How To Make More Money

Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org and I’m doing another quick self-help segment where, in about ten minutes, I’m gonna tell you how to make more money. This is a fascinating topic for me, because I personally like money. Who doesn’t? I like to make more of it. I like to look for strategies for how to make more money.

It’s All About Marketing

I can’t cover this topic deeply enough, because this is a really deep topic, and I have some advanced level strategies, some long-term strategies that you can put into place. That requires building up some structures. Here, I’m gonna give you more practical, more quick to implement type of ideas. I think the biggest idea that you need to understand to make more money is you need to start to learn marketing. You need to understand the principles behind marketing. Because marketing is all about how to sell something or convince someone of the value of what you have to offer. And marketing is much broader than we initially think it is.

Marketing will tell you how to sell yourself to a company, how to sell yourself to an employer, how to sell yourself to a client, how to attract more business, how to even build up a charity and get attention to your charity, even if a non-profit. How to attract the opposite sex, because that also involves using the principles of marketing.

Marketing is very important, and what marketing is gonna teach you if you start learning it is that you need to provide value. You need to understand what the other person wants, and what is valuable to the other person. Then you can tailor a proposition that will appeal to them.

If you’re only thinking about yourself, and you’re thinking about how to leech value from your employer, or you’re thinking about how to leech the most value from your clients and your customers, or a relationship – I hope you’re not doing that in a relationship – then what’s gonna happen is that it’s gonna come back to bite you in the ass.

Providing value

Naively, it seems like “Well, let’s try to leech as much value and we’re gonna get the most money”, right? It doesn’t work that way. What I find works much, much better, and what all the self-help gurus out there, all the people that have come before me who have studied this stuff, and have really made big successes of their lives, all come to the consensus that you need to be providing value.

What does that mean? That means, for example, if you’re working at a company, and right now you’re in a kind of a mid-level position – like a salesman, an engineer, or an accountant, whatever – and you wanna make more money and within that same organisation, then what you gotta do is provide more value to the company. You wanna provide it in a way where it’s obvious to them, and you wanna provide it in a context that they actually want and need.

For example, you might go to your boss, and you might ask them: “What are you guys working on next? What’s the next big thing? How can I contribute the most? Let’s say I really wanted to develop myself, and I wanted to build skills and I could give you guys the most value, what would that look like, for you guys? If I actually went and made all those changes, what would that be worth to you guys? Would you be willing to give me a promotion? Would you be able to give me a pay bump? Would I get a bonus? What could I get? Could I get some perks, some more vacation time?”

Hunting For Opportunities

This is how you do it. You gotta look at where the opportunities are within your company. What are they doing next? What is gonna earn them more money? Whatever earns them more money, they can then justify paying you more for. Because if you could earn your company an extra hundred thousand dollars a year with what you’re doing, either a programme that you’re writing, or the sales that you’re making, or the customers you’re attracting, or the advertising you’re putting out there.

If that’s giving them a hundred thousand dollars cash, and they can see that clearly, link that to your efforts, then they can understand it’s just viable to pay you some percentage of that. They can justify paying you probably as much as half of that, but more likely they’re gonna give you ten percent of that, or twenty percent. It all depends on your situation.

Look for value. If you’re running your own business, and you wanna make more money that’s almost easier. What you gotta do is go and ask your clients, interview your clients and get a deep understanding of what your clients want. What are their real needs, not what you think they want, but what do they say they really want. Then tailor your services to really provide that to them.

Provide what they want more of, and they’re gonna pay you for it, appropriately. Go ahead and ask them. Most entrepreneurs and business leaders actually don’t have a very crystal clear understanding of exactly what it is their clients and their customers want, cause they never sat down and went through that process of finding out. That can be a process that requires some work. If you do that, you’re gonna increase the amount of compensation you’re getting. You’re gonna increase the amount of money you’re charging.

Asking For More

Other ways to make more money? Well, simply ask for it. That’s a simple one, have you tried that? How many people have actually asked for more money? A lot of times we have hesitation, we feel like we don’t deserve it or we feel like if we ask something bad is gonna happen and we’re gonna get rejected or fired, or the client’s gonna leave us.

Well, in a lot of cases, you’re undercharging for your services or your products. Whether you’re working at a company, or you’re running a business and selling your own services and products. You can usually charge more. A lot of times, you can charge double more, and you’d be surprised to find that clients and customers and employers will pay for it.

It all depends on what your positioning is. You should at least try. Do you go in and ask for a yearly salary bump? Do you at least try to do that? Maybe ask for a ten percent raise every year. Make it a habit of doing it. Maybe ask for twenty percent raise. The more you ask, the more you try for it, the more likely you are to get it. If you never ask for raises, no one’s gonna come to you and just hand you a raise.

It’s the same thing with your clients. See if you can charge them more, raise your prices by ten percent, raise your prices by twenty percent, see what happens. You might be surprised at just how much free money you’re losing right now because you’re too hesitant and you’re limiting yourself in your mind, basically, as to how much you can charge.

If your clients are getting a lot of value from what you’re offering, and they don’t have a lot of other options to go to, and you’re not in a super competitive business, then you can probably charge more for what you’re doing.

Sell Your Uniqueness

Which leads me to the last point, which I think I’ll talk about here, which is a more fundamental principle about how to earn more money in whatever it is you’re doing. That is to position yourself into a place where you’re providing something unique that other people are not providing.

The problem with selling a commodity, like if you’re selling gasoline, wheat, or bubble gum is that this stuff is – these markets are so competitive that prices are pretty much set. You can’t really charge much more for bubble gum than what it costs. You can’t really charge much more for gasoline or for wheat than the market price. There’s an industry price.

If you’re providing some sort of unique product, some sort of unique service, something you have patented, something that you’re doing for a company that no-one else can do, then you have some leverage. Now, all of a sudden, you can charge more. It is about creating more leverage in either your business or your career.

In your career, the way you create leverage is becoming very, very good at it. Becoming so good that nobody else is as good as you, and nobody can deliver the same kind of results and value as you. For example, if you’re working for a company as their advertising guy then the better you can market, the more tricks and techniques you know, the more connections you have built with other marketers in the industry, and the more you can leverage them, then the more value you’re able to provide.

It’s a simple math calculation. If you can provide a million dollars worth of value to somebody, then they’re gonna be willing to pay you at least ten percent of that. You’re at least worth ten percent.

Building Up A Brand

If you can provide a million dollar worth of value, they’ll give you at least a hundred thousand. Maybe more, depending how good you are at negotiating. The same is with your business. What are you providing that’s unique about your business? How are you setting up your business that you’re offering a unique selling proposition? How is your product so unique that even if you charge a little bit more for it, customers would still want it?

That usually means building up a brand. That usually means building up some unique points, some unique features that will keep customers coming to you, even though there are other people out there. Maybe your product quality is exceptionally high. Maybe your service quality is exceptionally high. Whatever that is, maybe you just have amazing branding, and you’re the top of the industry, you’re the industry leader in your niche.

That will allow you to charge more money, and any kind of actions you can use to build up and elevate any one of those pillars I just mentioned will allow you to charge more money. I think the ultimate strategy here is to make yourself unique. To do that, that means putting in the hard work and the time it takes to build it up.

It doesn’t matter if you’re building up a brand for your company and you’re investing time and money into building up that brand over a span of a decade. Or you’re doing that with your career, and you’re building up yourself as a brand, as someone who’s an expert in your own industry, whatever industry that is.

If you’re a florist, make your self a world-class florist. If you’re an athlete, make yourself a really world-class athlete. If you’re an engineer, become a really talented, accomplished engineer, with patents behind you. Something like that will make you much more marketable.

Spreading The Word

The final thing that I’ll probably end on is – I already mentioned a little bit of this building up your expertise, but also building up your renown in your industry. Getting a little bit of fame. I don’t mean like celebrity fame, although that can be lucrative in and of itself, but for most of us it’s not about fame, it’s about building up a certain authority and expertise.

Like I said, within your industry, are you well known? Do you have articles published under your name, in your industry, as an expert? You don’t? Why not? Are you going to all the conventions and the industry events? Are you in touch with the leaders in your industry? Are you friend with them? Are you acquaintances with them? Are you in a mastermind group with them?

All of those things will raise your value. First of all, you’ll learn so much more. Second of all, you’ll have more options, you’ll have connections. It’s really powerful to have connections. It’s really powerful to have your name out there. Once you have a little bit of a reputation, even if it’s just within your narrow little niche, then what happens is that your market value skyrockets. And it doesn’t skyrocket proportional to the value you give, it skyrockets much more.

When people recognize you – think about that, if you go into a job interview, and you go in, and there’s you who has ten articles published, maybe a blog that people in this industry follow. Then there’s the other guy, who just has a normal, vanilla resume, and maybe has ten, or even twenty years of experience, but he doesn’t have any sort of image out there, no personal brand built up.

Who do you think they’re gonna hire? Who do you think they’re gonna pay more? You, by a big, big margin. So go ahead and start building that up for yourself. Create a strategy for how you’re gonna do this. Do that for your business, do that for the brand of your business, and if you’re just a career professional, do it for your career. Super, super important. With career it usually means building up connections and training. Getting lots and lots of training, and lots and lots of practice, until you’re really, really good.

Wrap Up

Alright, that’s it. Those are some really excellent ways to build up your money. They’re not get-rich-quick schemes. This is how you can actually get more money in a sustainable way that is proven to work. These are timeless principles that are guaranteed to work for you, if you just work them.

They’re a little bit abstract. You have to go out and personalize them to what you’re doing in your life. I think that you’re smart enough to figure out how that can roll. If you want more advice on how to really make more money, even deeper strategies, then check out Actualized.org. There, we really go into what it takes to become super successful, super wealthy. Wealthy beyond what you can imagine right now.

To do that, it starts with getting your inner game dialed in, developing a certain sense of self-mastery, and then getting your life purpose down. Once you’ve got your life purpose down, and you’re really committed, and you really know what you want out of life, and you know the kind of value you wanna offer other people, the sky’s the limit for you. You will not have a problem with money.

You will be making as much money as you want. That does take some time and some effort to figure out. There are some tips and tricks I wanna show you, so go ahead to Actualize.org and sign up to the newsletter. This is Leo signing off. Go ahead and share this, give me some comments, and like it if you do.