Do you want to get paid to work less?

Uh-oh. This article is sounding “spammy” already, right?

Don’t worry, it’s not!

While it may sound like a myth, you can actually make more money by working less if you choose wisely where your time is spent.

Check out these three simple ideas so you can get paid to work less!

Raise your rates

It is incredibly difficult to truly value your worth as an entrepreneur, especially if you are just starting out. The truth is that most of us are undervaluing our work by charging less than we deserve. It is difficult to take the “leap” into raising your rates. A close friend, fellow entrepreneur, and incredible graphic designer Nicole Schmidgall said it this way in her recent blog, “The amount that you charge your client shows how much you value your time. If you are charging the right amount for your services, the client will see that you value your time and will not take advantage of it.”

Residual Income

While it is important to devote time to your main business, creating residual or “passive” streams of income can be well worth your while. Residual income comes through creating automated systems that produce revenue without interference from you, once they have been set in place.

Don’t get me wrong, creating these income streams are hard work in the beginning, but the idea is to work diligently to put them in place and have them make money FOR you.

So HOW exactly do you do this? One way is to sell a product. Write a “How-To” e-book that relates to your business to market to your customers. I recommend using LULU for this task. Create a course to teach others a certain aspect of your business that you do well. Check out sites like Udemy to create an online course. If you are a photographer, sell some of your images to Flickr or Shutterstock to be sold as stock photography. Maybe your business provides a service (like massages or car maintenance) that you could sell a membership to? Need more suggestions? Use your “Googling” skills to research more ideas for residual income. Spend some time searching “Residual income for (Insert your profession here)”. Establishing these passive streams of income is a smart way to increase your profits!

Focus on the 20%

Have you heard of the 80/20 principle? The 80/20 principle was discovered by Vilfredo Pareto during the late 1800’s. He was an Italian economist who discovered that, generally, 80 percent of a person’s outcomes come from 20 percent of their inputs.

Take a moment to think about what a typical day looks like for you. Do you spend more than 20% of your day on actual “billable” hours? What if you could double that time spent? The key is to get rid of tasks that do not make you money and delegate or automate everything else. Spending $10 to have a neighborhood kid mow your lawn is a wise investment, if you can use that ½ hour to help a client at a $80 an hour rate. Hiring a virtual assistant to manage your email or send out a newsletter, so you can focus on the tasks that make you money, could be the best decision you make all year!