Track What’s Working And Use The 80/20 Rule
One of the best ways to double your income is to figure out what’s working and do more. Sounds simple enough. The problem is that you must first know exactly what’s working and what isn’t. The best way to do that is to track everything. From there, you look at your data and make a plan for what you should and shouldn’t be doing going forward.
Your first step will be to decide what you want to track. This will be a little different for everyone depending on your business and what you do daily, weekly, and monthly. An excellent place to start is to look at income and expenses, products or different sources of income, and where you spend most of your time.
Let’s say you start to track where your income is coming from. If possible, look at the last six to twelve months of financial data. Did you make money selling your products? Did you get large affiliate commission checks? Did you sell advertising on your websites?
Next, you want to look at expenses related to that income. You’ll have some fixed costs, like hosting your website, which you should ignore for this exercise. Look at costs directly associated with each source of income. For instance, you may hire a graphic designer or a VA to launch your products and pay for your shopping cart software. You may also be paying commissions to affiliates promoting your products. Subtract those costs from your income to get a good feel for your actual profits. Other sources of income will have little to no expenses. Once you’ve adjusted your income figures to reflect the profit you’ve made, you can start to compare.
Last but not least, look at the amount of time you’re spending to generate income. Launching a new extensive course may take an entire month of working twelve-hour days. On the other hand, you may be able to put together a short eBook or fresh membership content in a day or two by leveraging content you’ve already written or buying pre-written content. Look at the time it takes for each type of product and compare this to the amount of money you expect to make from the launch and in the future. This will help you decide the most profitable way to spend your time.
With all the information at your fingertips, it will be easy to decide what you should be doing more of, what you should be doing less off, and what you should stop doing. Focus most of your time and energy on profitable products and income sources. Work on it for six months, and look at how much your profits increased. I wouldn’t be surprised if this strategy allows you to double your income.
Collaborate With Other Players In Your Niche
Here’s an easy way to double your income. Put yourself in front of twice as many people who are interested in what you have to offer. Of course, that is easier said than done. Getting traffic and exposure is one of the hardest things to accomplish as the internet grows and expands. Sure, you could throw a lot of money at the problem and accomplish it with well-placed ads, but that’s not a viable option for most of us.
A great way to get in front of a new audience interested in what you have to say is to find someone else doing something similar to what you’re doing. In other words, find other players in your niche or closely related niches and start collaborating. For example, let’s say you’re selling a guide on growing tomatoes. Go find a few bloggers and marketers who are also in the gardening niche. This could be someone who blogs about organic gardening, sells container gardening kits, or sells books on how to grow all the vegetables you need in your backyard. You won’t be competing directly but instead, complement each other. Your audience will be interested in additional organic gardening tips and may want to purchase a container kit that makes it easier to grow those tomatoes. Do you see how this could work?
Approach the other players in your niche and see how you can work together. A great place to start is to offer to share something of theirs with your readers first. If the person sells a product, ask if you can interview them or see if they have a special coupon you can share with your readers. You can even profit from sharing this with your readers if they have an affiliate program.
Next, ask if they would be interested in sharing you with their audience. This is constantly your end goal, but you have to make it worth their while. Depending on your business model, there are several ways to accomplish this. It makes it easy if you have a paid product and an affiliate program. You can also offer to create unique content for the other person’s audience.
No matter what you decide, make it as easy as possible and do whatever you must to get your fellow blogger or info product creator to email your list. Mentions on social media and blog posts are great, but your ultimate goal should always be to get them to mail for you. When they do, your next goal is to get these people on your list and turn them into paying customers.
Raise Your Prices & Rates
Are you up for a bit of math? I promise it won’t be challenging, but it will open your eyes to the possibility of doubling your income by raising your prices and rates. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of the best ways to double your income is to charge more for what you do. When we start working online, we tend to undervalue our worth. We are anxious to get clients or make those essential first sales. Creating on the low end is not a bad idea. Without experience, testimonials, and social proof, starting with low-end products and services is a great way to get a foot in the door. But it isn’t where you want to stay.
How do you know that it’s time to raise your prices? When you start to make quite a few sales. If you’re a service provider who’s constantly booked, you should be raising your prices. When you hear your customers rave about your products and share how much value they’ve gotten from them, it’s time to raise your prices.
But what do you do when you’re not there yet? It may sound counterintuitive, but your sales pages aren’t converting may be because you’re not charging enough. Think about it. You come across a course on running an online business that offers a ton of content for $7. What’s your first thought? It’s probably that it can’t be excellent if the person sells for so little. Your customers and clients may feel the same way.
Often we’re reluctant to raise our prices because we think we’ll lose customers. While that can happen, it also opens a lot of doors. Other people may not even consider buying what you have to offer until they see a price that they associate with high value. Plus, when you increase your profit margin, you don’t need to sell nearly as much as you did before.
Let’s dive into that math. Let’s say you have a product that you sell for $20. To simplify the math, let’s say you sell 100 each month and that there’s no cost associated with the product. With an information product like an eBook or course, there isn’t, and let’s ignore those pesky payment processor fees for this exercise. In that case, you’re making a $2,000 profit per month.
Now let’s say you go crazy and double your price. You start charging $40 for your product. Because it’s such a great value and the higher price reflects that, you find you’re making just as many sales as before. By doubling your worth, you’re doubling your profit. You’re not bringing home $4,000 per month.
But it doesn’t stop there. Because of the higher ticket price, an affiliate marketer becomes interested in promoting you. You set up a 50% commission, and he sends an additional 100 customers your way. That’s another $2,000 in profits after you’ve paid the affiliate his or her share.
Don’t be afraid to raise your prices. You don’t have to double your rates if that seems like a bit much. Play around with the numbers. If it doesn’t work out as you hoped, you can always return, bundle products at a lower price, or offer a coupon. Play around with pricing and find the sweet spot for your audience and your products that nets you the most considerable profits.
Create A New Product For Your Existing Customers
Listen up; this is important. It’s one of the most powerful marketing concepts and could become a game-changer for you. It’s much easier to sell ten products to one customer than to go out and find 10 buyers. In other words, creating a second product and selling it to your current customer base is much easier than going out and marketing to new people.
That’s why creating a new product is one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase and even double your income. Find out what your audience needs next. What else are they struggling with? What’s the next step they should be taking to reach their goal? Talk to your customers and do a bit of research in your niche. I’m sure you’ll come up with fun and creative product ideas. Pick one and get to work.
You’ll find that it’s much easier and quicker to create that second product than it was to work on the first. You know what you’re doing now. And guess what. It will get even more accessible the third and fourth time around. Plan to create a whole series of products that help your customers reach their ultimate end goal. Think about related topics when you start to run out of ideas on what they should be doing next. For example, once you’ve taught your tribe everything you know about list building, branch out into social media or copywriting. If you’re teaching them about container gardening, consider branching out into composting or food preservation, for example.
Finish that product and get it up for sale. Then email your list of existing customers about it. Don’t be surprised if most of them buy from that email. That’s right; you’ll see quite a few sales from that email. Compare that to all the work, effort, and time it took to find those customers in the first place. Doesn’t that want to make you get to work on the following product?
Of course, the benefits of adding a new product don’t end there. Start promoting the second product the way you did the first. Send an offer for it out to your list of leads. Mention it on social media. Link to it from existing content on your blog. Mention it in guest blog posts and podcast interviews. People who weren’t interested in your first product end up picking up this new one, resulting in even higher profits. Try it and see for yourself.
Focus On List Growth And Sales
You can do much daily to grow your reach and make more sales. The list seems almost endless. You could be writing a new blog post, creating a series of videos, posting on various social media platforms, writing guest posts, or publishing kindle or print books… the more critical question you should be asking yourself is what should you do if doubling your income is your goal? The answer is much more straightforward, and the list is much shorter.
You should focus on just two things. Growing your list and making sales. Does this mean you stop doing everything else you’ve always done? Not necessarily. Think of it as a mindset shift that can help you become more profitable. You could still write that blog post. But the goal of the post would be to either turn the reader into a subscriber or warm them up for the offer you’re going to email them about in a couple of days. You’ll record that podcast interview, but your main goal will be to convert the podcaster’s audience into subscribers to your list. Do you see how this works?
Why is focusing on subscribers and customers so important? Because it takes some time before someone is ready to buy from you. They must know, like, and trust you before they hand over their credit card or log into their PayPal account. When you reach a new audience, your number one goal should always be to get them on your list. That gives you a chance to build a relationship before you make an offer to buy. Of course, the benefit of a list doesn’t end there. You also get a chance to make offers for other products. These could be your own or something you’re promoting as an affiliate. The result, in either case, is more money in your bank account.
A list of subscribers is valuable and something you should always work on growing. The only thing more valuable is a list of customers. Customers have proven to trust you and like you enough to hand over their hard-earned money. If you deliver a lot of value and help them solve a problem, they are more likely to buy something you offer or recommend than anyone else.
As you grow your business, focus first on increasing your list of email subscribers and then on converting these people into paying customers. Make that the main goal for everything you do online, and you will quickly see your income grow.
Embrace Paid Advertising To Grow Your Reach
Do you know what your only minimal resource is? It’s time. We all end up with just twenty-four hours per day. What does that have to do with getting traffic and growing your reach? It’s simple. You have two options when it comes to reaching more people. You can spend a lot of time creating fresh content, posting on social media, and reaching out to podcasters, bloggers, and vloggers. Or you can get in front of your ideal customers through paid advertising.
Yes, paying to advertise can seem a little daunting. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll make your money back. The good news is that starting is easier and more affordable than ever. You can start small with as little as a few dollars per day and scale up as you learn more about what you’re doing.
A great place to start is with Facebook ads. You see them all day long. Pay attention to the ads you find yourself clicking. Maybe it’s an exciting tagline and a pretty cover for a new book. Perhaps it’s a new pair of shoes or a planner that promises to help you stay productive throughout your busy day. Think about that ad. What made it so appealing? What hooked you?
Once you’ve figured this out for a few ads that have grabbed your attention, it’s time to try it yourself. Start with your best-selling product or the lead magnet that draws in new subscribers like crazy. Why do people buy or download it? Are you solving a problem? Do you tackle a hot topic? Try to zero in on what’s making this such a big hit for you already. Then craft a Facebook ad that reflects this.
Next, it’s time to do a little homework. Read through some blog posts about getting started with Facebook ads. Watch a few tutorials. Go through the one Facebook provides and follow the steps to set up your account. Make sure you have your pixels installed (it’s a Facebook thing… those tutorials will explain), so you can track what’s working and what isn’t. Then create that first ad.
Create at least two more ads similar to the first, so you can start testing. A great place to start testing is with images. Pick three different photos, but leave everything else the same. Launch this first set of ads with a limited daily budget. If you want to spend just $5 per day, that’s fine. If you can swing it, go up to $10 or even $15, but keep your bids as low as possible. This will get you data faster. Let them run until you get a feel for which one performs best.
Keep that ad and start changing something else. Maybe it’s testing an ad with little text against one with slightly more text and one with a lot of text (maybe an entire article or blog post). Perhaps you test different headlines. Or other calls to action. Keep testing and tweaking until you find a profitable ad that you have difficulty improving upon.
From there, the sky’s the limit. Invest some of your profits into running more ads. Create ads for different products and opt-in offers. Branch out into Instagram and WhatsApp ads, cross over to different social media platforms, or even Google Adwords. Keep buying ads and keep growing your reach and your profits.
Create A High Ticket Item You Can Sell Again & Again
One of the quickest and easiest ways to double your income is to create a high-ticket item you can sell to your customers. One of the most popular models to do this is to offer one-on-one coaching or small in-person workshops at your house. While that’s certainly an option and a great way to justify asking for several thousand dollars per ticket, this model has one big problem. It isn’t scalable because you’re limited in how many you can sell by how much time you’re willing to spend on these meetings in any given week or month.
Let’s look at some options that allow you to create one of these high-end products without this limiting factor involved. In short, we’re going to look at some high-value products you can make that you set up once and then sell repeatedly. First, why is creating a high-end product such a good idea? After all, the majority of your subscribers and customers won’t buy them. The reason is that you don’t need to sell a lot to be profitable. Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say your average product costs $27. To make $5,000 per month, you need to sell an average of 185 of them. That’s a lot of new customers you need to find each month to reach your income goal. Now let’s say you have a $97 product. You only need to sell 51 of them. Last but not least, let’s go crazy and say you come up with something you can sell for $497. You only need to sell about 10 of those per month.
Now let’s circle back around to the idea of doubling your income. Sure, you could come up with another $27 product, but you’d have to do double what you’re doing now to generate an extra 185 sales. But what about that $497 product? It could become the last piece in your product funnel. Not every single one of your customers will buy it. Only the ones that need the extra help and are serious enough about reaching their big goals will pick it up. But that’s ok. You don’t need many to buy monthly to increase your profits.
There are a lot of different ways to create these products. Your main goal will be to offer a lot of value and to make a real difference in your customers’ lives or businesses. For example, this could be a comprehensive guide with workbooks and open office hours where customers can ask questions. In the guide, you walk them through each part of reaching their goal. Or maybe it’s an interactive video course that allows them to pick and choose lessons specifically on the stumbling block they are facing next. Or perhaps part of it is access to your team of people who can help them create covers, set up websites, etc. Or maybe it’s yearly access to your membership site where they get help, motivation, advice, and interaction with like-minded people. Get creative. Think about what you would have wanted when you were in their position. What would have helped you get to where you are now faster? Create that, and then don’t be afraid to put a premium price on the product.
