Want to increase your online income? Swap those bytes for dollars? Gone have the days of the [dot] com boom, and don’t forget the bust. But is it still easy to make money on the Internet? We share with you 5 Easy things you need to be doing to increase your online income.

Putting an ad into the back of the local newspaper is literally old news. You need to Connect with your customers in the correct way and drive traffic to you.

It sounds obvious right? To increase your online income you need to advertise, spend a penny to make a penny. But it’s often something people are afraid of. Having to send some of their money to someone else with no guarantee of new customers banging down their door. But Advertising is now social, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the list goes on and the reach is huge. Facebook alone has 1.6bn active users and the tools on these platforms today help us to be efficient too. Using information we give when setting up profiles for things like location and age and combining that with our interests gathered from viewed pages, social media advertising lets us target only users who would be potential clients. We can cut the cost of advertising by targeting the right people and make those click thru rates soar.

It’s easy to go after the things you want, spending time and valuable resources pushing something that just isn’t sticking with your audience. Whether that’s selling a service or a product, your cash flow maybe coming from somewhere you didn’t expect.

Time to switch gears, find which clients and which products are making you the most profit, and to turn your focus on them. You may have started a business writing Résumés online but when you evaluate your income your work as a freelance blogger is the real cash cow.

Take a day to look over your work, evaluate and do more of what makes you money and let’s get milking. If you steal from one author it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.

– Wilson Mizner

Don’t let your competitors take your sales. There’s nothing more damaging to your brand than having a shiny ad that’s driving customers to your page and it looks like a time machine sent you back to 2002. When customers reach your site the hard work has been done, it’s time to reel them in. So make sure your site stands up against your competition. Keep on top of trends, look at your competitors. What are they doing? How do their links work? What do they have on their homepage? Sign up to their newsletters, if they’re doing something that works, you want to copy that and make it your own. A great tool for finding out about your competitors is similarweb.com. You can find information on visitors, country stats, similar sites, the list goes on.

Time is money. We trade hours of our lives every day, to make money, it’s just the way it is. We can always make more money, but unless you have a time machine you can never make more time. It’s almost criminal to undervalue ourselves; our time is the most important thing we have. If your service is worth having, people will pay for it. It’s not at all impossible to add 50% on to your price, yes you may get less customers initially but there’s every chance of getting more money for less time. It’s effectively free money.

It’s not at all impossible to add 50% on to your price, yes you may get less customers initially but there’s every chance of getting more money for less time. It’s effectively free money.

Now, it’s time to make those 24 hours work for us. Inefficiency in our work lives just doesn’t cut it, especially when you’re the boss.

The Pareto principle also known as the 80–20 rule or the law of the vital few, is the principle that we can apply to our business’ today. 80% of our time is taken up by tasks that form only 20% of our overall goal. So this being said, we need to focus on the 80% of our goal that takes only 20% of our time, this will drive our business forward quicker. You may be a great marketer but if you’re spending a whole month learning how to use WordPress to setup your website, you have just wasted a month’s wages. Outsourcing work that you’re not experienced enough to do is a must. Even with experience, you may find that the process is too time consuming and more efficient to hand over to someone else.

Stick to what you’re good at and the rest? Get in the professionals. Websites like freelancer.net and fiverr.com are two great resources to find great talent to outsource your work to. Don’t take a gamble on learning a new skill in one month that you will never use again, hire a professional. Not only will the work be top notch but delivery will be quicker and it frees you up to do what you do best.