This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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I believe that just about every skill can be monetized. You just have to think creatively and learn to adapt that skill to something people will pay for. They won't always pay for the direct skill, but sometimes there's a way to, you know, transform or morph your knowledge into something that is monetizable. And I'm talking about that because I got a great listener question today. And first of all, welcome to Side Hustle School.
My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is a daily podcast, seven days a week, all about helping you make extra money without quitting your job. And perhaps taking one of those skills you already have and turning it into, you know, as I said, something monetizable, something making money. That's good stuff. So today's caller is skilled at gaming, specifically video gaming.
He's really good at playing video games. I respect that. How can he apply this knowledge or principle? And he also has a caveat for us. He's got something he doesn't want to do.
He doesn't want to play games competitively. So no e-sports. He just wants to take his knowledge and earn from it. So let's see if we can help him out. And by proxy, perhaps someone else as well.
So if you're not into video games, that's cool. There's something that you are into though. So the whole idea is how can we take that thing, whatever it is, and find a way to help you profit? All right, question is, can I get paid to teach people to play video games? My answer coming right up.
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Hi there, my name's Jackson, and I'm calling in from Edmonton. I'm good at video games, like really good. I've been playing at least five hours a day for 20 years with only a few breaks. Games have changed a lot during that time, but I've kept up with the changes. From the Atari 2600 to the PS5, I can hang.
So since you say that every talent can be monetized, how can I monetize this? I don't want to compete in e-sports, but I'm open to any other ideas. Thanks for everything you do. Keep up the good work. [Music]
All right, all right, let's see what we can do here.
So a lot of this kind of stuff, video game lessons, well, they're not really lessons, but I'll come back to that. But a lot of video game sharing happens on Twitch and some other platforms, but Twitch is probably the biggest one with really popular streamers who are playing games all day, but they aren't really teaching. They're mostly just conversing. And a lot of them are pretty good at games because they're playing games all day. So there is some element of that, but it's not so much, let me teach you how to play this video game.
So in terms of lessons, I thought about a story we did a while back, episode 2033, 2033, video game writing class is real life game changer. And in that story, there was a teacher using the platform Out School. So just check out that episode and then the platform Out School, using video games as essentially a metaphor to bring people into her writing classes. So she had also been really successful, I think three to $4,000 a month doing that. But of course that's also not quite teaching video games.
It's a bit of a metaphor, as I said. So can you actually teach video games? Well, I mean, you could try. You could try without school or any platform, pick a popular game. I think it's really important to pick a game that's very popular, that has lots of people playing it.
And you can try offering up your skills, whether it's through direct coaching, that kind of, I don't know, tutoring, I suppose, or by creating some kind of guide for sale, which we talked a bit about last week, creating a guide or a detailed report so you can essentially sell the expertise. I mean, the challenge, of course, as I'm sure our caller realizes, is that there is a lot of free information out there. Like when I was a video gamer, a very early gamer, many, many years ago, decades ago, in fact, there were resources like Game Facts and some other nascent websites where you could go and people are posting walkthroughs and just all kinds of free content that will teach you how to play the games. So you need some kind of angle. You need to build some platform of your own because of course you have to have authority.
You have to create desire. Oh, this person can, in fact, help me get better at playing Fortnite or Minecraft or whatever the game happens to be. So there has to be discoverability as well. Like I have to know who you are. So lots of factors there.
I don't want to say it's an easy path forward, but I'm sure there's a way to do it. And I hope that you'll do it so that we can feature it as a case study and say, check this out listeners, he's figured it out. So good luck and listeners, anybody else out there for questions, comments, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what's going on. We'll continue to feature them throughout the year, along with case studies, throwback Thursday episodes, failure Friday episodes, our new first $1,000 series, lots of other good stuff.
New episode every day, short action packed. My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
