Make Money by Learning Photoshop for Free

Posted on 05. Jun, 2011 by Corey Hartford in Random

The title of my blog isn’t editorially “catchy.” But it’s not meant to be cute, it’s meant to be truth! Yes, because while life can get rather complicated at points, there’s always a simple fact that exists; if you know how to do something that 98% of the rest of the world does not know how to do well, you can make a lot of money and be very popular with a certain group of people by doing that very thing.

This might sound like a crazy concept, but there are actually people out there that do this kind of stuff – you know, charge money to do things they know that others don’t. We call them, “consultants.”

You can get paid, son

word.

I’m not trying to be condescending here – but I am trying to wrap your mind around the fact that you could be charging people to do things that you already do in your free time. Now, I have two groups of friends, more or less. One group is comprised of uber- tech-startup nerds. I love em’, but they probably know about where I’m going with this. Be good at something, charge people for it.

But I also have a group of friends that hasn’t quite cliked into that mode yet. For whatever reason, they’re either convinced that they don’t have time to freelance on the side, or their mind is too focused on a singular object -<zombie voice> must get desk job, must work for company, must wear suit </zombie voice>- but the fact is you can do a whole lotta things at once, it just takes a little self-motivation sometimes.

How I became addicted…

My thing is WordPress. I love it. I’m not a WordPress Guru to end all WordPress Gurus, but I do love diving into the nitty gritty of it and finding out how things work. I’m costantly building sites for myself, my friends, local businesses and other people that find themselves in need of a website boasting the sort of elegant simplicity that WordPress provides ever so well. My team of writers at Mahalo will tell you that I’m always raving about the platform – talking about the latest plugin I just activated, diving into the  style sheets to purposely break things just to try and learn what goes where. Basically…

It’s by building, breaking and repeating that I learned everything I know today. And you know what? I can charge people for what I know today, and that’s a pretty good feeling. I can build a site, SEO the content, tweak a few things in the backend, and setup some killer metrics for you. But, there’s one area where I really need a boost, and it would help me justify increasing my hourly rate in both the short and long-term: Photoshop.

My next hurdle

grad school memories…

Oh man, if I knew how to do what I wanted to with Photoshop, I would be unstoppable. I think it’s a program that absolutely every web designer, consultant or entrepreneur needs to know. Whether you’re mocking wireframes or business cards, leaderboards or posterboards, Photoshop is an essential skill you’ll always need to truly take a project to the next level.

Now of course you can always outsource the design work to a third-party company, but then you start losing out on a significant cut of your profits. This is no good. We want to keep money in, not let money out.  Business 101.

What I’ve learned about learning

…but it was all worth it

Before I started my gig at Mahalo, I took HTML and CSS classes at Santa Monica College which, admittedly to my surprise, was actually an impressively fine institution. The classes, while introductory, introduced me into a deeper world (I had some underlying background knowledge) of coding than I had been able to decipher before. It felt very powerful to learn something that, well, empowers you!

Taking the time to learn those skills cost me very little money (hooray for the Community College system!) and provided a great deal of value to both my personal skill-set, as well as my personal pocketbook. This isn’t bragging or a whole “Look at me” ordeal – it’s motivation. It’s motivation to either, A) take what you know, start marketing it, and start making money doing what you do best, or B) take a class and learn something so you can eventually do that!

If you have the time to be reading this, then you have the time to learn

learning photography

I know, I know … you’re busy. I get that, trust me, I do. But even if you can freelance yourself out for just two hours a week, that’s great for a number of reasons. First, extra money is always good, right? Second, you’re refining your skills. The better you get, the more you can charge the next customers. Lastly, you’re keeping your resume current and impressive-lookin’. To show that you’re developing your talents and exercising your skills outside of your normal work environment, can really go a long way in impressing a recruiter. Trust me, after looking at over 5,000 resumes in my day, I can attest to that.

Stop reading, start learning

So, that’s my shpiel – go learn something. For me, it’s off to Mahalo’s Photoshop course, which includes close to a hundred lessons of completely free, ridiculously in-depth Photoshop how- tos, tips and tricks. My boys Gene Shaw and Justin Zagri put it together as the “pilot course” in our new cirriculum program. I’m not going to lie, and all bias aside, I think this is the best free Photoshop education source anywhere on the internet. So I’ll take it, practice for hundreds of frustrating hours, and then I can start increasing my daily rate by 10% … 20% … 30%.. who knows?! And you know what? You can do the same exact thing for you and your career – and it all starts with just a few videos

An introduction to the Photoshop course

What can you do in Photoshop?

Take the Course: http://www.mahalo.com/learn-photoshop