By Stacy Karacostas
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-02-09
The big question on every entrepreneur's mind is always… "How can I make more money?" Today I want to try and answer that for you. That way your small business can start earning you the kind of revenues you deserve.
Of course, you can go at this from a couple different angles. First off you can strive to increase your gross revenues in one of three ways:1) Get more new clients or customers. This is the obvious one, and it's where most small business owners focus the bulk of their time and money. But it's not the only way to make more. Nor is it necessarily the best way. You could also…
2) Increase the average transaction value. This lets you make more each time someone buys. You can do this by raising your prices. Or by creating higher priced bundles of products and/or services. Or by upselling or cross-selling other products and/or services that are of value to your current client or customer.
3) Increase the number of transactions per customer or client. If every sale is a one shot deal you have to constantly fill your funnel with new prospects in order to keep making sales. That's expensive. If, instead, you can have the folks who already know, like and trust you keep coming back for more, it's much better for you and them.
To do that you could structure your business so you offer ongoing services, something new regularly, programs or products that build upon each other or go together, a membership type program, etc.
However, with whatever you decide to do, you need to consider your expenses. This leads me to my fourth way for you to make more money…
4) Cut your expenses. Expense creep happens-especially when you're a busy entrepreneur. Because it's hard to keep track of everything all the time. But there's no time like the present to take a hard look at where every penny goes. And also your ROI (Return on Investment)-particularly when it comes to new products or programs, and each and every marketing tactic you implement.
It's worth spending more to make more. But if you're not making more you need to be ruthless about cutting what's not working and focusing on what is. That savings translates into more net revenues for you, and more you can invest back into your business.
5) Finally, you can spend more time focused on revenue-generating activities (sales, product development, marketing, taking care of clients, etc.), and less on time-sucking activities, by outsourcing to Virtual Assistants.
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