WebRTC has seen phenomenal adoption in the past few years, as businesses can offload media bandwidth from their centralized servers. Making that cost savings case part of your pitch makes for a compelling offering. You can even leverage third-party solutions such as Twilio and even FB Live to build customer service live help desks.
Right now I'd say with AR / VR gaining momentum there is tremendous opportunity for skilled Unity3D / WebGL people. Definitely more involved than learning React, but can also be much more rewarding. I'd even go so far as to bet these skills will be a bigger draw than AI / ML / Data Sciences in the near term. Good Luck!
As a consultant this strategy is very smart, very stupid for a company tho.
1) Consultant goes to company and sells his new hot tech stack that is just released.
2) Company buys in and pays a lot of money.
3) Consultant now is locked himself a nice position because nobody wants to deal with this technology and he is the only expert they can get.
Not sure what technology you are referring to but it's definitely not elixir or pheonix.
I am mostly into scraping and automation tools. Whatever I learnt; for instance Scrapy, Beautifulsoup etc I wrote about it on my blog as well as on medium based publications. It helped me to earn some good contracts and gigs. DO remember I did not follow 3-5 yet otherwise It was going to be more awesome for me.
1) Pick a new up and coming language or framework. Something like elixir or pheonix or something else that is really hot and just starting out.
2) Learn it. As you learn, write a series of really awesome tutorials and articles on your blog about that stack.
3) Help people out on SO and other forums that talk about that tech. Point folks to your posts if it looks like it might help. Add your blog to your profile page.
4) Try to guest on some podcasts about this same technology, or maybe even create your own podcast.
5) Keep doing steps 1-4 with constancy and over time your luck surface area will grow and new opportunities will come your way.
When you start contracting in that tech you'll be able to charge much better rates than your old rate because you will be a thought leader in that space.
Also, you will be able to capitalize on sites like airpair.com
Hope this helps!