Click here to watch my video on How to double your income in under 6 months.

We all know a person who is extremely talented at doing something and they treat it almost like a hobby. Perhaps it is a hobby for them. But when you need help fixing your car or with a computer they are there and lend a hand for next to nothing. Perhaps they are a good friend or acquaintance but at the time you would have been willing to give your left arm to have whatever working again. Why do you think so many people pay tons of money to the Geek Squad?

What is your true value?

Your true value is what you think you are worth. You might lie to yourself and say, “I don’t know as much about SEO as So-and-So”. That doesn’t matter. If you think you are worth $10/hr, you are going to make $10/hr. We all know people who make a lot of money doing something they have no right doing because they are a complete, incompetent a-hole. But that doesn’t stop them now, does it?

Value is a frame of mind and the sooner you establish what your true value is, the quicker you can start making some real money. This will likely prompt you to make some drastic changes, but that is ok. In six months, I went from a 40 hour per week, 23k per year help desk technician to working 15-20 hours per week and making over 86k per year! I did that all by making a choice and so can you.

How do I find my true value?

You probably think the idea of simply asking for more money is crazy, but in essence that is what I did. The most important thing you can do for your emotional, financial or spiritual life is to simply ask for what you want. It’s not enough to ask for more money. You have to ask for specifically what you want. I want $50,000 per year and the flexibility to work from home.

There is one caveat to this asking for more business. You have to believe it is possible to reach what you are asking. Asking for a million dollars is nice but if you don’t truly believe that having a million dollars is possible you’ll have a very hard time reaching that goal. Aim for a goal that is substantially higher than what you are making now but within reach. Start with doubling your income first.

If you currently make $25k a year, make your goal $50k a year. Then take that $50k and figure out how much per day it takes to reach that goal. Figure the average workweek of 40 hours and 50 weeks per year minus vacation and you get ($50,000/50 weeks = $1,000 per week)($1,000/40 hours = $25 per hour or $200 per day). This could be as easy as setting up one WordPress blog/business website per week, per client, granted you know how.

Nobody should have a problem trying to figure out how it is possible to make $1,000 per week. If you are having a problem figuring out how to make additional passive income, it is probably due to not having a specific enough goal. Try it once for one week and once you prove you can reach the $1,000 goal for one week I am sure you can find a way to repeat that.

What are people willing to pay?

The short answer is a lot.

People are willing to pay any amount granted the value is there. It is not their job to prove your value assessment right but your job to show their investment is worth the value you offer. This starts with you. Going back to how much you value yourself, your time and your skill set is key. If you don’t truly believe you are worth $25/hr then you wont make $25/hr. You will continually find yourself in low paying jobs constantly grinding away to make ends meet.

I had my wake up call when a family friend put me in my place. I learned from that experience (the one I describe in the video above) that making more money isn’t about the opportunities but about your mindset and your goals.

If you are in the business of solving people’s problems, you’ll find they’ll be willing to pay just about anything in order to make the pain of whatever go away. If you are in the business of providing additional value to their already successful business, you’ll need to show how and why they need to pay you to ensure they don’t end up in pain. The Internet is changing at an exponential rate. It used to be ok to just have a website, an online brochure, but now millions of people (customers) are hanging out in places like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and consume content by the bucket loads.

Tons of businesses are finding themselves behind the 8-ball when it comes to things outside their business. If you believe you are worth more and your value justifies, you’ll have no problem finding clients who are willing to pay that exact amount. You’ll find that you will begin to make deals that fall right in line with what you are asking for. Then you simply ask for more again.

Ideas on how do you increase your value to your clients?

Pain is the number one motivator for 99.99% of the human population. I am not saying to start threatening people with physical pain in order to gain their business but to show them how you can stop a certain type of pain for them. If their company is online and their sales have remained the same or tapered off, show them how you can gain them a larger audience.

You can begin by showing your client the number one business website in their field in comparison to theirs. Now show them how quickly their competition is adapting to the changing circumstances and how you can help them to avoid becoming irrelevant in the future. Relevancy and eyeballs equal more sales and profit. Then lay out a plan for them to regain what has been lost and then where it will go from there. You’ll have to rely on past experiences to make sure you aren’t promising a bill of goods you can’t deliver.

Another way would be for you to work for a small base pay and take a percentage of sales or start selling the leads you generate. In the end you can charge a lot more this route because you are taking on more of the burden or risk. This will vary with the amount of trust you have with your clients.

Ideas on how do you increase your value to your boss?

This can be a little trickier. This will depend a lot on your relationship with your boss coupled with some good negotiating skills.

Start by framing up exactly what your intentions are. Creating a solution for a common problem and/or a way to improve the way things currently are. This of course can raise lots of opposition, especially depending on where you are in the organization and whether or not your organization has people willing to change or adapt. For this very reason I decided to quit my full-time job and pursue the life of the self-employed. Others have stayed with their employers and succeeded massively.

For instance, my good friend has stuck with his corporate job and started heaping all of the value he could onto his back. This year he received twice the raise that all my old coworkers received and has positioned himself as an authority to significantly increase his income in the next two years. All of this amid a recession. He was able to position himself as a high commodity in the workspace. This can be done a number of ways.

Firstly, determine what you want and make a plan to reach it. The people who win wars don’t necessarily have better warriors but better plans for reaching their goal. Decide what your goal is and start your plan of reaching it. This will likely not happen overnight, so be patient. If you need to increase your value, then do so.

Secondly, by increasing your interaction within the workplace and with your company’s clientele you gain more leverage. If my friend above were to leave that job for another, chances are high that it would be for much more money due to the added value he could bring to the table. A more complete package. By positioning yourself within a company as an invaluable resource, you arrive to the table with much more bargaining power. This isn’t to say that anything is a sure thing but with the right goal and understood value you can drastically change your position.

Lastly, you can use your past experiences and successes as a bargaining chip for your new future boss. If your current employer doesn’t fully appreciate the value you bring to the table, another will if presented correctly. Know exactly what your goal is and if your current path is not leading to it, find another. That could possibly mean relocating your job.

Conclusion

The most important thing to know is where you want to be and by when. Answer those two questions and you’ll find a way to arrive on time.

I know I am not alone in finding ways to drastically increase my income in a short time-frame. Tell me about some different ways you have exploded your income.

This is the third and final in a series about Nido Qubein and his book, Stairway to Success.

Developing a plan for success involves three things:

1. Setting Goals
2. Setting Priorities
3. Developing Strategies

“Good personal planning involves no more than determining how you will get from your present circumstances to the future you have created through your vision.” – Nido Qubein

I tend to set pretty ambitious goals for myself, and I do so by writing or printing them out and hanging them around my office. Up until last week I listed goals on my blog for page views and other meaningless stats. I have since pulled those off because I personally think those are the wrong goals to have because of their small measurable impact. I am instead working on a new set of goals that I might not publicly post for this blog and its growth. Goals are a must and should be taken vary seriously.

“Wisdom ofttimes consists of knowing what to do next.” - Herbert Hoover

Setting priorities gives you a place of reference when you come to a situation in which you are unsure of where to go. Knowing your goals and making them your priority makes day to day decisions easier. Suppose your goal is to save $2,000 and you are buying Christmas gifts for your family and extended family. It is easy to want to splurge on the people you love even if it goes against your goal of saving money. Is there a best way to save money and still buy / create gifts for your family? Of course there is. It might take a little more imagination than cruising the isles of Best Buy, but it can be done.

More important, the issue of saving money vs. buying Christmas presents for your family shouldn’t even be an issue. Nido talks about the different levels of planning and problems. Most problems like the one above can be addressed early and then shouldn’t ever be an issue down the road at Christmas time. If you plan ahead with your goals and set priorities you should be able to navigate your way through most problems fairly easily.

“There usually are half a dozen right answers to “What needs to be done?” Yet unless a [person] makes the risky and controversial choice of only one, he will achieve nothing.” – Peter F. Drucker

Developing your strategies for success in any area of your life is like having a playbook in sports. Could you imagine if a professional sports team just said: “Aw…this week, let’s just wing it and see what happens”? My guess and I am sure yours as well would say they are guaranteed to lose.

Your strategies should meet these criteria:

• They must specify actions to be taken.
• They must specify the person or persons who is to take the actions.
• They must establish a time for beginning the actions.
• They must establish a deadline for completing the actions.
• They must establish criteria for determining when the actions have been satisfactorily completed.

This can be addressed pretty easily by stating what the problem or goal is that you are trying to achieve or overcome. Then developing a plan of action to tackle that issues in a systematic and bit sized way. You need to set an “end game” for that issue when you get to your defined goal or conclusion.

I have brought you through roughly half of the book Stairway to Success by Nido Qubein. If you would like to learn more, I would highly suggest buying it or checking it out of your local library. Although I did not read this book before I started out on my own quest for success in business and life, I have been using many of the same techniques learned by other teachers and writings. I think this book has the plan well laid out and is a solid package of advice for building upon your success in any facet of your life.

Here are the first two parts, Nido Qubein Part 1 and Nido Qubein Part 2

This is the second in a series about Nido Qubein and his book, Stairway to Success.

After writing the first post about Nido Qubein and one of his books, I thought I would take a minute and explain why I am even talking about this to begin with, and why here on a marketing blog.

Boiled down and condensed, Nido Qubein says we are our greatest marketing tool. There is nothing in the world that can replace what each of us knows on any given subject or topic. If you were to put me in a room full of sports enthusiasts, I would be pretty lost. I wouldn’t feel the need to run and hide, but I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the stats, players, teams, so on and so on. But, if you were to put me in a room with economists and monetary theorists I could hold my own.

The greatest thing we as individuals can do is find the things we can do and love and develop those talents to be the best they can be. I didn’t take any marketing classes in high school or college. I didn’t learn theory on marketing and how to persuade people to buy things. I instead picked up some books and started reading from some of the best marketers around. I started following blogs, learned about web marketing and permission based marketing.

What I came to realize is that if I had taken some of those classes and had been taught those more “traditional marketing techniques,” that experience probably would have skewed my perception on marketing. Instead of reading about people in turkey costumes being targets of water balloons, you would be reading about proper banner sizes for your store and approachable vs. unapproachable color combinations.

The main message Nido Qubein is hitting hard at in his book is that each of us has a choice. That choice is the ability to determine our future, our success, our wealth and much more. According to William Jennings Bryan, “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

Creating a Vision

“Many people go through life unaware that this creative power lies within them. Yet we all have it. You can create the future you want. It’s all a matter of forming a vision, committing yourself to that vision and acting in harmony with the vision.” – Nido Qubein

Here we come back to having that choice again in how we are going to be 2 or 3 years from now. First we have to choose what our life, business, physique or emotional status is going to be. Then you break down those goals into smaller, more manageable pieces. When all of this is done with the commitment of the head and heart it is much more likely to stick around than your last New Year’s resolution.

Crossing your own Rubicon

“Crossing the Rubicon” is a popular idiom meaning to pass a point of no return. It refers to Caesar’s 49 BC crossing of the river, which was considered an act of war. -Wikipedia

I am not saying that you have to start war with anything, but I think the point Nido is trying to make is there needs to be a catalyst. It’s like an alcoholic making the commitment of sobriety after hitting rock bottom, or a morbidly obese person starting recovery after being told life will be cut short otherwise. The event has to be significant and memorable to the effect of when things are tough you can look back to where you have come from since then as a source of encouragement. For me this was when I quit my traditional day job around Christmas of 2007 (almost been a year, WOW!).

I made the choice back then that I would no longer let others determine my fate, but I would pursue the things I enjoyed and learn those things to the best of my ability. I can tell you it was worth every bit of it and I would never take back that choice. I did have my doubts from time to time and ups and downs like anything else, but this is true anywhere and under any circumstance.

To be continued…

You can find the first in the Nido Qubein series part 1 here and part 3 shortly.