Google Analytics

It used to be that if you wanted to make a good living, you had to go to college and spend years getting a degree. But the world has changed. Now people are earning multiple five and six figure incomes working from home using skills they learned on the internet.

And I know this isn’t all hype because I’m one of them. When I quit my job to become a freelance writer in 2018, I had no professional writing or marketing experience. I learned everything I needed to know hunched over my 10-year-old MacBook Pro. Over the years, I’ve continued to learn new skills to make my services more valuable and grow into social media and marketing management roles.

I’m going to share seven of the most valuable skills I’ve learned and my favorite websites for learning them. This isn’t just a roundup that you could get off Google or ChatGPT. These are legitimate skills that can help you build or grow your freelance business this year. The first skill is using Google Analytics. This is a foundational skill for anyone who works in marketing or deals with websites and it’s completely free to learn and get certified.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is Google’s free analytics tool that pulls in website data on user behavior. The latest version is called Google Analytics 4. You’ll also hear it referred to as GA4. GA4 is the source of truth for most businesses because it shows them where users are coming from and what happens once they land on their website.

Why is Google Analytics important for freelancers?

It’s really key for understanding how their funnel is functioning and what’s working and what needs to be improved. And as a freelancer, it’s also one of the best ways to prove the value of your services because you can directly measure the ROI of what you’re doing. For example, if you are a social media manager, you can see in Google Analytics how much traffic and revenue is coming from each social media source.

Quick note: this article may contain affiliate links, and I may earn a commission if you sign up for or purchase something through one of them.

Getting Certified in Google Analytics

As a fractional marketing manager, I use Google Analytics at least once a week to check on performance and pull reports. My husband actually just got his Google Analytics certification and when I was telling him where to find it, I just told him to Google it because I assumed that it would be easy to find, but it’s actually not.

If you go on Google and you try to find this, you’re probably going to find multiple courses, but the main one is on Coursera. That’s not the one that you want. We actually found that to be super glitchy and it’s not the one that I took when I got my certification.

I had to do some digging and I found the Google Skillshop link that you need. The thing about this course is I know that it’s going to prepare you for the Google Analytics certification exam, which you’ll need to pass. And fair warning, the videos are kind of cheesy and dated, but they definitely get the point across.

Google Ads Certification

And that same Google Skillshop link is also where you can take courses to earn your Google Ads certificate. Google Ads are also known as pay-per-click or PPC advertising and it is specifically for the Google search network. Brands run these ads so they can show up when people search for certain keywords or take certain actions online. If you’ve ever noticed in your search results on Google that something says sponsored, like a product or a search result, that’s a Google ad. Businesses in every industry run Google ads. This is a great skill to learn because it’s always in demand. I either manage or assist with Google Ads in some way for all of my clients at this point. Even if you don’t plan to be a Google Ads manager and manage these campaigns, it is helpful to have a working knowledge of it if you want to support brands with their marketing, so that you can understand what’s feeding their funnel.

Canva Design

If these data and paid media skills are boring you to death, you might be suited to something more creative like Canva design. Canva is a very user-friendly design tool and they have an online design school to help you learn how to use all of its features. While it’s not on the level of advanced design tools like Adobe Illustrator, where you can create custom graphics and logos, it does give you all the tools that you need to design most of the assets that brands need for marketing. Things like social media graphics or meta ads and designs for emails. I use Canva for all of these things and more. In fact, it’s probably the most used subscription in my tech stack. There are a ton of different services you can offer as a Canva expert, and it’s also good to know for your own business. You can use it to create your pitch deck or create reports and presentations. And I also like to use Canva to customize elements of my website.

Website Design

And if you enjoy tinkering around in Canva, you may also want to learn website design. Designing websites isn’t as complicated as you might think. In fact, most of the major web design tools, if not all of them, use drag and drop editors. And all of the major website building platforms have tutorials or even certification programs. After building websites on just about every platform, I can tell you that they’re all pretty similar. Yes, they each have their own interface. but because they’re all drag and drop, the design and editing principles are the same. Once you learn one, it really helps you across the board. The one thing I’ll say is that if this is something you want to jump into. put a little bit of thought into the type of client that you want to work with before you go all in on learning one of these tools, because different types of businesses tend to use different platforms. I’ve noticed that small businesses and local businesses tend to use Wix and Squarespace, whereas e-commerce brands are almost always on Shopify.

Email Marketing

Another skill that is easier to master thanks to drag and drop editors is email marketing. And when I say email marketing, I don’t just mean building out the emails and making them pretty, although that is definitely a service that you could offer. I mean actual marketing. Knowing how to segment lists and knowing what flows to create and how to create an overall email marketing strategy, knowing how to read the data and make recommendations based on that data. There is a lot that goes into it, but the good news is that you can learn through courses offered by email marketing tools like Klaviyo. There are several other email marketing tools out there, but if I had to choose one to master right now, it would be Klaviyo because this is the go-to email marketing tool for most e-commerce brands. And e-commerce brands are said to rely on email marketing for at least 25% of their revenue. It’s something they always need and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another skill that is absolutely timeless and essential is search engine optimization, or SEO. Unlike Google Ads, where you pay for visibility, SEO helps you earn organic visibility by making your website rank higher on search engines. I like to think of SEO as the language of search engines like Google. If a website isn’t on the first page of Google, it may as well not exist. That’s why businesses have pretty much been investing in SEO since the dawn of the internet, and they will continue to do so. SEO is one of the first skills that I had to learn when I started out as a freelance writer. And one of my favorite resources was Neil Patel. Neil is a pro at taking the many, and sometimes complicated, layers of SEO and making them really easy to understand. And he has a great 4-hour course to help you get started.

Social Media Strategy

This last skill is near and dear to my heart, and that is social media strategy. When I started offering social media management services, I was pretty much just posting whatever my clients asked me to. But I quickly learned that that doesn’t get the best results. That’s when I realized that if you want to be a social media manager and not just a post-it assistant, then you need to learn how to create a strategy. The strategy is really what makes a social media investment worth it for a business, because it informs what gets posted, where it gets posted, and how a brand shows up based on their goals. It’s not just random. Strategy is definitely something that takes experience to truly master, but HubSpot has a certification course that shows you how to build a strategy from the ground up.

Turning Skills Into a Profitable Offer

Those are the seven skills that are in demand and highly valuable to businesses, and that I would definitely learn again if I was starting over right now. But what most freelancers don’t realize is that if you want to be a high earner with stable income, skills alone aren’t enough. You need to package up your skills into a polished offer that clients are willing to pay premium prices for.