts start to make income. This is where consulting activity can be stopped in order to save considerable amount of time and invest it elsewhere !

This amount of time is then invested into reinforcing further the affiliate activity and launching the e-Leaning one.

At the fourth stage, the Affiliate activity is mature enough for generating good income and the e-Learning activity is reinforced even further.

At this stage, the passive incomes coming from Affiliate Marketing and e-Learning are generating enough cash flow to be invested in launching one or several startup testing ideas or what is called MVP for Minimum Viable Products to be tested in the market.

The fifth and final stage consists in selecting the successful MVP and expanding it into a viable data startup !

If you are interested in going further on one or several ones of the exposed online strategies for monetizing your data knowledge, you are invited to go through the proposed extra contents below (*).

Find your best fit and make your choice !

So choose the skills that you need to improve below and take your data professional career to the next level !

Please leave comment if you have any question or request about the content, I will be delighted to bring more clarifications and build more content of this kind !

If you are interested in the data industry, entrepreneurship around it and digital nomadism for data pros then you are at the right place ! 

Talk to you soon ! Take care !

(*) The recommendations correspond to affiliate products that were tested and validated by dataPros.ai. We only recommend products that we like and think that they are of high quality standards and that they will bring high value to our community ! Purchasing the products through the provided affiliate links will not change in any way the final price that you will pay for the selected products. Thank you !