In today’s shaky economic climate you might be looking for extra ways to make money. Scratch that, I bet that you are looking for ways to make money. Everyone can always benefit from more money coming into their bank accounts. And that’s great, but no doubt you have heard the saying: work smart not hard. It’s actually not a bad idea to do both.
The best ways to make money are by doing things that will also help you to become more financially or business savvy. Having a garage sale can help you to make some quick cash, and get rid of some household junk, but are you going to learn anything from that process? Will you gain some important business skills from a garage sale? Your kids might, but you probably won’t. Hopefully, at this point, you are beyond basic math skills.
That doesn’t mean you should skip having a garage sale, but I want to encourage you to try looking for money making opportunities that are going to do more than just earn you money. Try to kill two birds with one stone and actually develop another skill while you bring home the bacon.
For example; My brother and I started this blog to help people become smarter financially. As we share our expertise, we also had to learn what was going on beyond our expertise. This has helped us to increase our own intelligence around financial matters. So we created this blog as a way to share our experiences and make a little money. The amazing side effect of that has been an increase in our own knowledge. We killed two birds with one stone.
When we first started out on this adventure, we didn’t realize how much this was going to help us on a personal level. Now that we see how important it is to gain knowledge along with making money, we wanted to make sure that we shared this with our readers. There is always something more to be gained than just a few bucks.
Here’s another good example. If you are feeling excited and drawn to a product based business, then you had better be a good sales person. If you are going to sell your products you have to be good at convincing people that you are selling a good product. This might seem obvious, but for many business owners it isn’t obvious at all. Many business owners are under the misconception that they just need to have an amazing idea and the rest of the business will take care of itself.
While you are creating this amazing product, you have to know how to get it on the shelves and make people interested in buying what you have to sell. If you don’t think that you have sales skills than there is no time like the present to start developing them; because the reality is that we all could benefit from sales skills in business, no matter what we are doing. Look into taking a class, read a few books, go to a seminar, but do something that will help you to become more business savvy and at the same time help your business.
If there are skills that you want to develop in a specific niche, look into some freelance work. With freelance you can get jobs in any number of niche markets. This means if you want to learn more and develop your skills with web development, get a freelance job doing some web development. It’s going to be a steep learning curve and you better be ready to work hard, but by taking on a few side jobs you can earn money and strengthen some skills that you feel are important to develop.
One of the most important life lessons is to work to learn. Yes, you need to earn money, but if you are working at a job that you hate and it does nothing to help you learn, it might be time to find a new job. People spend way too much time at jobs that barely pay them enough to get by month to month, and they are completely miserable. If your job isn’t offering you enough money to help you save or enough mental information to help you continue to develop, then you should start looking to do something else with your life.
I know that can be scary, especially in these economic times, but what is great about these economic times is that anything is possible. If there is a dream you have always wanted to try, now is the time to go for it. Anything is possible, the playing field is wide open and you can step into your dream. And if you do it right you could be killing two birds with one stone.