Double your blog income by doing these three things

Are you looking for ways to boost and perhaps even double your blog income? Don’t be shy or feel uncomfortable to admit it. It’s absolutely okay to set a goal to increase or even double your earnings. In fact, if you’ve started a blog or online business in order to make money, then increasing how much you make should definitely be one of your goals!

So, are you ready?

Awesome!

Here are 3 things you need to be doing to boost your blog income.

 

1. Track What’s Working and What Isn’t

One of the best ways to increase your income is to identify out what’s working well and then start doing more of that. Sounds simple enough, right? The problem is that you first have to know exactly what’s working and what isn’t. The best way to do that is to track everything. From there you can look at the data and make a plan of 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 on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. A good place to start is to look at income and expenses, products, affiliate links and/or any other sources of income. And of course, don’t forget to look at where you spend most of your time.

If possible, go back and look at the last six to twelve months of financial data. Did you make money selling your own products? Did you get large affiliate commissions? Did you sell advertising on your blog?

Then look at expenses related to that income. You’ll have some fixed expenses like website hosting, for example, that you should ignore for the purpose of this exercise. Look at costs directly related to each source of income. For example, in order to launch your products, you might hire a graphic designer or a VA, and pay for your shopping cart software. You may also be paying commissions to affiliates promoting your products. Deduct those costs from the income you’ve made 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 the income. It may take you a full month of working twelve-hour days to launch a new big course. 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. 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 going forward. This will help you determine the most profitable way to spend your time.

Once you know what you should be doing more of, less of, and what you should stop doing, you can then concentrate most of your time and energy on your most profitable products and income sources. Work on it for a good six months and remember to keep tracking – you should see a nice increase in profits!

2. Collaborate and get more exposure

Another great way to increase your business’s income is to get yourself and your website in front of more people who are interested in what you have to offer. Yes, that’s easier said than done—getting traffic and exposure is one of the biggest challenges for online businesses and blog.

You could boost your traffic with some skillfully optimized ads, but that’s not a viable option for most of us.

A fantastic alternative is to find someone else who’s doing something similar to what you’re doing and collaborate. This way you can get exposure to a new audience interested in what you have to say and offer.

For example, suppose 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, or someone who sells container gardening kits or books on how to grow all the vegetables you need in your backyard. Their audience will likely be interested in growing tomatoes, and your audience will be interested in additional organic gardening tips, and they may want to purchase a container kit that makes it easier to grow those tomatoes. The key is to find people who have similar audiences to yours but with whom you won’t be directly competing.

Approach other bloggers or business owners 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. If they have an affiliate program, you can even profit from sharing this with your readers.
Next, ask if they would be interested in introducing you to their audience. This is always your end goal, but you have to make it worthwhile for them. Depending on your business model, there are several different ways to accomplish this. For example, if you have a paid product with an affiliate program, that would be a great incentive for them to promote your product. You could also offer to create unique content for the other person’s audience.

No matter what you decide to do, make it as easy as possible and do whatever you have to do to get your fellow bloggers or business owners to email their lists for you. Mentions on social media and blog posts are great, but your ultimate goal should always be to get them to promote you to their subscribers. Once they’ve done that, your next goal is to get these people on your own list and to turn them into paying customers.

3. Focus on List Growth and Sales

There’s so much you can do on a daily basis to grow your reach and make more sales. The list seems almost endless, doesn’t it? You could be writing a new blog post, creating a series of videos, posting on various social media platforms, writing guest posts, publishing kindle or print books…etcetera etcetera. The more important question you should be asking yourself is what should you do if increasing or perhaps doubling your income is your goal? The answer is much simpler and the list is much shorter!

You should focus on 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 more as a mindset shift that can help you become much 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 your podcast interviews as usual, but your main goal will be to convert the audience into subscribers to your list.

Why is focusing on subscribers and customers so important? Because it takes some time before someone is ready to buy from you. They have to know, like, and trust you before they they’ll feel comfortable parting with their hard-earned money. That’s why your number one goal when you reach a new audience should always be to get them on your list. That gives you a chance to build a relationship before you offer them something to buy. And 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 end result, in either case, is more money in your bank account.

The only thing more valuable than your subscriber list is your list of customers. Customers have already demonstrated that they trust you, are interested in what you sell and value what you have to offer. If you deliver a lot of value and help them solve a problem, they are more likely than anyone else to buy additional things that you offer or recommend.

As you go about growing your business, focus first on growing 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.

Over to you! What steps are you taking to grow your blog and boost your income?