I hope you’re enjoying our start-the-year-strong business planning series. If you missed the first two posts, you can find them here:
Why Business Planning Is The Secret To Success For The Coming Year
How To Measure Growth And Figure Out What To Focus On In Your Business
Today we’re looking at the simple three step process that, if you incorporate it into your planning and work on it consistently, will boost your bottom line over the coming year.
Disclosure: Links in this post (and anywhere on The Savvy Solopreneur) may be affiliate links. Find out what that means here.
To grow your income, you need more customers. That means you need more people to sign up for your list, because your email list is where the first customers for any new product or service you launch or promote are. Where do these new subscribers come from? You get them by increasing the traffic to your site. It’s a (fairly) simple three-step process:
- Traffic
- Subscribers
- Sales
Let’s break it down.
Traffic
This should always be a priority and something you work on regularly. Track your growth and always keep an eye out for fresh new ideas to boost your traffic. Ways I have boosted traffic to my blogs over the last few years include:
- Being active on social media
- Doing these 16 things every time I publish a post
- Writing guest posts on popular blogs (like this one and this)
- Writing regularly on Medium, and linking to my blog
- Publishing ebooks that link back to my blog
Subscribers
Your next focus should be getting more subscribers. As you start to get more traffic, your list will start to grow, but don’t stop there. Tweak your opt in-forms to increase conversion. Create a new lead magnet to get the attention of a different sub-group of your target audience. Set up a few dedicated opt-in pages and start driving traffic to them. Do what you can to continually grow your list. Ways I’ve increased subscribes over the last few years include:
- Tweaking my opt-in gifts to ensure they are what my readers want
- Offering extra content upgrades
- Putting my opt-in forms and invitations to subscribe in strategic places ALL over my blog
- Offering my digital products half-price to subscribers
- Asking readers of my ebooks to subscribe to my blog
Sales
The third piece of the puzzle is turning those subscribers into paying customers. You want them to spend money with you either by buying your products and services, or through your affiliate links. Customers = revenue. And one customer can mean several sales. Your best customers will buy everything you create or recommend, leading to increased revenue.
To increase revenue, you may want to offer more products, raise your prices, find more attractive offers you can promote as an affiliate, or work on your sales funnels. There’s a lot you can do to grow your bottom line once you have traffic and subscribers figured out. Ways I’ve turned subscribers into customers over the last few years include:
- Offering subscriber only sales and discounts
- Launching new products to my subscribers with a pay-what-you-want offer
- Sending free content to my list with a highly relevant recommendation for a paid product
- Bundling my ebooks at a discounted rate (like the Box Set of Savvy Solopreneur guides)
- Offering my subscribers a free digital bonus when they buy through my affiliate link
These three things always work in synergy. By getting more and higher quality traffic, while improving your opt-in rates, and offering relevant products with sales funnels that convert well, you can quickly make a huge difference to your bottom line. Each of these elements alone will help, but by combining them, you will start to see exponential growth.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you start out with 100 new visitors per day. 10 percent of them sign up for your mailing list, which comes out to 10 new subscribers each day. One of these people buys one of your products at $10.
Now let’s see you double your traffic. With nothing else changing, you go from making $10 per day to $20. But what if you can also improve your opt-in forms and get to a 20% conversion. You also create a few more products and each of your customers ends up spending 3 times as much as before. When we add all that up you go from making $10 per day to 40 new subscribers each day which means 4 new customers. If each of them spends $30 shopping around in your shop, you end up making $120. That’s a pretty big bump from $10 while still only requiring you to double your traffic.
Want some awesome, affordable training on turning traffic and subscribers into paying customers? I recommend the online training Funnels That Click. It shows you exactly how to build a profitable sales funnel, and right now it’s down to just $9.99 (from $69.95). I have no idea how long that offer will last, so apologies if it’s gone back up. Check it out here.
Do you need to get more clarity in your online business? Maybe you need our FREE printable workbook for solopreneurs. Just let us know where to send it. You’ll also get a chance to grab The Busy Blogger’s Success Kit for half-price, and a regular newsletter with tips, freebies, and special offers.