One of the most common questions I get asked is ‘How do I make more money’? The fact is if you aren’t making money (and I would argue if you aren’t making enough money to pay yourself) then you just have an expensive hobby. Whether you are starting a new business or growing your existing business, money is likely to be your primary focus and I’m going to share 3 ways that you can make more money in your small business.

 

1 – Increase your number of customers or clients

Probably the most obvious way to make more money in your business is to increase the number of customers or clients you have. More customers = more sales = more money.

However, I know that getting more customer is easier said than done. So what can you do to get more clients?

 

Firstly, check your conversion rate. Your conversion rate shows you what percentage of people are taking a desired action. In your case, the desired action is to buy. If you are selling something on your website you can calculate your conversion rate simply by dividing the number of people who have purchased from you divided by the number of people who have visited the page and then times that number by 100.

Conversion rates are easy to calculate online, but you can still use the principle offline too. For example, maybe you have a coaching or consulting business and you talk to people before you work with them (like I do). You could divide the number of clients you signed up in a month divided by the number of discovery calls you had in that month and then divide that by 100.

By knowing your conversion rate it will help you to understand how many people you need to be put in front of in order to make a sale.

Now in an ideal world, you would then monitor your conversion rate on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to ensure that it is improving. You can also research online to find industry standards. If you are below your industry standard I would recommend you focus on improving your conversion before you move onto the second way to get more customers or clients – driving more traffic.

 

Secondly, drive more traffic. If you need more customers you can convert the people who are aware of you (as we just looked at) or you have to make more people aware of you. Whether you are selling online or not, driving traffic to your website should be a main priority as that should have all the information a potential customer or client needs.

To drive more traffic to your website you can use the following techniques:

• Paid advertising (such as Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc)
• Guest appearances (on other people’s blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels etc)
• Press (getting mentions in online and offline publications)
• Social media (using your platforms to actively encourage people to visit your website)
• Search Engine Optimisation (creating content on your website that will enable it to appear on search engines)

 

2 – Increase the value of each customer or client

Another way to make more money in your business is by maximising the amount every customer or client pays you.

The first way you can do this is by increasing your prices. I could talk about pricing all day and there are so many strategies when it comes to pricing (I will leave that for another blog post), but right now you should ask yourself the following question ‘Could I increase my prices without reducing the number of sales?’. Or if you want to get super technical you should be asking yourself ‘Could I increase my prices and the reduction in sales is outweighed by the additional income?’  If you can answer yes to either of those questions then a quick way to make more money would be to increase your prices.

The second way you could increase the value of each customer or client is by increasing the number of things they purchase at a time (increase a customer’s ‘basket value’).  This is where you get to the wonderful world of upselling. What can you offer someone that is complementary to their initial purchase that will increase what they spend with you?

The reasons why upsells are usually so powerful is people are already in a buying mode. Not sure how you could use upsells in your own business? Read my post about out how Russell Brunson increased my basket value by 561%.

 

3 – Make a customer make more purchases from you over their lifetime.

Idea 2 focused on generating more income by maximising that one purchase, however, another way to generate more money in your business is by focusing on the customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value or lifetime customer value is where you focus on how much money you can generate from a person over their lifetime. So rather than looking for one big sale, you are focusing on how to make them a repeat customer.

This is extremely common in the world of products. Think about how often fashion works. By making things go ‘in’ and ‘out’ of fashion they can increase the number of clothes we buy in a lifetime. Or consider best before dates and recommendations of how often you should buy a new mattress. This is all designed to make you buy more.

The online equivalent would be memberships sites. Rather than a one-off payment for a book, course or session, you manage to make them pay you every single month. As we know acquiring a customer is often the hardest part so if you have someone who believes in you and has already bought once your aim is to work out how to get them to buy again and again.

 

So what should I do to make more money in my small business?

From this post, I hope you can see how there are multiple ways to make more money in your business. Now in an ideal world you would try and do all 3, but just start by focusing on one.

Knowing whether you are trying to gain more customers, want your customers to spend more in one purchase or you want customers for life will have a massive impact on your focus. It will help you work out whether you should be focusing on pricing, conversion, driving traffic, or your offerings. So choose one idea and focus on that.

 

Did you find this post helpful? I would love to know in the comments below which way you are going to try and make more money going forward.

And if you would like 1:1 support to help you clarify your sales targets and create the marketing strategy and plan to achieve those financial goals then check out how you can work with me here.