Make a Google or Yahoo search on “earn more money” and you will get millions of results. Day trading, real estate, internet marketing – there are hundreds of tips and brilliant ideas out there. They all have one thing in common though. The do not only hold a promise of more money. They all involve risks of losing money as well. In order to generate money you need to invest money and investing money means by definition a risk of losing the money.
There is, however, one almost fools proof and risk free way of earning more money: to negotiate for an increased salary. Given a long term strategy, careful preparations and good knowledge of basic negotiation techniques, an employee has the opportunity to earn substantially more money by obtaining recurring and substantial salary increases. This is a fact that applies also during the ongoing economic crisis.
Thus – instead of making risky investments in stocks or property, employees can make risk free investments in learning how to negotiate a salary. They can learn how to prepare for a salary negotiation by finding the salary range within which they can negotiate, by identifying the particular interests of the employer that the employee can appeal to in order to ask for a higher salary, by analyzing and improving their bargaining power and so on. They can learn when to negotiate the salary and if they should make the first offer or not. They can learn how to respond to offers made. They can learn how to draw bargaining strength from soft values such as honesty and reciprocity in the salary negotiation. In short, they can learn how to negotiate their salaries like a professional would do.
Learning how to negotiate a salary is by far the safest investment for increased income that an employee can make. An employee having this knowledge will double his income twice as fast as an employee without this knowledge. Even during the economic crisis.
David Hill
