The Only Way How to Make Money so the Money will Make You
Making Extra Cash To Invest
One of the the truly golden rules with investing is that you only invest money that you can afford to lose. So if you lose it, it will not impact your ability to survive, or your ability to continue to pay for your preferred level of living standard. The reason this rule is golden, is that you want your investment decisions to be purely based on the investments. You don't want to start making decisions with your investments because you need the money to pay for food, or your mortgage.
This is why making some extra money to invest is such a good way to start on the road to financial freedom. The income you are earning today in your job already supports your living expenses. So if you leave that money alone, find a way to make some extra money and only invest that additional income, then you will be free to only use investment related information to make your investment decisions.
Below are the methods I have found to be sustainable ways to make the extra money outside my day job, that I used to fund my investment portfolio.
You Must Add Value To Someone
The basic rule with any work from home opportunity which you must follow, is that you must add value to someone.
There are plenty of other offers out there which don't follow this basic rule. I like to call these offers scams, and I strongly suggest you avoid them. They are not sustainable ways to make additional income, they have not been set up for your benefit and often they are not even legal. Some examples of such scams include the ponzi schemes, gambling systems, auto-surf schemes and helping the Nigerians (Ie. the 419 Scam) with their "requests for assistance." More often than not, such schemes will take money from you, not earn it for you. If it sounds too good to be true, you should assume it is too good to be true.
In a nutshell, to make some extra money, someone must pay you. (it has to come from somewhere) If someone is going to pay you, you must have something that this person wants to buy. To have something that someone wants to buy, you must have something which in their eyes, adds value to them. This is why, by starting with the basic rule that you must add value to someone, you will pretty quickly be able to work out if a scheme is an opportunity or a scam.
Also, before you think about these opportunities, spare a moment thinking about how you are going to approach them. Are you going to approach them as a consumer, or as a business person. There is a big difference. We explain this further here: Developing a Business Mindset
Here are the opportunities we have found which generate additional income by adding value.
Freelance Consulting Work
We all have skills which we can sell independantly. Further to this, we all have opportunities everyday, to learn and acquire new skills. And the world is full of organisations with short, medium and long term issues, looking for people with our skills to solve them.
From this basis, we can see there are 3 simple parts to the formula in creating a freelance consulting business. The first part to the formula is easy. You recognise the specific skills you have today that you can sell to potential clients. These would probably be the skills you use in your current job.
The second part of this formula is recognising that there are new skills you can acquire which are highly sought after by people willing to pay good money for those skills. Its not hard to research these sought after skills and start to learn them, either formally or informally.
The final part of the equation is the hard part. You need to bring your skills together with the organisations who are willing to pay money for them. This can be quite daunting when you have no clients. Most people are afraid to "sell", which basically is what this entails. But don't worry too much about this step, there is a real simple trick to it. There are service providers out there who will actually find these organisations for you. They have made it their role to do the sales for you. What this means is that you don't have to look for these opportunities because they do. All you do is contact your future clients through their interface, tell your clients about your skills and soon enough, you'll have a book of clients filling up all your time woth work.
Click through here for an introduction to the guys I use to find my clients.
Internet Based Businesses
Internet based businesses are my favorite way to make extra money to invest. The basic difference between internet businesses and freelance businesses, assuming you follow the golden rule of adding value to someone is in the treatment of time. Click through here to read about our specific internet based business concepts.
With freelance consulting, you are adding value by selling your time. This means there is a limit to the amount you can sell. Having said that, the cash payments for such work are usually very attractive and as such, its certainly a fantastic way to make more income, specifically over the short term. I certainly always revert to freelance consulting whenever I am looking for quick cash flow.
With internet based businesses though, you are selling a product or concept. You are not selling time. You only put the time into the project at the start (when you are building the website), and if you do it well, your website will make you money, month after month after month. This leaves you free to spend you time on other things. So internet based businesses are definately my preferred long term business strategy. They just aren't helpful if you are looking for short term cash. Infact, in the short term, these types of business will cost you money while you set them up.
