Before you create new products and new profit streams, it makes good sense to maximize the earnings in your existing business.
To show you how this might be done, I’m going to use a membership site as an example. I love memberships because of the continuity of payments you receive. After all, why get paid just once on a sale if you can get paid every month for several months or longer, right?
Let’s say you (or your client) have a membership site. Naturally, the first thing you want to look at is increasing your conversions. First, you work on increasing conversions on your squeeze page, to get as many new (free) subscribers as possible. The more subscribers / prospects you have, the more of these you can turn into PAID subscribers.
Next, you’ll want to work on increasing conversions on your immediate upsell to the paid membership. And then you’ll want to work on increasing conversions with your autoresponder sequence as you follow up with prospects who haven’t yet subscribed to the paid membership.
Odds are you already know all about this. In fact, you’ve probably read numerous articles that tell you the exact same thing. The problem is, this is the point where those articles STOP, and also the point we will jump off from.
Now that you’ve maximized conversions on your funnel, what else can you do to increase revenue?
In fact, what can you do to DOUBLE the revenue you receive from paid subscriptions?
You can choose from several methods, ALL of which I highly recommend you implement.
First, offer your current paid subscribers a yearly payment option.
For example, if your membership is $25 per month, you might offer an annual membership for $175. This is a great deal, since it saves your subscribers $125.
“But won’t I be LOSING money if I do this?”
GREAT question. Your first step in deciding how much an annual membership costs is to find out how long your average subscribers stay with you.
In this example, if the average subscriber keeps their paid subscription for 5 months (5 x $25 = $125) then you are making an extra $50. If your average subscriber stays for 3 months, then you are making an extra $100.
You’ve got to know how many months your subscribers stay with you, multiply that number times the monthly subscription rate, and then charge an annual fee higher than that number, but lower than 12 times the monthly rate.
Confusing? It’s simple math, so just read the previous paragraph again and you’ll catch on.
Another example:
You charge $40 per month for your membership. Your average subscriber stays with you for 6 months (that’s really good at this price point, btw.) That’s $240 that you are currently making on the average subscriber.
You offer an annual membership for $320, which is $160 off of the normal rate. Your subscribers save $160, and you make an additional $80.
Your numbers will vary, but you get the idea. Adding this option can potentially bring in a very nice chunk of money very quickly.
You might want to offer the annual rate for one week only, so that subscribers don’t procrastinate.
And be sure to give new subscribers this option, too. New subscribers are generally the most excited, and thus the easiest to convert to an annual membership.
Second, you’ve got some prime real estate on your members page that’s most likely not being used right now.
Choose some hot affiliate offers your members are bound to like and add those to your member page.
You can do it in the form of banners or ‘personal recommendations.’ Switch these out every so often. This isn’t likely going to be a huge source of revenue but guaranteed, you will get some sales from this page.
An alternative is selling paid advertising on your members page. Basically, you are doing the same as before, except the banners or ads go to someone else’s offer instead of your affiliate links. You’ll find that fellow marketers would LOVE to offer something free to your members in exchange for their email address, and they will pay you nicely for the chance to get their offer on your member’s page for a month or two, or longer.
Third, create an entirely new page in your member’s area, and call it “Member Benefits.” Be sure to use that exact name – we’ve tested other names like Member’s Discounts and so forth, and “Member Benefits” out-pulled everything else we tested.
On this page, you’re going to place discount offers that you’ve negotiated with other marketers.
These might be discounts on products, free courses and books, free consultations, free coaching sessions and so forth.
Everything on this page benefits you. The courses and products with discounts earn you affiliate commissions. The free items cookie you in for commissions on anything purchased in the future, and so forth.
And again, you can place paid advertising on this page if you want to.
You might think this sounds like a lot of promotion, but we’ve found that almost no one complains. After all, what member is going to complain that you’ve found them a discount or something valuable for free? Occasionally someone will quip about banners, but it’s rare and nothing to worry about, as long as you don’t go crazy overboard with advertising.
Best of all, if you implement all three methods above, you’ll see a big cash boost from day one.
Your results will vary. And what if you don’t have a membership site? You do have a download page, correct? You can place ads for products there.
You can also bundle products and offer a discount. If you create products on a very regular basis, you can sell ‘memberships’ to all of your forthcoming products for a certain period of time.
And you can create a ‘Subscriber Benefits’ for your email subscribers. Add to the page every week, and also send out a weekly reminder email, letting them know there are new goodies to go collect – goodies that are available for a short time only.
That last paragraph may have slipped by your attention almost undetected, so I’m going to recommend you read it again. Go ahead…
I hear from so many marketers that they have trouble monetizing their lists. But if they would simply create a ‘Subscriber Benefits’ page and keep it filled with interesting things that result in commissions and send their readers there each week to collect those benefits, they could earn a six-figure income from this one technique alone.
Bottom line: Take a good look at your current products, funnels and business. Get creative and find ways to squeeze more money out of what you’re already doing, and it’s entirely possible to double your income without creating any new products or businesses. Until you do, you’re probably leaving thousands of dollars on the table that could be yours.
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