The 4 Ways to Instantly Double Your Income

It’s hard to double your income if you have a “normal” job. You need to control your own salary first. But luckily, you don’t have to quit your job and move to Thailand to do it.

Instead, build a ‘side gig’ business you can run in your time off or on weekends. Keep at it until you’ve replaced your full-time income, (congrats, you’ve just doubled your income!) then quit your job.

Now that you have your own business, there are other ways to double your income. Here they are:

1. Double your prices

If you’re running a services-business, you can charge higher than anybody else does, but you have to convince people you’re worth it. You do that by building trust and becoming an expert in your field. You can also charge more if you’re getting all the traffic.

Charging more is scary at first, and when you double your price you’ll probably lose half your customers or get half as many orders. That’s fine. Now you’re making the same amount of money but have double the time. Now you can focus on expansion, content marketing, or finding new clients.

2. Double your output

If you’re selling products (even digital products like ebooks), then you simply need to create more products, more quickly. Branch out from ebooks to courses. Have a range of things for sale. If you have a widget, think of a variation that you can charge more for.

Some goods can be luxurized (like the iWatch) but not all can. Ebooks, for example, are hard to sell past $9.99. But if you have a big enough audience, you could turn an ebook into a $99 course or service pretty easily – or even $999. That’s one way to go: or you can just publish 99 more ebooks.

3. Double your sales

If you get paid by the sale, increasing traffic to your site, or more actively hunting down and approaching prospects can double your profit. This article says that 94% of salespeople give up after four calls – but 60% of sales are made after the fourth call!

I like Google to send traffic to me, so I focus on content and backlinks… but once I have more products for sale, I’ll focus more on constant advertising (maybe $500 a month to make $5000).

4. Focus on wealthy clients

I’m pretty comfortable with the first three steps, and have doubled my income several times, but I’m starting to peak. There’s only so much I can charge for book covers: people won’t pay too much to publish a book ($2000 on average, $20K would be extravagant). And I can only do so many book covers every month. Those are limiting factors.

So I’ve started building up passive income with more books and courses… plus some other businesses that I hire someone else to run.

And my plan right now is to focus on writing a whole bunch of books, to get up to a few thousand bucks a month on Kindle sales. But that’s small money. I’m thinking too small.

If you want to go big and make real money, you need to:

HELP WEALTHY PEOPLE MAKE MORE MONEY

There are hundreds of thousands of businesses in the world struggling for visibility. They need help with branding, their website, getting traffic, advertising, being cool on social media, developing fun content for marketing.

Many of those companies have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing, promotion and customer acquisition. If you can do something valuable and measurable that visibly bumps their bottom line, that service you provide is worth money.

For example, right now I help authors pick book names, choose an url for their website, and get them started toward building an author platform and marketing their books. Those are valuable skills, focused on a poor market (most authors aren’t going to make a lot of money with their books; there’s only so much they are willing to spend.) What they really need is for me to take over and do it for them, long term, but it’s impossible for me to guarantee predictable results.

They’d have to pay me a lot of money on retainer, maybe $10K a month, and I couldn’t guarantee they’d make anywhere near that money back, because they’d need to employ Kindle marketing strategies like low pricing on ebooks.

However, I could take all those same skills and help somebody who’s launching a business, service or product, to brand themselves well, build a platform, and find and appeal to their target audience.

An “author website” goes for between $1000 and $5000 bucks, but a business website can cost much more than that (I have friends making around $25K per project). It’s the same service, uses the same skills, takes the same amount of time, but a business website will generate more revenue, so it’s more valuable and worth more money.

If I wanted to do that, I’d have to define who my services are for.

I’d be looking for businesses that do over $500K in revenue a year, and I’d want to try and improve their sales by at least 20% (an extra $100K a year). Actually, even if I did that, they wouldn’t be able to pay my retainer… so I’d have to earn them more – maybe 50%, to get up to $750K a year. Then I’d be pulling my weight.

The more value you’re able to provide, the more money you can ask for: which is why selling to businesses (B2B) is almost always a better option than selling directly to consumers, unless:

1. You can double production and double prices

2. Production and distribution isn’t a problem

3. You can make high end luxury versions of your products

I’m not talking about earning a good living: you can do things on a much smaller scale and make enough money to be comfortable. You can sell art on Etsy or write novels and make enough income to survive on; or be “self-employed” running a small business providing services.

There’s lots of ways to make 100K+ a years.

But if you want a predictable way to make MORE than that – to go from 10K a month to 20K a month – you need to be working with big businesses for whom your particular skills can have a major impact.

One of the exceptions to this rule is in books: it’s still possible to write a lot of books and make an insane amount of money, like 50K a month. For me, that’s a pretty exciting goal, and I’m going to chase it for a few years and see if I can write enough books to become a Kindle Superstar.

But after that, as a fall-back plan, I may start focusing on helping businesses make more money.

Where are you in your entrepreneurial journey? What do you need help with? Let me know in the comments!

The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a haunted castle tour. Totally free. Get it here.

Derek Murphy

I’m a philosophy dropout with a PhD in Literature. I covet a cabin full of cats, where I can write fantasy novels to pay for my cake addiction. Sometimes I live in castles.