Day 2: Two ways to boost your income as an embedded engineer
Rosmianto A. Saputro
I want to offer better ways to boost your income as an embedded engineer. Ready?
There are 2 options, and both offer you great flexibility:
- Monetize your time at a far higher rate
- Monetize your knowledge at a far higher price
Option 1 is relatively easier than Option 2. I’ve done (and still doing) both so I’ll guide you.
Monetizing Your Time
This is essentially doing freelance.
Another form of freelance is consulting work, it's more like directing the development trajectory and overseeing the progress. Less hands-on, more managerial.
I charge around 4x more than my main job. So, I matched my weekly salary at my job, with 10 hours doing freelance on weekends (Saturday & Sunday).
It’s the most straightforward way to boost your income:
- You attract clients
- You do the work
- You get paid
“But what if I don’t have time this weekend?”
That’s the beauty of it. You don’t work this weekend. Instead, you can delay the project kickstart to next week, for example.
“But I should keep finding the next gig”
That’s also the beauty of it. Yes, you won’t always find clients every week to work with. But why worry now? You have a stable main job already. Your job as a freelancer is to keep attracting clients. I covered this topic in my book Becoming Embedded Freelancer, which discusses how to handle uncertainty.
As you gain experience in attracting clients, your problem will change from “no clients” to “too many clients” which is a good problem to have. That’s the point of doing part-time freelancing.
“Okay, I’m interested. How to become a freelancer?”
Ah, great question. I made a book called Becoming Embedded Freelancer to guide you exactly there. You can check the free preview chapters here.
“But what If I can’t find 10+ hours a week? I’m a busy person with 5 other responsibilities.”
Well, that’s a sign you should do Option 2: Monetize Your Knowledge
Monetizing You Brain
Make more money by selling what you already know in the form of digital products.
But I have to admit that this Option isn’t an overnight process (honestly longer than Option 1), and requires more skills outside embedded systems to execute it right.
You essentially extract the knowledge you possess, package it into a product, and sell it. You can package it as:
- Ebook
- Video Course
- Email Course
- Templates
- etc
The email that you’re reading right now is an Email Course about making more money as an embedded engineer, but instead of charging you $39 for this 7-day course (which is a pretty low price), I chose to charge $0 so I can educate you of this interesting world of monetization.
“Well, there’s an existing ebook/course of what I know”
I used to think like that. I built a firmware development guide to help embedded engineers build a good workflow (using my experience and perspective). It was designed to be a concise guide. The topic sounds “generic” and there should be books covering that already.
Yes, but do you know how much I make from that guide alone?
$3500
Yes, $3500 in revenue and it’s even better: it’s a passive income.
I literally get paid while sleeping. So in the morning I woke up, I checked my phone only to get a notification “You made sales!”
As long as you can position your digital products as the solution, people will buy.
I recently built another digital product called “Becoming Embedded Freelancer”, which essentially distills my experience from being a freelancer and packages it into a short, practical, and easy-to-follow ebook. I launched the book, and guess how much I made?
$1216 in revenue in around a week
So, in other words. As long as we can package our knowledge into an attractive and clear product, position it to be the solution, and set the right price, there’s a good chance the product will be a great source of passive income.
If you’re interested in monetizing your brain as an embedded engineer, send me a DM and book a 1:1 call with me.
Wrapping It Up
That’s all. I presented to you 2 corporate ways to make more money as an embedded engineer, and I also showed you 2 alternatives, with higher flexibility, and passive income potential.
In the next article, I want you to visualize when you get extra income from freelance project.
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
1. Becoming Embedded Freelancer Book. Learn how to earn more money (even more than your main job) working on freelance projects using a proven path explained from an embedded engineer's point-of-view.
2. Firmware Development Workflow Guide. Upgrade your workflow to achieve efficient development, consistent code quality, robust firmware, and skyrocketed your productivity as an embedded engineer.
