First a very quick lesson in business fundamentals.
There are only three ways to make more money with a business:
1. Increase the size of a transaction with your customer. (Get more money per transaction).
2. Increase the number of customers. (Getting more customers is often the wrong approach).
3. Increase the frequency of transactions with current customers. (Most important and usually ignored completely)
Written by Jay Abraham via Russell Wright at Theme Zoom
The first thing to notice about these 3 points is that they are principles, not techniques. They apply to any business. Not just online business.
Anti-commercial message: if you are about to purchase an e-book or a piece of software, evaluate it against these three points. If it isn’t clear to you why you are purchasing it, or the reason is, “so I can make more money, because the sales page says some dude made $24,000 last month” then give it a pass. Please.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled post…
To grow the earnings of your blog think in terms of a business and follow basic business principles to align your actions towards greater earnings.
1. Increase the size of a transaction with your customer.
AdSense is a probably the lowest transaction size. Especially if that is the only method of monetization.
When I was doing the craft show circuit in my previous business, I learned pretty fast that the top earners had a range of price points. There are lots of people who are just as comfortable (or more) spending $1000 as they are spending $20 and you want to give them that option.
Does your blog cater to big spenders in your audience?
You could put together:
- One-on-one coaching programs, or private consulting
- Site wide big ticket advertising or sponsorship packages
- The ultimate product for your niche
- A live event
- A teleconference
For the last 2 you wouldn’t even need to be the “expert” you could always partner or facilitate.
2. Increase the number of customers.
The blogging equivalent of this is to increase number of readers. Like it says above, this is the one everyone thinks is their biggest problem, or the solution to, “how can I make more money?” but most blogs leave a lot of money on the table even with the traffic they currently have.
The work of creating a profit rich site, one that really meets the needs of your readers in a way that you can benefit from financially, will attract visitors as well. Focusing on just getting visitors is usually misguided effort, since it isn’t client focused. If you create an über cool place for people to come to, with a lot of great resources, you’ll automajically receive lots of traffic.
Getting more traffic has been covered to death, so we’ll just skip it for this article. In case this is your first day online get more traffic by doing this.
3. Increase the frequency of transactions with current customers.
When it comes to blogging, increasing the frequency of transactions can occur in 2 ways. The first is to continually create great new ways for people who enjoy your site to create income for you, and the second is to encourage your readers to keep in touch via RSS and email.
Are you continually creating new ways to make money with your site?
- More money posts – I define these as posts with affiliate links in them, reviews of products that I actually use are usually the best money posts for me.
- Explore new (to you) income channels – have you signed up for post level text link ads for example
- Set up an Advertise page with options and rates
- Optimize your AdSense – for both positioning and layout. I’ve seen a slight tweak in link color double earnings from AdSense
- Create your own products. You know your visitors, what is it that they need? Make it and sell it to them. This is my favorite one.
In the blogging business RSS readers and newsletter signup’s are the stock and trade of encouraging repeat visitors and repeat actions.
Are you grabbing existing readers and making sure you can keep in touch?
- Make sure people are encouraged to subscribe to your feed
- Capture emails and send out a newsletter once and a while to encourage people to return to your site. Or make special offers
Admittedly this one falls into the category of “do as I say and not as I do” since I’ve let both of these slide a bit on Art of Money, but this is the best RSS subscriber boosting tip ever and this is the second best.
The Last Step
Requires some discipline. Align your efforts and intention to doing these three things.
Consistently focus on them and you can’t help but succeed. Anything that doesn’t support one of the three business fundamentals should be taken off of your todo list.
Finally, track your progress:
In blogging this would be the equivalent of increasing the amount you are earning per unique visitor.
It’s simple: visitor value = profit / number of unique visitors
You’ll measure all of the three business drivers with this metric. Tack it over time, and if possible begin to discover which activities affect it most dramatically and then further focus on those ones to accelerate growth.
I agree with your advice, some of which I am already following, and some of which is on my “to do” list. My main focus right now is on my allergy website, and the focus is paying off in terms of building traffic, and AdSense revenue. You are right about AdSense being a low per-transaction income. I do think it is a good litmus test though. Another interesting thing I have notices is that of all my websites, the one with the highest textlinkad income has the lowest AdSense income, so it pays to mix and match for sure.
It’s funny how some people get online and think it’s easy. Far from it! It’s more competitive now than ever, but for those who are willing to work harder and smarter, they can still do well.