I rushed down the elevator to my mailbox. Today had to be the day; it's been over a week since my client told me he had mailed my check. The anticipation gripped me as I floated down to the lobby mail room. I dropped my keys twice trying to open the box, then tore through the mail.
The plain white envelope was stuck between a J.Crew catalog and a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon. This was it. I just stared at it in the lobby, then carried it upstairs gently, as if somehow this envelope might spontaneously catch fire or blow up in my hands.
In my apartment, I laid it on the table and with the precision of a surgeon, I carefully used a letter opener (wait, why was I using a letter opener, I've never used one previously in my life to gently pull apart the envelope.
I inched it out slowly.
The $100,000 check weighed less than 1 gram. This 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. I often get asked how someone can make more money quickly. While it's actually pretty easy to go out and make $20 mowing a lawn or a couple 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.
I've distilled this down into 7 steps on how to make more money today and in the future. Most people just make the decision right in front of them with little thought on the impact it's going to have on their lives in the future. But the people who make the big bucks are often intentional, strategic, and have a plan.
Here are the steps I took, and you can take, to make an extra $100,000 per year (or more!)
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1. Get a raise, a bonus, or find a higher salary
The fastest and easiest way to make more money is to get paid more doing what you are already doing. Period. When it comes to money, always try to optimize what's in front of you. 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.
Did you know that it costs most employers $20,000+ to just replace one employee, so they will likely pay you $10K+ more per year just to keep you? And if they won't and you want to leave, there are companies that will pay to get you. Don't sell yourself short. There has never been more salary transparency and it's so easy to figure out what other people in your role at other companies are getting paid. It's also easy to use salary data to scope out career trajectories. 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.
I used to work with this guy Brian who was a Jr Copywriter at the first digital marketing agency I worked at – his starting salary was $36,000. He was a super talented guy, but he knew from his research that he was never going to be able to make more than $80,000 as a copywriter in Chicago. He wanted to make the big bucks with his creative skills. He saw on GlassDoor that Senior Creative Directors can make $150,000+ with just 5 years experience. He set his goal on the creative director position and started building his portfolio and helping out the creative director at our agency. Only 3 years later, he got a Senior Creative Director job in Vancouver and makes over $150,000 per year. What did he do? He saw what he wanted and came up with a game plan to get there.
In the digital economy, the money is there, but most people leave it to chance and think their bosses are going to see their hard work and reward them. I hate to break it to you, but you are on your own. Be your own advocate – ask for what you want, back it up with data, and come up with a clear game plan for where you are trying to go.
Keep a close eye on the salaries for positions like yours using sites like Salary.com, GlassDoor, PayScale, or Indeed.
If you want to go deeper, here's a popular post I wrote on hack your boss and 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. Quickly build in-demand skills (and future-proof yourself), then either get a raise, jump jobs, or move into an entirely new career
Skills are future currency. The more in-demand skills you have, the more money you will be able to make, the more control you will have over your income opportunities and the ability to diversify them. 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.
Thankfully it's never been easier to build new skills for free or inexpensively. It used to take decades working at a job to learn the ins and outs of how the company and position worked. In the old model, an employee would start in an entry level position, learn the ropes, and get a promotion every 2 years with a 5% salary increase into the next role managing the people who did the tasks below them. You spent your time managing people and learning new skills. If you stayed long enough with the company then you might work 10+ years to reach the level of senior management. Your experience was aligned with compensation and later promotions depended on less on your value and more on the position opening up from someone up above moving out. 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 in 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. My friend Judith increased her salary from $50,000 to $225,000 in 3 years making moves from her graphic design job to leading sales for a tech company.
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. You can learn pretty much anything required to run a company in a few hours online. 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.
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 and sell your expertise
You know those skills that you can build online? After you master them, you can 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.
This is the paradox of the information age – an infinite amount of info is available for free online, but people seek teachers and experienced curators. You can easily sell your knowledge and make more money both actively and passively.
Actively: Once you've built expertise, you can sell it to other people by training or using your expertise to help them solve their problems through a consulting engagement. The larger the problem, the larger the organization, or the more desperately someone needs their problem solved, the more money you can make. The more specialized your knowledge, the more money you can make.
The more money you make someone, the more money you can make. I have consulted on digital marketing and website strategy for many companies and institutions, and these same rules always apply. 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. Here's how to build a consulting business.
Passively: It's never been easier to sell your expertise online. My blogger Michelle launched an online course to teach bloggers how to make more money using affiliate ads and she made over $1 million last year. The course sells itself. While this is, of course, an extreme example, it's super common and easy to build a course that makes $10K+ a month.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider