To be able to make money doing what you love you need to know how to derive the maximum Usable Value out of your passion. What is Usable Value? Usable Value is basically the amount of value that is derived by SOMEONE ELSE from the thing that you love doing. Let me give you some examples of Usable Value.

You’re a brilliant musician that plays the piano. You sit at home composing, and playing songs. You love what you do, but you make absolutely no money doing that so you go to a regular job during the day so that you can pay your bills. The music you compose and play has tremendous value to you. It is such beautiful music that it makes you cry just listening to yourself play. You curse at the heavens because life is unfair forcing you to get a job doing something you hate when you could be playing piano all day.

What’s the Usable Value of your piano playing? Pretty much Zero. Yes, it’s valuable to you, but you’re not SHARING that value with anyone else. You’re basically taking your talents and hoarding them all for yourself and hiding behind a screen of insecurity.

So how could we improve the Usable Value of your true passion in life? There are many ways, but here are a few:

• Start playing the piano at private parties and events where others can listen to your beautiful melodies
• Compose and record your songs and distribute them to the public in some way
• Offer a service where you compose a customized song for people’s weddings
• etc.

I think you get the point right? You have to look for ways to increase the Usable Value of your passion.

This is typically the step where people drop the ball big time. They become super experts in some field like piano playing and when they aren’t making money playing the piano they think that the solution is to practice harder. It’s like they think that somehow the magic “Make Money Doing What You Love” fairy is going to come see them at night and reward their hard work practicing with a check for a billion dollars. Stop waiting for the fairy and start learning to increase the Usable Value of your passion. If the fairy comes, that’s great, but I wouldn’t count on it.

So How Can We Increase the Usable Value of Our Passions?

There are many ways, but let me give you 8 questions you can ask yourself to see if there are ways you could increase the Usable Value of your passion:

(1) Can I capture/record the value in some way?

Ask yourself if there is some way that you can capture the value you provide in some way that doesn’t require you to be physically present when the value is transfered from you to someone else. For example, if you are a cooking teacher you may be able to capture the value you provide by recording a DVD series teaching people how to cook. Another example may be to write a book on your cooking techniques and recipes.

Let’s say that you’re a life coach. Maybe you can capture some of the most common techniques you teach people into an eBook format or write on a Blog. By capturing this information, you are able to help more than one person at a time.

For example, by writing these blog posts I can literally be helping someone who is reading a post I wrote a few months ago while I’m free to focus on writing this post. By capturing the value that’s in my head and writing it out in a blog post format, I am able to increase the Usable Value of my passion of helping people for others to enjoy.

(2) Can I improve the distribution of the captured value?

Once you do find a way to capture the value, look for ways that you can increase the distribution of that value. For example, let’s say that I have 100 top quality self-improvement articles on my Blog. Let’s also say that I have 100 people regularly following my Blog. For every blog post that I write I have the potential to help 100 people in the same amount of time that I would only be able to help one if I worked with people one-on-one. This is a great start, but another thing I can do to improve the Usable Value of my blog posts is to increase the exposure they get by attracting more regular readers.

If for example I can grow my RSS subscriber base to 1,000 readers or 10,000 RSS readers or more, then I’m able to help 10,000 people in the same amount of time and with the same amount of energy that it now takes me to help 100 people.

So basically, by working on promoting my blog, I am now leveraging the blog’s exposure to increase the Usable Value of my blog posts by one hundred fold. So essentially even though the information in my blog posts may not change, the VALUE each blog post potentially delivers increases significantly.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your job ends when you create the value. If you have no distribution process setup to distribute that value to the masses, then you haven’t really created any value out there. You’re basically still hoarding it all to yourself.

If you don’t want to do it yourself then hire someone who will promote your work, but don’t kid yourself by thinking that it’s not your job to improve the distribution of your work.

(3) Can I find ways to express my passion with more people by connecting to them at their level?

Is there something you’re doing in your work that could be slightly altered in order to connect with more people and offer more value to people without compromising your true passion? For example, when I first wanted to launch this site I wanted to teach people how to grow their income by doing what they love. So naturally I was thinking of calling my site Inspired Income Earner or Inspired Income Maker or something like that. Doing my research though I found out that people never search for the word “Income” when referring to money in the context I am referring to. The only time people seem to search for the word “Income” is when they are looking for “Income Tax” or things like that. Every other time they refer to “Income” as making money.

So by understanding that most people will not connect to the word “Income” as much as the words “Make Money” I was able to call this site InspiredMoneyMaker.com and still get the exact same message across as before. I really don’t care if you call it “income” or “money”, I just want to help you make more of it by doing what you love.

Another example could be if you’re a music artist. Let’s say that you’ve produced an album and you want to expose people to your music. Is there some way that you could connect to a more mainstream audience with some of your work? For example, many Hip-Hop artists who typically sell albums with explicit lyrics have come out with “clean” versions of a popular song which they are able to get on the radio. At first this may seem like they are “selling out” by removing the explicit lyrics in their songs, but in reality it is a way for them to connect with listeners who may not ever be exposed to their work otherwise, and then when someone likes their music they can purchase the full album with the explicit lyrics in tact.

(4) Can I outsource or hire others to help me find ways to increase my Usable Value?

Let’s say that you are a wonderful spiritual teacher. However, you have zero technical abilities and therefore you have no way to leverage the tools available on the Internet. What if you hired a technology guru who’s passion in life is technology and used his expertise to increase the Usable Value of your teachings?

If you’re an author, can you outsource or hire a publisher to publish your work? Can you hire someone to market your book for you? Can you get into joint-venture deals with others and jointly benefit from the success?

There are many variation to this step, but essentially just be aware that one way to increase the Usable Value of your passion is to hire outside help and expertise to help you out.

(5) Can I focus in on a more targeted market and connect more directly with them?

Let’s say that you are a nutritionist that has a passion for helping people with their overall health. You’re finding it hard to compete or connect with people because there are so many nutritionists out there already doing what you do. What if you focused in on a more specific area and became an expert in it. For example, what if you became focused on nutrition and how it affects asthma, or pre-natal nutrition, or newborn nutrition, or premature baby nutrition, or active males under 35 nutrition, or whatever it may be. By focusing in on a specific area you may be able to become a lot more valuable than just being a “generic nutritionist” that just knows the same things that everyone else knows.

(6) Can I broaden my focus to increase my Usable Value?

Basically the opposite of number five. Maybe you’re currently very focused on one area, but perhaps you can broaden your passion to provide more Usable Value. For example if you know how to play piano, perhaps you could also take some voice lessons and provide both piano and voice in your recordings.

Another example could be if your passion is training Border Collie dogs, perhaps you can expand out and find other dog breeds that you could apply your training tips to.

(7) Can I package it better?

Sometimes you can have the absolute best product or service that can totally help the world but it’s just packaged horribly. Imagine a car manufacturer coming out with a brilliant car, but then only offering it in some really, really ugly color that nobody likes. It wouldn’t work right?

Well, a lot of people have this misconception that packaging doesn’t matter. They think that people *should* buy the product or service because it’s good and there is a lot of value offered by it and the packaging *shouldn’t* matter. I’m sorry but that’s just not the way the world actually works. Packaging DOES matter. Are you going to lead some crusade to try to convince people that they *shouldn’t* look at packaging as an indicator of value, or are you just going to accept the fact that packaging makes a difference in most cases and use it to your advantage instead?

This leads me to the final and most important question in my opinion.

(8) Are you going to increase Usable Value by using what ACTUALLY works, or are you going to stay stuck on trying to operate from the frame of mind that things SHOULD work in some imagined but logical way.

This is a big one and I’ll probably write a whole Blog post just on this point alone, but basically you have to start looking at the world and start looking to see what actually works, instead of what you think works. For example, I can either try to change the search patterns of millions of people and try to convince them that they *should* be searching for “INCREASE MY INCOME” on Google, or I can just realize that people don’t search for that and use “MAKE MONEY” instead.

Use what works, not what you *think* should work. How do you know what works? Research, experiment and test, don’t intellectualize. If I test and see that more people click on my AdWords ads when they are on the left hand side, compared to the right hand side then I’ll put them on the left hand side - EVEN IF my intellect thinks that right hand side should be better. This doesn’t just apply to your own thinking either. A lot of times “Using What Works” also means going against the advice and intellect of your friends.

Do you know how many people I know that think that those typical sales letters you see on the Internet selling eBooks and such don’t work? They don’t like them, they think they’re ugly, they hate the text and fonts used and they would never put together a page like that because they think they’re ugly. Instead they might put together a very nice and clean web-page with some bells and whistles and add in some fancy flash graphics. They are stuck in the thinking that people *should* act in a certain way. In their minds people *shouldn’t* buy from ugly websites. They really don’t care what actually works, and that’s the problem.

If you want to really learn to increase the Usable Value of your passion in life, use what works in marketing that product or service you have a passion for.