If you’re an online entrepreneur, then you know that as a business owner, one of the most important things to consider is how to make more money.
Whether it’s through your e-commerce site or blog, there are lots of ways to increase revenue and make more money in your online business.
In this post, we’ll take a look at five methods for increasing income and making more money in your online business: affiliate marketing, sales funnels, optimizing your funnels, email list and business systems.
It’s all too easy to fall into the trap that you won’t have time for your own product development or new initiatives when you’re operating a business. The truth is, without proper attention, some of these efforts go unnoticed and untapped. There are actions you’ll be missing out on if you don’t take the time to optimize every aspect of your business.
An online business provides you with the best of both worlds: passive and active income.
If your business is just focusing on active income, which is any income that is dependent on you showing up for you to make it, then you need to include more passive streams of income into your business.
Every online business has many ways to make money in a passive way. You can do these while you already serve your customers.
Passive income is an essential income stream in any business and will help you build your bottom line while you actively market your business.
You’ve put your time and money into your business; why not make it work for you?
Ways to Make More Money in Your Business
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a popular way to make money online. It involves partnering with an affiliate network like ShareASale, Rakuten LinkShare or FlexOffers and promoting someone else’s products through your blog or website.
As you make sales, you’ll earn commissions. The key to making lots of money via affiliate marketing is to make sure that the products you promote offer good commission rates.
Simply set up an affiliate account with the product’s affiliate program and provide a unique link within a blog post where you discuss the product like a review post or a list of suggestion posts such as this one.
You can also create a resources page or products I recommend page where you use the link for all the tools and resources you recommend like I’ve done here.
You can also include affiliate links in, for example, emails or other digital items you offer.
But, before you post an affiliate link, read the terms of service for the social media sites you use. Different sites will allow different types of promotions.
To become an affiliate you can either go straight to the company you want to recommend and see if they have affiliates and you should also sign up for one of these affiliate services.
2. Create a Sales Funnel
Many online business owners make use of sales funnels to make more money in their businesses. A sales funnel is basically a series of pages or email marketing campaigns that are meant to get leads to opt-in, choose their desired product and make a purchase.
Take the example of an online course. You make it to make money, but you make more money if your potential customers make purchases after they sign up for the free email series because this is where they make their decision to make a purchase or not.
To build a sales funnel, first create the pages that are going to be part of your funnel. A lead magnet page, a webinar registration page, and a product purchase page.
Then make sure that each one of these pages is connected to the next through autoresponders or integrations with email marketing tools like Aweber, ConvertKit and Infusionsoft.
You’ll make more money by using the sales funnel because you can warm up a completely cold audience and help them make that purchase decision after they have gotten to know you by going through your free email series or other lead magnets.
3. Creating Tripwires & Upsells in Your Sales Funnel
Do you have simple sales funnels in place, where you make an offer to your wide audience and then provide more specialized, more expensive choices for them to choose from overtime?
Customers are encouraged to move down the funnel with additional incentives.
These additional offers can be added to your sales funnel as tripwires, upsells & bumps.
Tripwires, Upsells & Bumps are often overlooked places where you can bring in extra money.
Let’s start with a tripwire. This is an entry-level product that is usually sold for under $20. You would offer this to anyone signing up for your freebie in your lead funnel. This makes a potential customer a paying customer immediately.
Now, this is where you start to consider bumps and upsells for the main offer in your sales funnel. A bump offer is a little extra product that consumers may include in their order before checkout, whereas an upsell is a further offer you provide after the primary sale has been completed.
Consider what you might add as a tripwire for each of your lead funnels, and what you could include as a bump or an upsell that would be beneficial to your consumer.
It might be an eBook, a Trello board, mini-course, templates, checklists, or forms for a small price that is a no-brainer addition to their order as a bump offer.
Add a more pricey upsell for your higher-priced offers. The secret to success is to pick upsells that will benefit your consumer and make sense as a supplement to the primary product purchase. In other words, don’t create additional offers that don’t make sense.
4. Build an Email List
You can make additional money in your online business by creating a mailing list website or building a list on another subscriber-based platform like MailChimp, AWeber or ConvertKit.
An email list is the biggest asset you can make as an online business owner and if your list is big enough, it can make a big difference between earning $500 or $500,000 in profits every year.
However, think of ways to make additional money with an email list by selling advanced courses or creating a coaching program that charges clients on a monthly basis.
You make more money with an email list because you’re talking to a warm audience that already knows you so already trust you to help with their problems. So there are fewer objections when they are making their buying decision.
As they make that decision, it is through customer loyalty and trust; which leads to them making additional purchases without hesitation.
Also, make sure that all your email marketing efforts are focused on building that list because it can make a huge difference if you have enough email subscribers.
You can make additional money with your email list by offering advanced courses or making advanced training available for purchase.
5. Time-saving Systems
Having the right systems in place is essential to any business. Every business should have the following systems in place;
- Marketing & Discovery Systems (How people discover you)
- Education & Relationship Systems (How people get to know you)
- Sales & Conversion Systems (How you sell & get clients)
- Product & Service Delivery Systems (Customer Service, Fulfilmment + Billing)
- Signature Results Systems (How you deliver results for your clients)
As an online business, a lot of these systems can be automated to deliver efficiency in your business. This leaves you free to make more money!
How?
Well, having these systems in place allows you to focus on your clients and what they want most – results.
Look at your systems and see where automation can make life easier for you and make it easy for customers to make another purchase with minimal effort.
As an online business, you are the driving force behind the success of your customers’ businesses. You have a unique opportunity that few other service providers have – being able to make changes to your business in real-time.
The result? More efficiency = more stability on cash flow = make more money!
Bonus Tip: Branded YouTube Channel
You may even want to create a YouTube channel as an additional way of monetizing your business as people love watching videos these days. Just make sure you’re adding value by being helpful and informative with every video, don’t just make it a sales video.
Provide as much value as possible and make sure your videos are keyword optimized to make money even more from YouTube.
Making More Money In Your Online Business
These are 5 brilliant ways to make more money in your online business without having to spend hours working every day.
Instead, you’ll make more money by spending a little more time every week focusing on how you make additional money with your business.
What’s even better is that if you make use of the 5 brilliant ways to make more money in your online business, most can be automated so you make more time to actually enjoy your online business.
Want help with growing your business then get FREE Access to my Business Builder Vault today!
