The easiest way to make your business more profitable is to do more of what’s already working well for you, but do you even know what that is?The first step is to start tracking what’s working. What parts of your business actually bring in revenue? What projects and products are making you money? Which ones aren’t? What type of customer is most profitable for you? Where is your most profitable traffic coming from?
Taking time to dig into your stats and calculating your return on investment is one of the best things you can do for your bottom line. But you’ve got to look at those stats. I’ve been doing this recently, and I was surprised that some of the numbers, including best revenue streams and top traffic sources, weren’t exactly what I thought they were.
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Your Products
Start by looking at your products. This could be info products, physical products, any coaching programs you offer, anything you resell or even advertising you sell on your site. List it all out.
Next to each item on your list, note down how much money each product has brought in. You can break it down by month (especially if you sell seasonal products), or look at all revenue generated over the past 12 months. Use whatever number seems most helpful.
Next think about how much work each of these products or profit streams take. Selling advertising space on your site or a simple little kindle book may not make as much money per month as that big info product you created or the one-on-one coaching you offer, but they also take hardly any time to create and maintain. Some of your income may be truly passive and take exactly zero hours a month to maintain. Assign a value to each item on your list.
Once you have all your data, it’s just a matter of doing more of what’s working. Create more products of the type that are most profitable, given the time you invest in them. Remember to think about where that passive income is coming from too. If you’re still getting regular passive income each month on an ebook that originally took you a dozen hours to produce, you might want to set aside some time to produce some similar ones.
Your Customers and Prospects
Taking a look at your customers and prospects is also a good idea. Where did they come from? Who is your core customer base? These are the people that buy everything you put out and are singing your praises to their circle of influence. They may also be repeat customers that come back to you over and over again.
What prospects are most likely to turn into paying customers? Are they people that were attracted by your opt-in freebie, or are they people that found you via the great blog posts you write?
You can find a lot of this information by looking at your customer database and by comparing subscriber lists to customer lists. You can also learn a lot by talking to your customers and subscribers. Start a conversation via email, on your blog, or in a Facebook group.
Your end goal is to pinpoint who your most profitable demographic is and then figure out how to put yourself in front of more of those people. Which brings us to our last point.
Your Traffic
It’s time to dig into those website stats. Where is your most profitable traffic coming from? How do they find your site, what do they look at once they get there, and which product funnel do they go through to become part of your most profitable customer group?
Tools like Google Analytics are your best friend here. Spend a weekend learning more about the different reporting you can set up, what you can track, and how to read the numbers. If you don’t know where to start this ebook is pretty helpful (and very affordable).
Once you know where your most profitable traffic is coming from – be it Search Results, Pinterest, your Affiliates or Instagram – put on your thinking cap and figure out how you can tap into more of that traffic or something similar.
Keep tracking, tweaking and improving your bottom line. Make it a goal to get more profitable this month than you were last month. But start with tracking. Once you know what’s working, it really is a case of doing more of it.
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