Let's first cover a few stipulations. For delusional people, these will crush their kooky dreams of living a passive-income lifestyle with no work. But for people who are serious about earning money and who realize that to earn money passively, you have to start out doing work actively (just like I've done) this is what you need to know.
- Out of the 3 primary ways to earn money. the easiest way to earn money on the side is to start a freelance business. meaning you take your skills and turn them into direct income. It costs virtually nothing to get started, you can start earning money right away, and you can rapidly test and refine what you offer to earn even more.
For this reason, freelancing will be the main focus of my strategies for earning more, but note that you can (and many, many of my students HAVE) applied these lessons to other productizing or to increase salary at their regular jobs.
(Productizing is unrealistic for most people who are starting out since it involves both the critical aspects of freelancing, as well as an entirely separate set of skills.) MOST jobs can translate directly into freelance work and EVERY job implies skills that can transfer to indirectly to related freelancing jobs. But there are a small percentage of professions that can’t: For example, you don’t see any freelance cardiothoracic surgeons. (But you can see some doctors moving in that direction.) People worry about the time involved, but this is really just an excuse to do nothing. Do you think successful people say, Waa…if I start earning money, I'll have too much work, and I don't know if I want that… ? Of course not. They know that the real problem is getting any money at all, not getting too much. Since you'll be making money on the side, you can control exactly how much time you put in. There are proven ways to minimize the time you spend so you can hit your target goals. Finally, it's FUN to earn more, not drudgery. Just like dating, it will probably take repeated failures to find a good match between your skills and what the market wants.
Please re-read that last point about repeated failures.
This is probably the most important fact to keep in mind as you’re working through ideas that can make you money. I personally keep a Failures tag in Gmail where, if I'm not getting at least 5 failures/month, I know I'm not doing enough.
What are your real skills, and how can you turn them into something that other people will pay for? Let’s say you have a full-time job as a project manager or salesperson or translator. How can turn what you already know how to do into $200/month, $500/month, or even $5,000/month in side income?
Making more money is about creating a process to rapidly find, test, and develop a series of ideas until you find the right idea that's profitable.
