Do you want to start immediately generating income online? Do you want to immediately start generating more income? If you have a website, there are specific steps you can take to get the ball rolling. In this post, I’m going to share the 9 ways you can leverage the knowledge, products, services, and websites you have at your disposal and start generating more revenue with them. All these are simple, fast and easy. Choose one and go.
1. Branch Off Existing Products
Are you already selling a product? If so, you can branch off of your existing products to create new, smaller products to sell to your target market. Here are some examples of ways to do this with a variety of different product types.
- Information Products – If you have a video training course on social media marketing, you can branch it off by taking the modules on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and other social networks and selling them individually.
- Membership Products – If you have a premium membership site where you give members a new webinar each month, you can branch it off by taking the webinars and selling them as standalone paid webinars.
- Physical Products – If you sell a car cleaning kit, you can branch it off by taking the items within the kit and selling them individually.
Branching off your products allows new customers to get to know you and your business with less of a financial commitment, and thus, less of a financial risk. If they like the results from the smaller products, they might be more willing to purchase the full product in the long run.
2. Branch Off Existing Services
Are you already selling a service? If so, you can branch off of your existing services to create new, smaller services to sell to your target market. Here are some examples of ways to do this with a variety of different service types.
- Done for You Services – If you have a SEO consulting service, you can branch it off by offering reporting of a website’s current health in search, current keyword rankings, or current link profile. In addition to creating smaller services, you can create smaller services that will naturally lead people into buying your full service.
- Software as a Service – If you sell social media software that allows people to post and schedule updates to all of their social media profiles simultaneously, you can branch it off by creating a limited version that allows people to connect to three social networks instead of all their networks, or to send updates immediately without being able to schedule.
Similar to branching off your products, branching off your services new customers to get to know you and your business with less of a financial commitment, and thus, less of a financial risk. If they like the results from the smaller services, they might be more willing to purchase the full services in the long run.
3. Choose a New Sales Platform
Let’s say that you currently sell your all of products and services from your website. Look for new sales platforms that you can use to sell them. This will allow you to tap into new customer bases that only shop from specific platforms.
- If you are selling a video training course on your website, you can try selling it on Udemy.
- If you are selling a physical product on your website, you can try selling it on Amazon, Ebay, and Etsy (depending on the type of product).
- If you are selling a done-for-you service, you can try selling it on Fiverr, Elance, and Upwork.
- If you are offering consulting, you can try selling it on Clarity.fm as a pay-per-minute phone call.
One potential downside to this approach is that while you may find larger customer bases on other selling platforms, you may have to lower your pricing to compete with the other people in your space. The way to balance this in your favor is to convert your current product or service into something simpler with the branch off tactics discussed previously that help get the value of your service in line with the new pricing. Also, be sure that if anyone sees your product or service on both your website and another platform that you offer value-adds exclusively on your website that will hopefully encourage them to buy direct from you. That way, you cut out the middleman and get the full profits.
4. Create a Product from Your Services
For those that offer a service, there is always the option of creating a product based on that service. For example, if you are a website designer, you know that not everyone can afford your service. But maybe they would still like to get your expertise, in which case you could create paid training videos on how to create a website using Wix, Weebly, and other easy-to-use services. In the end, the person may buy the training, realize they still can’t do it, and ask you to do it for them instead. Or they may need a branch off service, like a logo. For those people, you can incentivize their training purchase by saying that the amount paid would be discounted from future use of your services.
5. Create a Service from Your Product
Similarly, for those that offer a product, there is always the option of creating a done-for-you service. For example, if you offer a video training series on social media marketing, there will likely be people who want to learn about it from your course but not have the time to implement the strategies themselves. Fortunately, done for you services can be charged at a premium, especially if the customer has already consumed your course. At that stage, they will know you are an expert in your field and will expect that your hourly rates are higher than average. Because they know and trust you, it will make it a much easier sell.
6. Find Advertisers
Let’s say that you don’t have a product or service at the moment. But you do have a website that receives a lot of traffic. If you are not promoting affiliate products or your own products or services, then finding advertisers is a great way to generate income on the high-traffic websites you own. You can offer advertisers banner ads, text links (for traffic purposes only, not SEO purposes), and sponsored reviews on your website. If you have a large social media following, you can offer advertisers promotion of their product or service on your social media accounts. If you have a huge email list, you can offer advertisers placement in your newsletter. You can discover advertisers for your website in a number of ways. Start by visiting other websites in your niche or industry to see who they are selling ad space to. Even those in the Google AdWords Display Network may be interested in advertising with you if you contact them directly and offer additional options like social media and email list promotion. Networks like Buy Sell Ads also provide a marketplace for advertisers to connect with website owners to purchase banner ad space and social media promotions. If you don’t want to don’t have luck reaching out to individual advertisers, or simply do not have the time, this network is a great option.
7. Open a Paid Mastermind Group
Do you have a wealth of knowledge in your niche or industry, but no time to create a full-fledged course about it? A paid mastermind group may be a good alternative. For those that are recognized authorities in their niche or industry, this is a great option that you could literally start as easy as setting up a sales page and a Facebook group. In that private Facebook group, people would pay a monthly premium to be in a space where you commit to answering their questions. You could also charge a higher monthly premium for a mastermind group where your customers can chat in a private forum, submit questions for weekly Q&A calls, and monthly premium training. Alternatively, you could get a group of well-known experts together and create a mastermind membership where each expert helps members out in a private Facebook group or forum. You would have to split the profits, but you would also have built in partners and promoters for your mastermind.
8. Promote Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to creating your own products and services. While you won’t make as much as you would selling your own products or services, you also don’t have to actually provide the product, service, or support thereafter. You are simply earning commission by pointing people in the direction of other great products and services. You can start affiliate marketing by finding affiliate programs for products and services that you already use. These will be the easiest for you to promote as you are already familiar with them and they have proven useful to you. For starters, no matter what niche or industry you are in, chances are, some portion of your website is run by a product or service with an affiliate program. This includes the service you bought your domain from, the service you host your website with, the platform your website is using (like Shopify for ecommerce), or the design (theme / template) you chose. Your first affiliate marketing strategy can be linking to the affiliate programs of each of these in the footer of your website like this. © 2015 by My Business • Design by My Theme • Hosted on My Hosting Company Anyone who comes across your website and likes its design or speed might be interested in the theme you used or the site you host it upon, leading to some potential affiliate income. You can go further by writing a review on your website about the things you use to power it. From there, consider other products and services that you use that your website audience would also be interested in using. Then find affiliate programs for those things. Affiliate programs exist for just about anything including books, courses, digital and physical products, services, and software as a service. Large online retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, iTunes, Overstock, and many others also have affiliate programs. So if they those brands sell something, you can promote it and earn a commission. The best search you can use is the name of the product or service you use and affiliate program. After that, you can look at affiliate marketplaces like Clickbank, Commission Junction, Ejunkie, ShareASale, and many others to find additional affiliate products and services to promote. There are many ways you can promote affiliate products that you believe your audience will want to purchase. Here they are, from least to most effective.
- Post text links or banner ads to affiliate products or services in your website’s sidebar or footer.
- Add text links to affiliate products or services within blog content, YouTube video descriptions, or other content.
- Write reviews about affiliate products or services.
- Promote affiliate products or services to your email list.
- Create automated webinars as if you were promoting your own product or service, but promote the affiliate program or service instead.
You can always use income generated from affiliate products and services as research for creating your own products and services. As soon as you see what is selling best with your audience, see if it is something that you could do better. Then market that product or service to all of those who didn’t buy the affiliate promotion. One thing to note: if you are in the US, be sure to read the FTC guidelines about affiliate marketing. It boils down to you need a disclaimer letting people know you earn a commission when they purchase an affiliate product or service recommended by you.
9. Sell Webinars
Do you have webinar content with valuable information, but no product or service to sell at the end? Why not sell the webinars? You can create a payment gateway as a part of your webinar registration process. This allows you to generate revenue from automated webinars 24/7. You can choose to upsell the people who pay for the webinar at a later date if you plan to add a product or service to your lineup. Paid webinars can be a great way to test your market to see if they are interested in paying to learn more or get help with the subject at hand. If you have webinars from products or services you sold in the past, but no longer sell, you can always edit your webinar content to exclude the sales pitch at the end and include the Q&A in its place. This will allow you to repurpose your pitch webinars as paid webinars to standalone.
In Conclusion
No matter where you are in business, there is always a way to generate more revenue online. It’s just a matter of taking what you have and thinking of the best ways to utilize it. Got an other quick, easy ways you like to generate income? Share them below.
