I’ve written a lot over the past 18 months about how to make more money. But since many of us made our goals for 2015 last week and are back to work after the holidays this week, I thought it was timely to give you some new ideas on the topics and repeat a few ideas that I have mentioned before.

Here are five ways to increase in your income in 2015:

1. Look for niches that you are uniquely qualified. I have had many writers tell me that they won’t be able to make a high income in content marketing writing because they don’t specialize in health, finance or technology. But if you are able to find a very specific niche that has very few qualified writers, then you can command a high salary because clients have few other options for writers.  At a conference, another writer shared with the group that her niche was African American Genealogy and that she had years of experience writing on this topic. While there are not hundreds of clients who need writers in this niche, the clients who do need a writer with this expertise will most likely be willing to pay higher because they do not have many other options. However, especially if one of your niches is very specific, it is essential to have multiple niches to increase your opportunities as well.

2. Drop your lowest paying client. I’m going to write more on this concept next week, because honestly this is an essential exercise for writers to do every few months. And it works every single time that I have tried it. The premise is that the best way to find higher paying clients is to first drop your lowest paying client. Most writers try to do this the other way around by finding a higher paying client before they drop the low payer, but honestly it just never seems to work as well.

3. Raise your target hourly rate. Hopefully you currently know the hourly rate that you are currently earning for all of your clients and have a goal hourly rate. So my challenge for you this year is that if your hourly rate is not $100, then begin targeting clients at an incrementally higher rate. If you are currently at $50 per hour, then move to $65. You can do that by looking for new clients as well as raising rates for current clients. It takes time and isn’t something that happens instantly.

4. Become skilled in high paying deliverables. It’s a fact that you will most likely not make a high income if you only write blog posts. Deliverables, such as landing pages, white papers, e-books and case studies, typically pay a higher rate.  Since there is the catch 22 of needing experience before someone will higher you, see if there is a need for one of these deliverables for a current client and propose one of these projects. They will be more likely to hire you even without specific experience in that type of deliverables because you have the knowledge of their company and they are familiar with your work. Once you have the clip, you can then market your services for those types of deliverable to other clients.

5. Search for long-term clients and avoid one off projects. I’ve said this before and I’m sure that I’m going to say it again. The best way to make a high income is to develop relationships with high paying and long term clients. This increases you income in several ways. The first is that because you have steady work coming your way then you reduce your marketing hours and increase your billable hours available for other clients. The second is that when after you become familiar with a client and topics then you become much faster at completing the deliverables. This results in an increased hourly rate and more billable hours as well.

What are your strategies for increasing your income this year? Have you tried any of the above ideas? Any more you would like to share?