I rushed down the elevator to my mailbox. The anticipation gripped me as I tore through the mail; this was it. The $100,000 check was the first six-figure check I’d ever received. It was 2012, and it felt absolutely surreal.
I’d done it. I’d unlocked an entirely new level of money-making. Today, I often get asked, “How can I make more money?”
While it’s pretty easy to go out and make $20 mowing a lawn or a few hundred bucks renting out your place on Airbnb, it’s definitely tougher to go out and make an extra $100,000 per year. It doesn’t happen overnight, but there are steps you can take to significantly increase your chances of making a lot more money. In fact, I’ve broken down how to make more money into 7 easy-to-follow steps.
How To Make More Money in 7 Simple Steps
Here are some proven steps that you can take to make more money today and in the future:
- Increase Your Salary
- Build In-Demand Skills
- Start A Side Hustle
- Analyze & Improve Prices
- Launch Your Own Company
- Reach More People
- Build A Network AND An Audience
1. Get a Raise, Bonus, or Find a Higher Salary
When it comes to money, always try to optimize what’s in front of you. The fastest and easiest way to make more money is to get paid more doing what you are already doing. It costs most employers $30,000+ to just replace one employee, meaning they will likely pay you $10K+ more per year just to keep you.
Don’t sell yourself short.
Talent is in high demand, and you have the leverage. Pretty much no matter what industry you work in, it’s really hard, and getting harder, for employers to find good talent. The power dynamic has shifted so employees have more negotiating leverage. We are in a talent drought. The competition to recruit, hire, and keep you happy has never been higher. You can use this to your advantage.
Keep a close eye on the salaries for positions like yours using sites like Salary.com, GlassDoor, PayScale, or Indeed. Check out my detailed post on how to get a raise. I get emails all the time from readers who’ve used the strategies in that post to get $10,000+ raises. One woman used it to get a $30,000 raise. It’s worth having a look.
2. Build In-Demand Skills (Future-Proof Yourself)
Don’t like what you are doing today and want to make more money? Figure out what skills are needed for the job you want and start building them.
Skills are future currency. The more in-demand skills you have, the more money you will be able to make, and the more control you will have over your income opportunities. You can use your new skills in a full-time 9 to 5 job, to side hustle, or use those skills to launch your own business and become an entrepreneur.
It’s actually never been easier to change careers, so building in-demand skills is a quick way to make more money – because you can switch jobs much quicker once you have a skill that’s in demand. The skills most in demand today and into the future will be a mixture of hard and soft skills, including analytics, coding, digital marketing, and selling, branding, and design.
- Here are the skills you need to future-proof yourself
3. Start Side Hustling & Sell Your Expertise
Sell your own expertise to others who want to learn what you know. Today and in the future, both creators and curators that add value will be able to build an audience and monetize it. This is why blogging is so great – you can share your expertise and monetize it. If you haven’t checked it out yet – here’s how you can make money blogging.
There is more information created every second online than can be consumed in a lifetime, but people are overwhelmed and don’t know where to look for answers or ideas that actually work. If you can provide answers and help people be more effective, more efficient, or more successful, then you can make a lot of money.
The key is to get one reputable brand as a client (you only need one) and add as much value as you can. Then you can use them as a reference to sell similar projects to similar size brands.
Learn more:
4. Analyzing Your Circumstances To Improve Pricing
If you really want to make more money, then it’s essential to learn to analyze your sales or business opportunity at a deeper level. What does the customer really want? What does your boss really want? Don’t just think about what they are asking – think deeper about what’s motivating them.
In a lot of business situations, your boss or potential client wants to look good/make more money/be successful. So, if you can help them do all three of those, you are golden. The next time you are delivering or trying to sell a project, think about what you can add to make your client more successful. Then price for it!
A vast majority of people underprice projects because they are afraid of losing them. Going back to the first $100,000 project I sold – up until this point, I had always undersold myself and my expertise, because I was afraid that I wouldn’t get the project. Previously, the most expensive website project I’d sold was for $12,000 so it took courage to ask for $100K. But with this project, I was able to ask for 10x more than I had before because I knew the value of my skill set, and I also believed that everyone I was competing with (all agencies) would be charging at least $100,000.
Remember you are trading hours of your life for the project. Why wouldn’t you want to get paid for what your time is worth, or even better, as much as you can?
5. Launch Your Own Company
It’s never been easier to launch your own business. You can build a website now in 20 minutes and start selling products or offering services in a matter of days.
There are many advantages to launching your own company and managing your life like a company. You can take tax deductions for business expenses, you get certain legal protections, and you can use a small business credit card to rack up extra miles for traveling for free.
Working for yourself either full-time or on the side has never been easier and it’s the clearest path to wealth. All of your investments – your time, networks, skills, and, of course, money will compound over time – resulting in new income streams and opportunities. It’s important to invest your time in building the habits, skills, and networks that will set you up for life.
Making money at anything takes time – it’s not just going to magically appear, but it has never been easier to build an audience and sell your expertise. Start building the foundation.
6. Reach More People with Your Product or Message
I have built my career targeting people online. I’ve been fortunate to work with over 200 different clients, including many of the top universities in the world to help them target and sell their products.
Today, you can target almost anyone on earth with a message personalized for them through digital marketing on the platforms that they use every day. In fact, when my wife was in Africa, I built a Facebook ad campaign with a small targeting audience just so she could see an ad that said: “I miss you!”
You might be thinking – well how can I do this? The good news is that anyone can learn how to market products online.
There are many high-quality free resources where you can learn about digital marketing and most platforms (like Google & Facebook) have extensive videos where you can learn the platform.
To learn the basics for free, check out the learning centers for Google Adwords and Facebook. There are also low-cost courses you can take, but if you are motivated, you can learn everything you need to know about digital marketing for free.
Once you’ve learned the fundamentals, then it’s time to learn from experience.
7. Build A Network AND An Audience
While I enjoy making new connections, I hate networking events. I’m an introvert at heart and disdain events that are set up just to network. In all the networking events I have ever been to, I have only met one person which eventually led to a connection that led to a sale.
But networking and connecting online? It’s exceptionally more powerful. The most profitable connections I have made have been through LinkedIn, my own website, or the holy grail: referrals from past clients! Once you have a few happy clients, you can unlock a bunch of others by asking for referrals.
If you really want to build a business or make more money, you need to build a network and an audience. A network is a group of connections that takes time to build and is essential to unlocking opportunities throughout your lifetime, but an audience is a lot more valuable. If you have an audience, you can actually make a ton of money pretty quickly – by selling value to an audience that trusts you because you’ve already added value to their lives.
Focus on building both an audience and a network. If you haven’t yet, definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. Let’s make it happen. We’re in this together.
Learn How to Make More Money for Free
Thankfully it’s never been easier to build new skills for free. It used to take decades working at a job to learn the ins and outs of how the company and position worked. This was the old-school model. Now with YouTube, online courses, and mentorship, you can learn new skills rapidly and have an immediate impact on your company’s or your own bottom line.
As I previously shared, I learned how to do digital marketing in 60 days on YouTube and went from making $50,000 to over $400,000 in one year! It was this shift that was the biggest driver of my millennial millionaire strategy. I was able to increase my salary and income by 8x in 2 years because I built an in-demand skill set (digital marketing) and continued to diversify my skill set. While I am a bit of an extreme example, the principle still applies that skills allow us to create value – which we can then monetize.
You can learn almost anything for free through online courses to diversify or develop an entirely new skill set. Once you feel like you’ve learned it, then pay an expert for 15 minutes of their time to answer your questions to fill in the gaps.
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