Top 5 Ways to Increase Your Income Successfully

If you want to get more money out of your work, consider these 5 options.

1. Change jobs.

Money isn’t everything. Financial gain isn’t the only consideration when evaluating your current employment. Work that you enjoy doing will give you greater satisfaction, a feeling that no amount of money can provide.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Successful people concentrate on their work, the business, while unsuccessful people focus solely on the money.

Think it over.

2. Take on an extra job.

Perhaps your primary job gives you great satisfaction, but doesn’t yet provide a sufficient income. Taking a second job may be a better solution than changing jobs. Like everything else – it depends on the individual. You know best. You have to consider the consequences; working two jobs means there will be less time for everything else and added pressure. Ask yourself if the increase in income is worth the additional taxes you’ll pay, time you will spend, etc.

3. Invest more time in your present job.

Another possibility is to put in more time into your present job. Since you are probably paid according to time or efficiency, your income will probably rise with more time invested. This alternative is similar to the one above, that of increasing your workload, except it doesn’t require acclimating yourself to a new job and therefore you don’t need to concentrate on (and master) two different jobs. However, the work may be monotonous (where adding an extra job might allow combining mental and physical work, a possible advantage) or less rewarding, thus, it might not be profitable to bet everything, so to speak, on one horse.

4. Be more efficient in your present job.

One good variation is to be more efficient at your present job, which often results in higher earnings. Think about how you can save time and money. Search for bottlenecks and fix them. Consider the Paret Principle – 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of the work done. Concentrate more on effective tasks and less on auxiliary ones that don’t bring in money directly (like preparation, cleaning, etc.).

5. Learn to enjoy your present job.

You’ll move towards your goals faster if you organize your present job so you enjoy it more. Make a list of things that make you happy at work or bring you satisfaction from your job. The list might include: what you have, what you have always wanted, where your advantages are, how tasks can be done in a pleasant and fun way and so on.

You’ll find the job itself probably isn’t so bad, it’s just that you have been focusing more on the negative, rather than the positive, aspects. Be optimistic and start to take an interest in your field of expertise. Associate with people who do similar work and enjoy doing it – allow them to pass their enthusiasm on to you.

Maybe you won’t get a raise at first, but you’ll be much happier and not only at work. If I asked you, which you would prefer, money or happiness, what would you say? Well, there, you see…

I promise you that over time you will be noticed – if not by your superiors at work and business associates or partners, then by others. There are always plenty of jobs for a worker who is conscientious and an expert in his or her field.

Those who are the best in the business have doors opened everywhere, regardless of whether such a qualified person is needed right then or not.

Wise employers employ someone the moment they realize that a person can benefit their company. They don’t wait for an empty position where they would be forced into a feverish search for an appropriate candidate.

Places to leave your stamp offline?

Obviously you can purchase advertising space in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, etc. But lets face it, paying for ad space can get pricey, so let’s look at a few cheaper ways to brand your business away from the computer, because shockingly, some people still don’t spend their entire day on the Internet.

Stickers

Giving your customers free bonus items such as stickers upon purchases, is an excellent way to get your brand out there in the physical world. Making the sticker-design appealing to the customer will increase the chances that they will actually use it somewhere, and wherever they stick it, your brand will be there.

This is a great opportunity to advertise your website to people that would ordinarily probably not find you online on their own. It can be just as effective for brick and mortar businesses as well, but even you guys should have websites, so I’d worry about that first if you haven’t already.

Flyers

Similar to stickers, flyers can provide a good advertising solution. However, they lack the longevity that a sticker can provide. Flyers can be torn down much easier than a sticker. You have to put them up yourself if you want them posted somewhere. If you just give them away to customers, they will most likely end up in the trash.

That said, posting them on bulletin boards, telephone poles, etc, can still attract some attention as long as they are up, and it shouldn’t be too expensive to print some up. If you already have a printer, it will cost you next to nothing. I would suggest again, including your web address or instructions on how to find you online.

Bulletin Boards

Bulletin boards are good places to post a variety of marketing materials. Not only can you post flyers, but you can post business cards, stickers (without sticking them, leaving opportunity for someone else to take them and stick them somewhere else), etc.

Lots of places have bulleting boards. The first ones that come to mind are libraries and supermarkets, but if you pay attention while you’re out and about, I bet you’ll find plenty of them.

A Live Person

You can have an employee (or yourself) stand alongside the road and do some physical promotion. I’ve seen other businesses use this approach. Often times, they will be wearing funny costumes and holding signs. While this may not be the best way to keep your dignity, sometimes business is about making sacrifices (besides, if you’re in a costume, nobody will recognize you anyway).

This can be an effective method particularly for brick and mortar business owners who have a store they can have somebody in front of or near, but I don’t see why someone running a strictly online business couldn’t go somewhere out in public and use the same strategy.

Attire

Another way to get some branding out of a live person that is a little less demeaning is letting them wear clothing with your brand on it. If you don’t want to give away t-shirts to you customers, you could at least consider giving them to your employees. Whether you require them to wear a uniform or not, a t-shirt is a t-shirt, and they may even wear them out in public on their days off. At that point, you’re not only getting free advertising, you’re getting some work from your staff off the clock!

I hate to drive a point into the ground, but again, include your web address!

Auto

Many businesses will pay ordinary people to feature advertising on their vehicles. This is something you could look into if you’re willing to put up the dough, but it would be cheaper to do it yourself.

This is another time when you are making a sacrifice, but you basically have a choice. Are you more concerned about your automobile’s appearance or having another way to attract customers? Just think about  how many people are going to see it on any given day while you are driving – to work, to the mall, to school, etc, etc, etc.

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50 office-speak phrases you love to hate

Management speak – don’t you just hate it? Here are the 50 of the best (worst) examples.

1. “When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss – sorry, “team leader” – it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again.”
Nima Nassefat, Vancouver, Canada

2. “My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers. I think that says it all really.”
Anonymous, England

3. At my old company (a US multinational), anyone involved with a particular product was encouraged to be a product evangelist. And software users these days, so we hear, want to be platform atheists so that their computers will run programs from any manufacturer.”
Philip Lattimore, Thailand

4. “Incentivise is the one that does it for me.”
Karl Thomas, Perth, Scotland

5. “My favourite which I hear from the managers at the bank I work for is let’s touch base about that offline. I think it means have a private chat but I am still not sure.”
Gemma, Wolverhampton, England

6. “Have you ever heard the term loop back which means go back to an associate and deal with them?”
Scott Reed, Lakeland, Florida, US

7-8. “We used to collect the jargon used in a list and award the person with the most at the end of the year. The winner was a client manager with the classic you can’t turn a tanker around with a speed boat change. What? Second was we need a holistic, cradle-to-grave approach, whatever that is.”
Turner, Manchester

9. “Until recently I had to suffer working for a manager who used phrases such as the idiotic I’ve got you in my radar in her speech, letters and e-mails. Once, when I mentioned problems with the phone system, she screamed ‘NO! You don’t have problems, you have challenges’. At which point I almost lost the will to live.”
Stephen Gradwick, Liverpool

10. “You can add challenge to the list. Problems are no longer considered problems, they have morphed into challenges.”
Irene MacIntyre, Courtenay, B

11. “Business speak even supersedes itself and does so with silliness, the shorthand for quick win is now low hanging fruit.”
Paul, Formby, UK

12. “And looking under the bonnet.”
Eve Russell, Edinburgh

13-14. “The business-speak that I abhor is pre-prepare and forward planning. Is there any other kind of preparedness or planning?”
Edward Creswick, Exeter

15-16. “The one that really gets me is pre-plan – there is no such thing. Either you plan or you don’t. The new one which has got my goat is conversate, widely used to describe a conversation. I just wish people could learn to ‘think outside the box’ although when they put us in cubes what do they expect?”
Malcolm, Houston

17. “I work in one of those humble call centres for a bank. Apparently, what we’re doing at the moment is sprinkling our magic along the way. It’s a call centre, not Hogwarts.”
Caroline Garlick, Ayrshire

18. “A pet hate is the utterly pointless expression in this space. So instead of the perfectly adequate ‘how can I help?’ it’s ‘how can I help in this space?’ Or the classic I heard on Friday, ‘How can we help our customers in this space going forward?’ I think I may have caught this expression at source, as I’ve yet to hear it said outside my own working environment. So I’m on a personal crusade to stamp it out before it starts infecting other City institutions. Wish me luck in this space.”
Colin, London

19. “The one phrase that inspires a rage in me is from the get-go.”
Andy, Herts

20. “‘Going forward’ is only half the phrase that gets up my nose – all politicians seem to use the phrase go forward together. ‘We must… we shall… let us now… go forward together’. It gives me a terrible mental image of the whole country linking arms and goose-stepping in unison, with the politicians out in front doing a straight-armed salute. Is it just me?”
Frances Smith, Toronto, Canada

21. “I am a financial journalist and am on a mission to remove words and phrases such as 360-degree thinking from existence.”
Richard, London

22. “The latest that’s stuck in my head is we are still optimistic things will feed through the sales and delivery pipeline (ie: we actually haven’t sold anything to anyone yet but maybe we will one day).”
Alexander, Southampton

23. “I worked in PR for many years and often heard the most ludicrous phrases uttered by CEOs and marketing managers. One of the best was, we’d better not let the grass grow too long on this one. To this day it still echoes in my ears and I giggle to myself whenever I think about it. I can’t help but think insecure business people use such phrases to cover up their inability for proper articulation.”
Leon Reilly, Ealing, London

24. “Need to get all my ducks in a row now – before the five-year-olds wake up.”
Mark Dixon, Bridgend

25. “Australians have started to use auspice as a verb. Instead of saying, ‘under the auspices of…’, some people now say things like, it was auspiced by…”
Martin Pooley, Marrickville, Australia

26. “My favourite: we’ve got our fingers down the throat of the organisation of that nodule. Translation = Er, no, WE sorted out the problems to cover your backside.”
Theo de Bray, Kettering, UK

27. “The health service in Wales is filled with managers who use this type of language as a substitute for original thought. At meetings we play health-speak bingo; counting the key words lightens the tedium of meetings – including, most recently, my door is open on this issue. What does that mean?”
Edwin Pottle, Llandudno

28-29. “The business phrase I find most irritating is close of play, which is only slightly worse than actioning something.”
Ellie, London

30. “Here in the US we have the cringe-worthy and also in addition. Then there’s the ever-eloquent ‘where are we at?’ So far, I haven’t noticed the UK’s at the end of the day prefacing much over here; thank heavens for small mercies.”
Eithne B, Chicago, US

31. “The expression that drives me nuts is 110%, usually said to express passion/commitment/support by people who are not very good at maths. This has created something of a cliche-inflation, where people are now saying 120%, 200%, or if you are really REALLY committed, 500%. I remember once the then-chancellor Gordon Brown saying he was 101% behind Tony Blair, to which people reacted ‘What? Only 101?'”
Ricardo Molina, London, UK

32. “My least favourite business-speak term is not enough bandwidth. When an employee used this term to refuse an additional assignment, I realised I was completely ‘out of the loop’.”
April, Berkeley, US

33. “I once had a boss who said, ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.’ It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil.”
Tim, Durban

34. “Capture your colleagues – make sure everyone attends that risk management workshop (compulsory common sense training for idiots).”
Anglowelsh, UK

35-37. “We too used to have daily paradigm shifts, now we have stakeholders who must come to the party or be left out, or whatever.”
Barry Hicks, Cape Town, RSA

38. “I have taken to playing buzzword bingo when in meetings. It certainly makes it more entertaining when I am feeding it back (or should that be cascading) at work.”
Ian Everett, Bolton

39. “In my work environment it’s all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don’t seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we’re being wee’d on. Which we usually are.”
LMD, London

40. “At a large media company where I once worked, the head of human resources – itself a weaselly neologism for personnel – told us that she would be cascading down new information to staff. What she meant was she was going to send them a memo. It was one of the reasons I resigned – that, and the fact that the chief exec persisted on referring to the company as a really cool train set.”
Andrew, London

41. “Working for an American corporation, this year’s favourite word seems to be granularity, meaning detail. As in ‘down to that level of granularity’.”
Chris Daniel, Anaco, Venezuela

42. “On the wall of our office we have a large signed certificate, signed by all the senior management team, in which they solemnly promise to leverage their talents, display and inspire ‘unyielding integrity’, and lots of other pretentious buzz-phrases like that. Clueless, the lot of them.”
Chris K, Cheltenham UK

43. “After a reduction in workforce, my university department sent this notice out to confused campus customers: ‘Thank you for your note. We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers and key stakeholders. We intend to start that process within the week. In the meantime, please continue to raise specific concerns or questions about projects with my office via the Transition Support Center…”
Charles R, Seattle, Washington, US

44. “I was told I’d be living the values from now on by my employers at a conference the other week. Here’s some modern language for them – meh. A shame as I strongly believe in much of what my employers aim to do. I refuse to adopt the voluntary sectors’ client title of ‘service user’. How is someone who won’t so much as open the door to me using my service? Another case of using four syllables where one would do.”
Upscaled Blue-Sky thinker, Cardiff

45. “Business talk 2.0 is maddening, meaningless, patronising and I despise it.”
Doug, London

46. “Lately I’ve come across the strategic staircase. What on earth is this? I’ll tell you; it’s office speak for a bit of a plan for the future. It’s not moving on but moving up. How strategic can a staircase really be? A lot I suppose, if you want to get to the top without climbing over all your colleagues.”
Peter Walters, Cheadle Hulme, UK

47. “When a stock market is down why must we be told it is in negative territory?”
Phil Linehan, Mexico City, Mexico

48. “The particular phrase I love to hate is drill down, which handily can be used either as an adverb/verb combo or as a compound noun, ie: ‘the next level drill-down’, sometimes even in the same sentence – a nice bit of multi-tasking.”
B, London

49. “Thanks for the impactful article; I especially appreciated the level of granularity. A high altitude view often misses the siloed thinking typical of most businesses. Absent any scheme for incentivitising clear speech, however, I’m afraid we’re stuck with biz-speak.”
Timothy Denton, New York

50. “It wouldn’t do the pinstripers any harm to crack a smile and say what they really felt once in a while instead of trotting out such clinical platitudes. Of course a group of them may need to workshop it first: Wouldn’t want to wrongside the demographic.”
Trick Cyclist, Tripoli, Libya

14 things you can learn from the Google story

1. Connections – human, computer, biology – are everything. Life = networks.
2. Never compromise your ideals because someone said it’s impossible, stupid, or a waste of time.
3. Do focus on changing the world, don’t focus on the money. If you provide value, the money will come.
4. Have a healthy disregard for the impossible. If someone hasn’t done it yet, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
5. Money is a problem, not a solution. Money cannot solve your problems, but your solutions can solve the money problem.
6. Value creativity, not money. View creativity as your company’s true bottom-line, or your company will stop growing and die.
7. Go against the grain. Don’t believe in other people’s visions for you, believe in your own.
8. Speed is more important than looking good. A shiny, beautiful car isn’t impressive when it gets overtaken by an old jalopy; the same applies to software.
9. Organic growth is best. Only grow as fast as you need to, don’t waste money on advertising a product you won’t want your mom to use.
10. Focus on users above all else, e.g. don’t do something that might annoy your users just to make more money, they won’t forget.
11. Never betray users’ trust, or anyone else’s.
12. Spend 20% of your time on blue-sky ideas without worrying about how they will make a profit. If it might change the world for the better, it needs to be done, even if it can’t make money.
13. Don’t make enemies of your competitors to stay driven. Be driven by your own values and mission.
14. Beat your own path through the wilderness.