15 Ways to Increase Your Income This Year
You need more money because everything's become extremely expensive. It doesn't matter if you're an employee, a freelancer, or a business owner. Here are 15 ways to increase your income this year.
First up, brute force. Work more hours if you're able to monetize your time. The fastest way to get more money is to spend more hours monetizing it. This ain't rocket science. Everyone wants an effortless way of making more money. But the truth is, most people could dramatically increase their income just by working more. We'll talk about plenty of smart ways to increase the value of each hour, but almost all of you would see immediate results if you just focused on volume first. There are times to be smart, and then there are times to work hard. Then you can negotiate a raise for the same volume of work, but with different stakes. The volume of work means the hours you put in.
Businesses are simple. You get paid a fraction of the value you generate for others. If you want to get paid more, it's time to generate more value. And you can do that in three ways. First, you save them time or effort. I'll do this for you so that you're free to work on something else. This works because their time is more valuable than yours, so they'll pay you because it's a profitable deal for them. Second, you minimize risk and accelerate success. I'll make sure this gets done by this time, even if I have to work twice as hard and figure some things out. But I want to be paid for it. You're taking on the risk, and the risk is expensive, so they will pay you for it. And third, expand the scope of work or focus on helping them scale. I'll take charge of this project. I'll recruit people and manage the data day operations moving forward. In exchange, this is what I think is fair payment.
The way you get them to say yes is by only getting paid if the agreed results are achieved. And then it's up to you to make it happen. The biggest mistake people make is they want more money for the same amount or level of work just because they ask for it. No company is incentivized to pay their employees more than someone else is willing to accept for the same amount of work. If you're a business owner, this point means you have to reach out to existing customers and sell them on another feature or product that expands your relationship.
Work on a commission. This is the best way to make money. If you have no money, you'll just sell something for someone else and get a paid commission. The great thing about this is that technically there's no ceiling to how much you can earn, and you don't have to bear any of the costs to get started. The more you sell, the more you earn; the more valuable what you sell is, the higher the payout. Commission work is a numbers game. It's one of those skills that once you master it, you'll never be broke again. It also teaches you the difference in the quality of leads. Surround yourself with people who run faster than you do. They show it's not only possible but attainable.
What you quickly realize is they have a different pace than you do. They make decisions faster. They put in more work and they think differently. They work in groups to push one another, provide guidance, and get better terms for themselves. If the goal is to increase your income, then learn from those who earn more than you do. They know things that you don't. So pay attention. Being part of a pack changes your behavior, so pay close attention to who your pack is made up of; dramatically accelerate your learning.
If there's one thing you can do to increase your income, it is to start with your ability to make decisions. Good decisions lead to more money. Always. It's okay if every day for the next one year you learn something that increases your value as an individual. That'd be 365 small increases. Some of these days would lead to breakthroughs, leaps in your growth, while others would just be another brick to build yourself up with. There's only one efficient way to do exactly this, and it only takes 10 to 15 minutes of your day.
Step one: You go to alux.com/app and set it up on your phone. Step two: You start a free trial for a yearly subscription. Step three: You open it up every morning while you have your coffee or tea. And step four: Profit, baby. Every morning, the app will inject your brain with the most actionable ways to not only increase your income but get you to your version of a successful life. Every day you don't use the app, you're losing value. So go to alux.com/app and allow us to guide you through the most valuable 15 minutes of your day.
Become a business. Incorporate instead of being an employee. Set yourself up as a business and contract your services to your current employer. This allows you to go from paying an average of 45% in taxes to around 20%. Businesses are taxed differently than individuals. You are taxed on the profit the business generates, and many of your big yearly expenses are deductible if you use them for business purposes.
When you shift your thinking from employee to business owner, your ability to increase your income opens up. You can add more clients and do something really smart: outsource the repetitive parts. If your life looks like a hamster wheel, then there's little to no room to increase income. Why? Well, because after you're done doing the work, the same work needs to be done tomorrow. The only way to increase your income is to find more income outside of your current hamster wheel.
So you need to buy yourself that time. You become the one who pays people. And more specifically, you pay them to do that repetitive stuff. Sometimes the boring tasks, but mostly just the repetitive ones. If you have to do it over and over again, somebody else can do that for you. Now your job is to monetize your extra time for a higher price than what you're paying that person.
Add a new stream of income by investing. If your money isn't making you rich, then it's making somebody else rich. Pay attention to who gets your money. You can flip that around by having a portion of your income go straight into investing. It might not seem like much, but that money would have been wasted otherwise. The playbook is this:
Step one: You automatically send 15% of your monthly income into a Vanguard account or any other platform with extreme low fees that allows you to invest in the S&P 500. Step two: You keep an eye out on property prices in your area while the investment account keeps building up. Step three: When you've got enough in it for a down payment, you buy a property and rent it out. Make sure the rent covers all expenses and then some. Step four: Rinse and repeat, my friend.
Now, sure, you're not going to get rich overnight and you'll still have to work, but every month your renters will buy you equity in that home and you'll be able to eventually own a few of these. Steal top performers from somewhere else. If you're running a business, the quality of your people determines the speed of progress. While your business is stagnating with your current overpaid employees, there are other businesses out there where the talent actually contributes to the bottom line.
Your job is to find those people and give them a reason to help you instead of someone else. As an extra insight for you from the big corporations: everyone is laying off workers by the thousands because there is a gap in the market. Believe it or not, people have been overpaid for the past five years, even though it doesn't feel like it. Corporations are willing to fire people in bulk because they can rehire the same number of people for 60% of the cost.
So either you steal some talent from someone else that drives the business forward, or you optimize your current operation by dramatically cutting personnel costs. Become consistent in your work. You might think you're the kind of special snowflake that only does home runs. Once in a while you put on your big boy pants and you knock it out of the park. Turns out, though, that strategy is just not conducive to long-term success. Not at all.
Consistency beats the occasional virality factor. Consistency adds up in ways that you can't even imagine. Post once per day. Write once per day. Build a schedule, a routine, if you will, that if you were to keep following it would get you to real outcomes. Stop wishing for a miracle and follow the time-tested path. Okay. You don't need a miracle. You just need to be consistent.
If you've always struggled with discipline, we've got a challenge for you. Go to Alaska slash app or open up the Alux App on your phone and look for Foundation Week on your homepage. These are seven lessons meant to be consumed one per day. You don't have to pay anything to get them. There is a free trial, but let's just see if you can do it for seven days in a row. It'll open up something for you that you didn't even know about yourself.
Focus and extract more value per employee. This doesn't mean making your employees work twice the number of hours for the same pay. No. Your job is to find the highest return per individual expertise. Instead of having your lead designer do your social media posts, have them work on variations of your Facebook ads, or have them optimize your landing page for conversions through A/B testing. A post will reach said number of people, and then it's off to the next post. But if they're able to create a kick-ass ad for you or increase the number of signups by 20%, that could be worth a whole lot more money to you in the long run.
They're going to work the same amount of hours either way. It's up to you to use your employees wisely. Give your clients the option to give you more money if they want to hear something we learned from our e-learning experience. On your final checkout page, give the buyer the option to add more products to their basket with a decent discount, or instead of buying a single product, give them the option to buy a pack of three, five, or ten. This does wonders for your average order value, meaning that you now make more money per customer.
More money equals good. Whatever your business or services, have the option to add more to the final purchase. Some people will gladly take you up on the offer. And on that note, create an offer exclusively for rich people. Whatever you're selling, create a special version just for rich people. Make sure to price it ridiculously, and that includes all the bells and whistles. It includes you doing it manually and personalizing it just for them, whatever that looks like.
Businesses do this all the time, offering a one-of-a-kind experience or the VIP treatment. If our course at alux.org is between $250 to $500, a rich people's offer would be something like $25,000 for a weekend retreat, private dinner, one-on-one coaching with the CEO of Alux and the rest of the team. This isn't for everybody. No, and most people will think it's ridiculous, but it'll take you less than half a day to set it up and it'll be purchasable if any buyer does show up.
Who knows? Throughout the year, you might encounter someone who's looking for that kind of service specifically, and then you strike gold. One of these is the equivalent of three, six, or twelve months of regular business, or 25 to 100 times the price of the regular product. Implement a subscription model. By now, you already know that subscription models are superior to almost every other business model out there.
Whatever your business is, see if you can offer it as a subscription. Get that recurring revenue going. Instead of just cutting hair or putting weaves in (we're looking at you, Gabrielle from the comment section), offer it up as a yearly or a six-month subscription; X amount of dollars and you get to come in twice a month for a refresher or whatever. This adds predictability to your business and more cash upfront, both of which contribute to you building a bigger business and increasing your income.
And finally, big discounts to people who wanted to buy but didn't find a way to talk to the people who were interested but didn't buy. Not only do you learn a lot about why you couldn't close the deal with them, but many of them are still interested in your product. If you have vacancies, if you have excess product, run the math and figure out how you can monetize this. You can retarget them online, send them emails, text them, DM them, you can call them to see if they've changed their minds and you can follow up with them with a great discount.
The biggest source of new income will come from the people you've already interacted with, and that's a pile of money just sitting there waiting for you to call. With the cost of living shooting up this fast, we want to know, Aluxer, what are you doing to increase your income? Let us know in the comments.
And since you stuck around with us, here's your bonus: Don't start something new if it comes at the expense of your main thing. Here's a gold nugget we've learned the hard way: It's four times easier to double your current business than it is to start a new one that makes the same amount of money. Not to mention that while you're busy building the new thing, the old thing will suffer and start to crumble.
Midway, you'll find yourself juggling a failing business or job and trying to build yourself a lifeboat with this new, untested thing. You think you're trading, but unless you have substantial financial resources where you can be just fine without either of these two, you're probably going to fail. If you're on a mission to double your income and beyond this year, write the word to X in the comments. We'll see you back here next time, sir. Take care.