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Whether you’re a courageous careerpreneur or a badass ladyboss or a fearless freelancer, the way you negotiate your salary is vitally important to your monetary success.
Your salary doesn’t ever have to define you but having monetary goals isn’t a bad thing and understanding the best way to sell yourself is the first step to achieving them.
Social Media and Selling go hand-in-hand. Understanding the value of the tribe and brand you’ve built online and how it translates to dollars in your bank account can be a difficult concept to grasp, but it is an important one.
You may not want to make six figures (and that’s ok) or you may want to make six figures in six months (that’s ok too!) or you may never want to leave a steady corporate job with a solid paycheck (also fine!) but you probably do want to find a way to feel more fulfilled in your career and more valued by your boss, team and clients.
Even if you are your own boss, there’s something to be said for being truly grounded in who you are, what makes you unique and what you’re selling.
As someone who tripled their corporate salary in four years, I can tell you it isn’t easy. As someone who built a six-figure business in six weeks by selling her skills, I can tell you THAT is the key.
Step 1: Identify Your Strongest Skills
Your job title and description rarely, if ever, covers all of the things you do on a daily basis. And it definitely doesn’t cover what you actually like to do. That’s where identifying your strongest skills comes into play. Take a legal pad, notebook or fresh document on your computer and write down everything you do in a day. Do this daily for seven days. If you have two jobs or more, make sure you’re writing this down for ALL of your gigs.
Step 2: Create a Salary Composite
Use a salary calculator (salary.com or payscale.com) to determine what someone with each of your strongest skills gets paid. Then, create a range for your top three skills. Have more than three skills? Group them in groups of 3 and create a salary range for each. Once you’ve done that, you can create a median range when you start to look at specific job postings.
Step 3: Sell It like a Pro
Selling your skills means understanding what your audience — whether that’s a client, potential boss, hiring manager or individual person — is looking for when it comes to your value to them now and in the future. Highlight past work, testimonials, unsolicited praise and a deep understanding of the skill set you’re discussing at any given moment in time. Test your skills by practicing with a friend or recording yourself to understand where any potential slip-ups might occur and how you can recover to continue the negotiations.
Related: Building a Community that Converts in Three Steps
Once you’ve covered these three steps it’s all about practice. Practice with your girl gang, your mentor, your dog… practice saying these skills and why they’re valuable in the shower, in your car and while you’re doing your daily tasks.
Weave your skills into the very fabric of your being in a way that they are there for you to acknowledge, accept and access at any time you wish.
You are a powerful negotiator, lean in to that and you will get everything you desire.