Do you struggle to know how to earn more money from your website, blog, or online store? Do you know what numbers to be looking at, and which ones you should be increasing in order to see exponential growth in your bank account? Most marketing professionals and entrepreneurs know about simple sale-funnels, opt-ins, email marketing, and PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords or Facebook Ads – but are you keeping track of how to grow traffic into actual sales that keep growing and growing? It isn’t enough to be gaining more traffic to your site, or to be ranked higher than competitor’s websites. You need to actually convert visitors into paying clients, and then increase your profit.
Here is a dead-simple way to keep track of these numbers and grow your revenue:
Make a simple spreadsheet.
- Write down your average sale.
- Write down your average numbers of visitors you receive in one month.
- Write down your conversion rate (% of those visitors that result in a sale).
- Write down the revenue you get based on those numbers.
Now you should be able to forecast the revenue results when you increase visitors to your website. What will happen to your revenue if you increase your traffic by 5%? 10% 20%? By looking at the actual numbers tied to your website traffic you can start to justify budgets for how much you spend to increase website traffic (through things like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads). Because pro-tip: you should always, always be making more money than you are spending. It may seem like common sense, but so many PPC campaigns get turned on and left unchecked on how it is affecting the real bottom-line of your business. So there are two ways to increase revenue from your website. The first way is to increase website traffic in a financially responsible way, by tracking those numbers above, and cutting out a reasonable portion of your profit into PPC campaigns that will increase visitors. The second way to increase revenue from your website is by optimizing the website itself. So instead of focusing on just increasing the number of visitors in that formula listed above, you can also focus on increasing the conversion rate. This can be a way to really start to kick-start some major profit growth online. Let’s look at two examples of each strategy so you can see how much of an impact each method really has:
Example of Strategy #1 – Increasing Traffic
Let’s say you are currently making about $2500 a month. If your average sale was $50, you get 5,000 visitors a month, that means you have an average conversion rate of 1% (aka 1% of your visitors are actually buying stuff). So what if we were to increase traffic and double it to 10,000 visitors a month? Assuming you changed nothing else, with an average conversion rate of 1% you would now be making about $5000 a month. Things like a Pinterest marketing strategy, other social media marketing, SEO campaigns, and content marketing tend to boost targeted traffic to your site.
Example of Strategy #2 – Increasing Conversion Rates
Okay so let’s assume the same stats about your business (average $2500 a month in sales, 5,000 visitors to your website, 1% conversion rate). The next strategy is to increase your conversion rate so that more people who are already visiting your site also purchase. Typical ways of increasing conversion rates are more targeted ads, creating niche specific opt-ins and landing pages, honing in on solving your ideal client’s pain points, and targeted SEO + sale funnel strategies. So let’s say you increase your conversion rate by just one more percent. Now your average is 2% conversion. Suddenly with the same amount of visitors you are making an average of $5000 a month.
Combining Both Strategies for Exponential Profit Growth
So in our example, what happens to our monthly revenue if we focused on growing both of those things? You increased your traffic (now at 10,000 visitors) and you increased your conversion rate (now at 2%) which means you would make an average of $10,000 a month. It is important to combine both strategies in your efforts to increase profits from your website. It isn’t enough to gain followers, rankings, or page visits if there isn’t some way you are converting those people into clients or customers. This is why it is so important to make sure you are coming up with strategies to increase those conversion rates in combination with increasing your traffic. If you focus your budgets and campaigns on increasing these two numbers in the above listed formula, you will start see rapid and sustainable, long-term growth in your business from your online marketing services. Make sure that when you hire someone to do any kind of digital marketing on your behalf that they are concerned about these numbers too, and will be updating you on them frequently. You need to make sure that your business is growing and not just spending recklessly without a plan. Feel confident in our ability to help you increase these two numbers? We promise to really care about the actual profit you are making from a campaign. So it is important to us that you are making back any investment you make in our services, and MORE ROI (return on investment) is so important. So even if you aren’t entirely sure what your budget should be, can be, or how to increase those numbers you can shoot Lauren an email at lauren@marceildesign.com and we will work together to create a free marketing strategy for your business. We only take on a limited amount of these one-on-one clients for free strategy sessions, so apply now via email and we will get back to you as soon as we can.
