If you are looking for a way to improve your online business, this is an excellent place to start. These nine strategies will help you increase revenue and get more out of each customer.
9 Ways to Increase the Monetization of Your Online Business
If you are an online marketer, chances are you’re a self-starter who prides yourself on being driven in the pursuit of a successful entrepreneurial career. But even those who have no struggles with productivity or with learning the ropes can hit a wall when it comes to maximizing their profit potential.
What often happens is a niche marketer will immerse themselves in the tasks presented to them to complete a business model. For example, they might start off launching a blog as an affiliate marketer or create an info product that they sell on a third party platform.
What they don’t know is that there are additional ways they can boost the revenue that funnels into their bank account. Most of these options take very little added effort, but they must be activated in order to start working for you.
Below, you will find nine different strategies you can use to quickly increase your earnings and gain an edge over the competition. With this added income, you can outsource or delegate tasks you no longer want to do, reinvest in your business by getting new tools and taking new courses, or simply use it to enhance your lifestyle in any way you see fit.
Engage in Ongoing Affiliate Recruitment
There are many digital info product creators who have come online with a desire to share the information they know with others. This is a lucrative business model for many different niches.
You can launch a digital course on how to grow tomatoes, how to lose weight, how to start an online business, how to care for your pet, how to prevent your body from aging fast, and many thousands of other topics.
For most digital product creators, their focus is put on brainstorming an idea that will sell, making sure the information is thorough and valuable enough for the buyer, and learning how to technically put the pieces together so that the course goes live and people are able to buy it.
What you may be neglecting is one of the most lucrative aspects of your task list as an info product creator. Having a JV (joint venture) page in place is not enough to put a powerful affiliate strategy in your corner.
You have to identify and nurture relationships with top affiliates in your niche who will sign up to promote your product when it launches. Not only does this increase your immediate income, but it adds a huge number of subscribers to your list that can be profited from at a later date.
The key in activating this simple tip is to be strategic in how you look for and communicate with these prospective affiliates. You want to look on leaderboards, launch lists (aka: your competitors), and ask others who would be the best affiliates to have in your corner.
You have to take a little bit of time to get to know what they promote, how they promote (so that you can provide them with all of the readymade materials they need), and what kind of perks they’re looking for when they agree to send their list to your offer – then deliver for them.
Don’t rely on the simple task of creating a JV page and hoping the right people will sign up. Unless you have built an amazing reputation for your brand, chances are it will get ignored unless you are proactive in targeting the right affiliates.
Host a Contest for Your Launches
Another thing you can do to increase the monetization of your online business is to make sure you are hosting contests whenever you launch a new product. There are specific launch calendars available to online affiliates so that they can choose which promotions they engage in based on whether or not the vendor is offering prize money.
If you’ve never hosted a contest for your launches before, there are a few things you need to remember so that you don’t soil your reputation in the process. First and foremost, you always want to make sure that you have the funds to pay out the prize money at the end of the launch.
There is nothing worse than an affiliate giving it their all to promote you and help you make sales, only to not be rewarded in the end because you spent what should have been their prize money.
One way you can avoid this is to set minimums on the prizes. For example, first place may have a $500 prize attached to it, but the affiliate has to have a minimum of 100 sales.
As the money is coming into your online accounts, make sure you leave in enough to be able to payout the prizes. So if you know you have $750 in prize money to pay out, and you have taken in $2,000, you only want to withdraw $1,250 and leave the remainder in your account to send to the winners.
Don’t host a contest where the only winning prize is whether or not someone gets bragging rights. This is an embarrassment to both you and the affiliate. The prizes ideally should be cash, but sometimes vendors will offer things like laptops, smartphones, or even a trip somewhere.
If you do offer vacations or products, you will also want to have an alternative, equivalent monetary prize that they can choose if they don’t want that item. You will have to choose whether or not your contest is based on the number of sales someone has, such as 100 sales total, or if you want it based on the revenue earnings they brought in, such as $2,500.
You might have someone who wins who has fewer sales, but who has earned more because they heavily pushed the upgrade offers in your funnel. All of this can be determined when you technically set up the contest on the platform of your choice.
You want to make the prizes enough so that it’s worth it for an affiliate. Having a $25 first place prize is usually not enough to entice top affiliates to get onboard. At the same time, you don’t have to offer a $10,000 prize for a simple eBook course that you are selling for $17.
You can have more than one contest during your launch. You might have one for the first 24 hours, the last 24 hours, or one in the middle of the launch to help with lagging sales.
Check Past Content for Links that Convert
If you want to increase the income of your online efforts, you may want to spend time going back to fortify the profit potential of every piece of content that you have published for your brand.
Early on in your journey, chances are you neglected to add things like hyperlinks to your own products that you now have, offers that you are an affiliate for, and even banner ads that could be strategically positioned within the content to help you earn more.
Some people may only want to go back a week or two in an effort to check their content, but in terms of search engine optimization, you will want to go back to the very beginning.
Content that has been around longer may have had a better chance of being indexed and ranked in search engine results pages (SERPs) then newer content that you have recently published, that may not have been crawled by search bots yet.
This is a good time for you to check for broken links or outdated links that are pointed to products you may not want to promote anymore. Log into the dashboard of your blog and start at the beginning with the very first post, working your way toward the more recent content.
On each blog post, you want to make sure that you have included hyperlinks to your products or those you are an affiliate for. You may need to add a little bit of text if you don’t currently see any opportunities on that post for monetization.
You want to do the same with any kind of multimedia that you have online. This may include going back to old YouTube videos to add profit potential to your descriptions, or to your podcast episodes to do the same.
You can also go to your social media posts on sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and the elsewhere and double check to make sure that they are all monetized and that you have left no stone unturned.
Another place you want to check is in your email autoresponder system if you are utilizing follow up emails that are dripped out to your subscribers over time. Make sure your emails are all current and up-to-date in terms of the information they provide, and monetize each one in some way – whether it’s a link to one of your own products or to someone else is that you are an affiliate for.
Secure Special Deals for Your Subscribers
If you’re looking for a very quick and easy way to increase your online earnings, look no further than your competitors. The people that you are going up against in your niche will be launching products that you can promote as an affiliate.
What happens to most digital info product creators, is they launch a course or membership program that may or may not do well during the launch period. After that initial release, the product is often set on the back burner where it doesn’t make them as much money, if any.
Many digital info product creators have to continually release new products in order to keep their income flowing. You can look at their back catalog and find products that they have released in the past that you feel will be beneficial for your subscribers.
Reach out to these vendors and see if they can arrange for a special deal for your list. This can be for an evergreen, permanent promotion such as a blog post review – or, it can be a temporary promo code that they set up for you for a short time that you can email your list.
Sometimes, they will put the product back to launch pricing for you, which can be a significant discount for your subscribers. Other times, they may take more than one of their products and bundle it up together with others that they have and discount it as a whole.
There are some digital info product creators who, once a product launch period is over, take it off the market completely. Periodically, they may take it out of the vault for a short sale, and they may be able to arrange something like this for you and your list.
Allow Sponsors to Leverage Your Content
Another easy way that you can monetize your online business is to enable sponsors the ability to leverage your content for their own promotions. You want to be selective about who you allow to sponsor your content.
Obviously, you don’t want to allow anything unsavory or offensive. Ideally, the sponsor should be aligned with whatever niche market you are in. It wouldn’t make sense to have a sponsor involved in the toy niche if your niche is all about anti-aging.
When you allow sponsors to have a spot in your content, it can be done with text, image ads, with video or verbally. It all depends on where you are hosting your content and what makes the most sense.
For example, if you have a podcast that you want to allow sponsors to promote on, then that will be a verbal ad placement that is spoken at the beginning, middle, or end of the podcast.
If you are allowing someone to sponsor your TikTok account, then you will usually be creating short videos for their brand that you then upload to your channel. You can use hashtags and text along with the video to let people know it is a sponsored post.
You can do the same on other social media sites, such as Instagram, Snapchat, and even YouTube. You might be able to charge a different fee based on the placement of the sponsored ad or the length or size of the ad itself.
Turn on Creator Funds Whenever Possible
Many social media sites have built-in creator funds that you can tap into if you are a proficient content creator. Not only do you have to have good content that viewers, listeners, or readers feel is valuable, but you need to be releasing content on a regular basis.
If you have a large following on social media accounts, they will often invite you to be part of their creator incentive program. These are often not immediately lucrative to small accounts, but for those who have a large following, you can earn a lot of money.
Facebook now owns Instagram, but both sites have incentive programs as does Snapchat, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, and Twitch. Go to the social media platform of your choice and look to see if they have a creator incentive program and find out what the requirements are in order to participate.
You also want to make sure that you are abiding by any rules that they set forth so that you don’t mistakenly lose your account and become ineligible for further monetization on their platform.
Then, begin researching strategies that are ethical and above-board (and allowed by the platform) to help you get more views and ultimately, more money from your content efforts on these social networking sites.
Host Live Events and Let Your Expertise Rake in Money
If you enjoy hosting live events on your social networking accounts, then you may want to use this talent to help you earn more with your channels. TikTok is probably the best example of a social networking app that allows creators to go live and profit from it.
With a minimum of 1,000 followers, you can begin going live on this app to your followers and also end up in the feed of people who don’t yet know you as they scroll through their For You Page.
If you are providing an entertaining or informative live event, they have the ability to send you gifts or tip you at that time. You can also put strategic monetized links in your bio that they can follow when you verbally give them a call to action to check it out.
There are many people who are raking in a lot of money with live TikTok streams who are doing nothing more than creating arts and crafts, scratching off lottery tickets, eating in front of the camera as if they are chatting with a friend over lunch, or giving great insight about a specific niche topic.
Before you start creating your own live events, make sure you get on the app and see what other people are doing so that you can beat the competition with something viewers find more engaging and also know how to prevent trolls from getting the best of you.
Flip Private Label Rights with a Goal of Pure Profits
If you have space online, whether it’s a blog on a domain that you own or social media profiles, pages and channels, then you have the ability to take what is called private label rights (PLR) content and monetize it without having done the work yourself.
You want to find a PLR producer who has a similar style to the content that you already upload to your accounts. That way, you have very little tweaking, if any, to do. Take the content and insert your own affiliate links or links to your products so that you can have a great return on your investment.
Private label rights are very inexpensive and you can find content in many different media formats. While text PLR is most prevalent, you can also find images such as social posters, video PLR, and even audio content that you can claim as your own and monetize any way you see fit.
