4 Easy Ways To Increase Your Income

The freelance roller coaster can be rough. If a clients takes 2 weeks longer than expected to pay you, you can go a whole month without having any cash coming in. 

Fortunately, there are ways we can increase our income in ways that don't rely on how many hours we work per week. Increasing your income can help stabilize the high's and low's of the roller coaster and provide more security in your business. 
 

1. Sell Knowledge

People love information products because e-books are cheaper and instantly downloadable. You see a lot of entrepreneurs selling behind-the-scenes, secrets-to-success e-books that are wildly successful (Just look at Small Business Bodyguard's success). This route has the biggest payoff if you are willing to put in the effort in order to achieve it. 

If you sit down one day and decide, "Hey, I'm going to write an e-book," it's not going to happen. There's so much work upfront that needs to go into an e-book, which is why most people have good intentions when they begin, but find their motivation teeters off after a couple weeks.

• Split up your e-book into blog posts. One way to tackle the overwhelming amount of work that needs to go into an e-book is to divide it up into blog posts. You can post this information as you go, essentially creating chapters. This approach breaks up your thoughts into tangible chunks. When you have all the content written, you can package everything up and sell it for a few bucks.  
• Go through your archive of blog posts/client resources. If you maintain a blog or have resources you regularly provide to your clients, there's a chance you already have resources or information that you could provide to your audience. Look to see if there are any resources that your audience might be willing to pay for, especially if it's provided you with value in your business.
   

2. Sell Design Resources  

Designers are in a great position to offer digital resources and products. Not only are you contributing back to the community, you're able to make residual income from your work. Creative Market is a perfect example of the earning potential from creating Photoshop brushes, fonts, graphics, stock photos, themes, templates and more.

My shop has been consistently generating almost $900/month. Most of my products aren't even on the popular page. You can imagine the amount of money some of the popular items are making per month. The downfall is that you have to surrender a cut from each sale, but in return, you are given the huge customer market that is already on the site. 

Websites like Etsy or Envato Market are also options for selling your design resources. Obviously, you can host your own products through services like Shopify, but you have to start from scratch.  
 

3. Affiliate Marketing

Advertising is how bloggers originally made money. Now a days, people are getting smarter and traditional advertising doesn't work as well as it used to, especially if the ads on your website have nothing to do with the content you post.

I've had decent success with affiliate marketing and it's a fabulous way to promote valuable resources for other freelancers, while earning some extra cash. The best part about this method is that it generates money while you're sleeping.

The con to affiliate marketing is that you need a large (massive) amount of traffic to generate any form of worthwhile earnings. The more eyeballs you have on your blog, the better, but it takes a lot of work.  

• Only promote brands or companies you believe in. Most of the companies I promote through my blog are ones I've used personally or have heard really good things about. They are also relevant to my target audience — which means it's a form of product promotion that's less invasive and still provides value to the reader even if they decide not to buy the product.  
   

4. Increase Your Hourly Rate

Lots of freelancers think that the only way to increase your income is to raise your prices or work more hours. This is not true, BUT, it's actually the easiest way out of all the tips we've described so far to increase your earning potential. 

I've always been a fan of per hour pricing — I find it covers my ass when unexpected things come up in projects and I've always felt more comfortable quoting on an hourly basis. One simple way to increase your income, is to increase your hourly rate. You should be doing this anyways as you progress through your career — as you start gaining more experience and responsibilities. 

If you charge per project, you could also revisit how you "package" your services. For example, if you are a freelance writer, maybe you charge $500 for a 500-word blog post. If this takes you 3 hours to complete, you are making $165/hour. 2 hours, $250/hour. There's no way you would be able to charge $250/hour as a freelancer, but this is just changing the perception on how the client views your services.