How To Earn $1000 More Every Month In Just One Hour A Day

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How can I make $1,000 more a month? — Briana Myricks (@brianamyricks)

One of my Twitter followers tweeted the message above last month. We had a great conversation where I told her how to accomplish just what she wanted, and now I’m going to tell you, too.

But first…what would an extra $1,000 a month do for your state of mind?

• If you owe $10,000 on a credit card at 15.38% interest, you could completely pay that card off in less than one year, if you paid $1,000 a month on it.
• If you save $1,000 a month in a 529 College Savings Plan starting the year your child is born, you’d have over $100,000 ready for their education by the time they turn 7 — with more than a decade left for that money to grow before they need it.
• If you put that $1,000 a month into a Roth IRA, you’d hit your annual contribution cap in less than six months. If you’re 30 years old, by the time you retire at age 65, you’ll have $1.4 MILLION dollars.

Sound good? You bet.

So how do you get that $1,000 a month? Here’s a simple formula.

1 billable hour per day x 30 days x $33.34 = $1000.20

Here’s what it means. If you can do one extra hour of work, billed at a rate of $33.34, and you do that work every single day for a month, you’ll have $1,000.

(Of course, we have to pay taxes on that income, so unless you’re putting that money into a pre-tax investment, you’ll want to raise your hourly rate a bit — say, around $38 per hour.)

If you’re working a minimum wage job, or even earning $12-15 an hour, the thought of billing someone $33-38 for an hour of your work can seem wildly out of reach.

It’s not.

Here’s some fields of work that can command those kinds of prices:

• Web design
• Graphic design
• App development
• Security consulting
• Social media consulting
• Private tutoring
• Foreign language translation
• Private music lessons
• Wedding or event photography

What’s even better? Most of these are fields where skill and experience is more valuable than a college degree — and skill and experience are usually free. Some fields, like app development or photography, may require specialized equipment, but if you have the skill and experience in those fields, there’s a good chance you already have the equipment anyway.

How I did it

Last month, I earned $1150 from two gigs.

The first was a web design job for a small local school. They already had a website, but it hadn’t been updated since 2007. For $550, I customized a free WordPress theme for them, consulted them on some Paypal issues, and added some new features they wanted for their website. In total, I earned $39 per hour, working roughly an hour a day for two weeks.

The second was a private social media consulting job. An individual wanted me to teach her how to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites, and to develop a professional social media strategy. I offered to do it for $600, and taught her through a three-week email course. I spent about an hour a night writing and composing my emails, earning a rate of about $28 per hour worked. Even better, this gig turned into a long-term retainership — my client is going to pay me a small monthly fee to consult on minor social media issues for the next six months to a year.

I have no formal training in web design or social media. I didn’t go to school to earn a degree in those fields. But I’ve spent years learning about web design and social media, experimenting with new tricks and tactics to find out what works. That gave me the skill. I’ve used that skill to build websites with established readerships through social media, and that gave me the experience.

With those two things, I have everything I need to earn $1,000 a month in just one hour a day.

So what can you do?

I’ve shown you how you can earn an extra $1,000 a month. I’ve shown you what you can do with that money, and I’ve shown you how I did it myself. Now it’s your turn. What can you do to earn $1,000 a month? Tell me about your idea in the comments!

Originally posted March 7, 2014.