In the quest of innovative marketing ideas the question all business owners want to know is:
How do I make more profit?
Few will argue that business is ever going “too good”
In fact, for many it’s the opposite.
The fact of the matter is that for most businesses there are always opportunities to make more money if we open ourselves up to additional avenues.
How do we find them?
Well, it isn’t as hard as we might think.
What we too often don’t realize is if we want to make more money, we have to take a detailed look at how we are currently making and spending money.
By making some adjustments to these levers, we can potentially open the flood gates to more business, increased revenue, and decreased costs.
For example, last year when Vicky and I started our Blogging Partnership – a service we ran connecting bloggers with advertisers, we started out making $1k/month.
Within 4 months that number jumped up to $9k/month.
How did we do it?
In short, through the following:
- Convert New Customers: We connected with more bloggers, since our income was directly proportional to the number of clients we worked with.
- Increase Price: We upped our commissions to better match the value we were providing.
- Work More Hours: We connected with our advertisers more often to increase the frequency in which deals were made.
- Constant flow of New Leads: We felt the need of bringing in new advertisers so that we never come short of business and profit. Although we ended up buying a list of emails there is a better option now.
$1k to $9k is quite a big jump, but in reality it came down to just a few decisions and a desire to push the business further. There was so much being left on the table, we just had to fill in the gaps appropriately.
From that point on, whenever I approach a business I break it down into the individual parts that add up to create profit.
I have organized that into a flow chart/infographic and included some additional case studies to illustrate my point.
Now, it’s true that it is not usually the case that one can increase revenue without increasing costs. For example, advertising costs money, which might lead some to claim that the below is an over-simplification.
I won’t argue this point.
However, this is where testing and optimizing comes into play and it is how we grow the business.
Keeping costs low does not grow the business, ensuring that our profit margins are in our favor does.
