Maybe you’re just starting out with your online business. Or maybe you already have an established online business and hoping to take it to the next level. No matter where you are on your online business journey, there is room to grow. That’s the beauty of the online world. 

If you are wondering how to increase your income, you are in the right place. Here are 7 proven methods to help you make more money online with your online business. 

Track What’s Working And Use The 80/20 Rule 

One of the best ways to increase your income is to figure out what’s working and doing more of that. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? The problem is that you first have to know exactly what’s working and what isn’t. The best way to do that is to track everything. 

From there, you look at your data and make a plan for what you should and shouldn’t be doing going forward.

Your first step will be to decide what you want to track. This will be a little different for everyone depending on your business and what you do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. A good place to start is to look at income and expenses, products or different sources of income, and of course, where you spend most of your time.

Let’s say you start to track where your income is coming from. If possible, go back and look at the last six to twelve months of financial data. Did you make money selling your own products? Did you make a significant amount using affiliate marketing? Did you sell advertising on your websites?

Next you want to look at expenses related to that income. You’ll have some fixed expenses like hosting your website for example, that you should ignore for the purpose of this exercise. Look at cost directly related to each source of income. 

For example, in order to launch your products, you may hire a graphic designer, a VA, and pay for your shopping cart software. You may also be paying commissions to affiliates promoting your products. 

Subtract those costs from the income you’ve made to get a good feel for your actual profits. Other sources of income will have little to no expenses. Once you’ve adjusted your income figures to reflect the profit you’ve made, you can start to compare.

Last but not least, look at the amount of time you’re spending to generate the income. It may take you a full month of working twelve hour days to launch a new big course. On the other hand, you may be able to put together a short eBook or fresh membership content in a day or two by leveraging content you’ve already written or buying pre-written content. Look at the time it takes for each type of product and compare this to the amount of money you expect to make from the launch and going forward. This will help you decide what’s the most profitable way to spend your time.

With all the information at your fingertips, it will be easy to decide what you should be doing more off, what you should be doing less off, and what you should stop doing. Focus most of your time and energy on the most profitable products and income sources. Work on it for a good six months and look at how much your profits went up. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one strategy alone allows you to increase your income.

Collaborate With Other Players In Your Niche 

This is an incredibly effective way to increase your income. Putting yourself in front of more people who are interested in what you have to offer. Of course that is easier said than done. Getting traffic and exposure is one of the hardest things to accomplish as the internet grows and expands. Sure, you could use a lot of money and accomplish it with well placed ads, but that’s not a viable option for most of us.

A great way to get in front of a new audience interested in what you have to say is to find someone else who’s doing something similar to what you’re doing. In other words, find other players in your niche, or closely related niches and start to collaborate. 

For example, let’s say you’re selling a guide on growing tomatoes. Go find a few bloggers and marketers who are also in the gardening niche. This could be someone who blogs about organic gardening, or someone who sells container gardening kits, or books on how to grow all the vegetables you need in your backyard. 

You won’t be competing directly, but instead complementing each other. Your audience will be interested in additional organic gardening tips, and they may want to purchase a container kit that makes it easier to grow those tomatoes. Do you see how this could work?

Approach the other players in your niche and see how you can work together. A great place to start is to offer to share something of theirs with your readers first. If the person sells a product, ask if you can interview them, or see if they have a special coupon you can share with your readers. If they have an affiliate program, you can even profit from sharing this with your readers.

Next, ask if they would be interested in sharing about you with their own audience. This is always your end goal, but you have to make it worth their while. Depending on your business model, there are several different ways to accomplish this. If you have a paid product, and an affiliate program, it makes it easy. You can also offer to create unique content for the other person’s audience.

No matter what you decide to do, make it as easy as possible and do whatever you have to do to get your fellow blogger or info product creator to email his or her list for you. Mentions on social media and blog posts are great, but your ultimate goal should always be to get them to email for you. When they do, your next goal is to get these people on your own list and to turn them into paying customers.

Raise Your Prices & Rates 

Are you up for a little math? I promise it won’t be hard, but it will open your eyes to the possibility of doubling your income by raising your prices and rates. I’m sure you’ve heard that one of the best ways to increase your income is to charge more for what you do. 

When we first start to work online, we tend to undervalue our worth. We are anxious to get clients or make those important first sales. Starting out on the low end is actually not a bad idea. Without experience, testimonials, and social proof, starting with low-end products and services is a great way to get a foot in the door. But it isn’t where you want to stay.

How do you know that it’s time to raise your prices? When you start to make quite a few sales. If you’re a service provider who’s constantly booked, you should be raising your prices. When you hear your customers rave about your products and share how much value they’ve gotten from them, it’s time to raise your prices.

But what do you do when you’re not there yet? It may sound counterintuitive, but the reason your sales pages aren’t converting may be that you’re not charging enough. Think about it. You come across a course on running an online business that offers a ton of content for $7. What’s your first thought? It’s probably that it can’t be very good if the person is selling for so little. Your customers and clients may feel the same way.

Often we’re reluctant to raise our prices because we think we’ll lose customers. While that can happen, it also opens a lot of doors. Other people may not even consider buying what you have to offer until they see a price that they associate with high-value. Plus, when you increase your profit margin, you don’t need to sell nearly as much as you did before.

Let’s dive into that math. Let’s say you have a product that you sell for $20. To keep the math simple, let’s say you sell 100 of them each month and that there’s no real cost associated with the product. With an information product like an eBook or course, there really isn’t and let’s ignore those pesky payment processor fees for this exercise. In that case, you’re making a $2,000 profit per month.

Now let’s say you go crazy and increase your price. You start charging $40 for your product. Because it’s such a great value and because the higher price reflects that, you find you’re making just as many sales as before. By doubling your price, you’re doubling your profit. You’re not bringing home $4,000 per month.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because of the higher ticket price, an affiliate marketer becomes interested in promoting you. You set up a 50% commission and he sends an additional 100 customers your way. That’s another $2,000 in profits after you’ve paid the affiliate his or her share.

Don’t be afraid to raise your prices. You don’t have to increase your rates if that seems like a bit much. Play around with the numbers. If it doesn’t work out how you’ve hoped, you can always go back down, bundle products at a lower price, or offer a coupon. Play around with pricing and find the sweet spot for your audience and your products that brings you the biggest profits.

Create A New Product For Your Existing Customers 

Listen up, this is important. It’s one of the most powerful marketing concepts out there and something that could become a game changer for you. It’s much easier to sell ten products to one customer than it is to go out and find 10 buyers. In other words, it’s much easier to create a second product and sell it to your current customer base than it is to go out and market to new people.

That’s why one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase and even double your income is to create a new product. Find out what your audience needs next. What else are they struggling with? What’s the next step they should be talking to reach their goal? Talk to your customers and do a bit of research in your niche. I’m sure you’ll come up with all sorts of fun and creative product ideas. Pick one and get to work.

You’ll find that it’s much easier and quicker to create that second product than it was to work on the first. You know what you’re doing now. And guess what. It will get even easier the third and fourth time around. Plan to create a whole series of products that help your customers reach their ultimate end goal. 

When you start to run out of ideas on what they should be doing next, think about related topics. For example, once you’ve taught your tribe everything you know about list building, branch out into social media or copywriting. If you’re teaching them about container gardening, consider branching out into composting, or food preservation for example.

Finish that product and get it up for sale. Then email your list of existing customers about it. Don’t be surprised if the majority of them will buy from that one email. That’s right, you’ll start seeing quite a few sales from that one email. Compare that to all the work, effort, and time it took to find those customers in the first place. Doesn’t that want to make you get to work on the next product?

Of course, the benefits of adding a new product don’t end there. Start promoting the second product the way you did the first. Send an offer for it out to your list of leads. Mention it on social media. Link to it from existing content on your blog. Mention it in guest blog posts and podcast interviews. People who weren’t interested in your first product, end up picking up this new one, resulting in even higher profits. Try it and see for yourself.

Focus On List Growth And Sales 

There’s so much you can do on a daily basis to grow your reach and make more sales. The list seems almost endless, doesn’t it? You could be writing a new blog post, creating a series of videos, posting on various social media platforms, writing guest posts, publishing kindle or print books… the more important question you should be asking yourself is what should you do if doubling your income is your goal? The answer is much simpler and the list much shorter.

You should focus on just two things. Growing your list and making sales. 

Does this mean you stop doing everything else you’ve always done? Not necessarily. Think of it more as a mindset shift that can help you become much more profitable. 

You could still write that blog post. But the goal of the post would be to either turn the reader into a subscriber, or warm them up for the offer you’re going to email them about in a couple of days. You’ll record that podcast interview, but your main goal will be to convert the podcasters audience into subscribers to your list. Do you see how this works?

Why is focusing on subscribers and customers so important? Because it takes some time before someone is ready to buy from you. They have to know, like, and trust you first before they hand over their credit card, or log into their PayPal account. 

That’s why your number one goal when you reach a new audience should always be to get them on your list. That gives you a chance to build a relationship before you make an offer to buy. Of course the benefit of a list doesn’t end there. You also get a chance to make offers for other products. These could be your own, or something you’re promoting as an affiliate. The end result, in either case, results in more money in your bank account.

A list of subscribers is valuable and something you should always work on growing. The only thing more valuable is a list of customers. Customers have proven that they trust you and like you enough to hand over their hard-earned money. If you deliver a lot of value and help them solve a problem, they are more likely than anyone else to buy something else you offer or recommend.

As you go about growing your business, focus first on growing your list of email subscribers, and then on converting these people into paying customers. Make that the main goal for everything you do online and you will quickly see your income grow.

Embrace Paid Advertising To Grow Your Reach 

Do you know what your only truly limited resource is? It’s time. We all end up with just twenty-four hours per day. What does that have to do with getting traffic and growing your reach? It’s simple. 

You have two options when it comes to reaching more people. You can spend a lot of time creating fresh content, posting on social media, reaching out to podcasters, bloggers, and vloggers. Or you can get in front of your ideal customers through paid advertising.

Yes, paid advertising can seem a little daunting. After all, there’s no guarantee you’ll make your money back. The good news is that it’s easier and more affordable to get started than it has ever been. You can start small with as little as a few dollars per day and scale up as you learn more about what you’re doing.

A great place to start is with Facebook ads. You see them all day long. Pay attention to the ads you find yourself clicking. Maybe it’s an interesting tagline and a pretty cover for a new book. Maybe it’s a new pair of shoes, or a planner that promises to help you stay productive throughout your busy day. 

Think about that ad. What made it so appealing? What hooked you?

Once you’ve figured this out for a few of the ads that have grabbed your attention, it’s time to give it a try yourself. Start with your best selling product, or the lead magnet that draws in new subscribers like crazy. Why do people buy or download it? Are you solving a problem? Do you tackle a hot topic? Try to zero in on what’s making this such a big hit for you already. Then craft a Facebook ad that reflects this.

Next it’s time to do a little homework. Read through some blog posts about getting started with Facebook ads. Watch a few tutorials. Go through the one that Facebook provides and go through the steps to set up your account. Make sure you have your pixels installed (it’s a Facebook thing… those tutorials will explain), so you can track what’s working and what isn’t’. Then create that first ad.

Create at least two more ads that are similar to the first so you can start to test. A great place to start testing is with images. Pick three different images, but leave everything else the same. Launch this first set of ads with a limited daily budget. If you want to spend just $5 per day, that’s fine. If you can swing it, go up to $10 or even $15, but keep your bids as low as possible. 

This will get you data faster. Let them run until you get a feel for which one performs best.

Keep that add and start changing something else. Maybe it’s testing an add with little text against one with slightly more text and one with a lot of text (maybe an entire article or blog posts). Maybe you test different headlines. Or different calls to action. Keep testing and tweaking until you find a profitable ad that you have a hard time improving upon.

From there the sky’s the limit. Invest some of your profits into running more ads. Create ads to different products and opt-in offers. Branch out into Instagram and Twitter ads or cross over to different social media platforms, or even Google Adwords. Keep buying ads and keep growing your reach and your profits.

Create A High Ticket Item You Can Sell Again & Again

One of the quickest and easiest ways to increase your income is to come up with a high ticket item that you can sell to your customers. One of the most popular models to do this is to offer one-on-one coaching or group coaching workshops. 

While that’s certainly an option and a great way to justify asking for several thousand dollars per ticket, this model has one big problem. It isn’t scalable because you’re limited in how many you can sell by how much time you’re willing to spend on these meetings in any given week or month. 

Let’s look at some options that allow you to create one of these high-end products, without this limiting factor involved. In short, we’re going to look at some high-value products you can create that you set up once and then sell over and over again. 

First though, why is creating a high-end product such a good idea? After all, the majority of your subscribers and customers won’t buy them. The reason is because you don’t need to sell a lot to be profitable. Let’s look at an example. 

Let’s say your average product costs $27. To make $5,000 per month, you need to sell an average of 185 of them. That’s a lot of new customers you need to find each month to reach your income goal. Now let’s say you have a $97 product. You only need to sell 51 of them. Last but not least, let’s go crazy and say you come up with something you can sell for $497. You only need to sell about 10 of those per month. 

Now let’s circle back around to the idea of doubling your income. Sure you could come up with another $27 product, but you’d have to increase what you’re doing now to generate an extra 185 sales. 

But what about that $497 product? It could become the last piece in your product funnel. Not every single one of your customers will buy it. Only the ones that need the extra help and are serious enough about reaching their big goals will pick it up. But that’s ok. You don’t need a lot of them to buy it each month to seriously increase your profits. 

There are a lot of different ways to create these products. Your main goal will be to offer a lot of value and to make a real difference in your customers lives or businesses. For example, this could be a comprehensive guide with workbooks and open office hours where customers can ask questions. 

In the guide you walk them step-by-step through each part of the process of reaching their goal. Or maybe it’s an interactive video course that allows them to pick and choose lessons specifically on the stumbling block they are facing next. Or maybe part of it is access to your own team of people who can help them create covers, set up websites etc. Or maybe it’s yearly access to your membership site where they get help, motivation, advice, and interaction with like-minded people. 

Get creative. Think about what you would have wanted when you were in their position. What would have helped you get to where you are now faster. Create that and then don’t be afraid to put a premium price on the product.

Conclusion

There’s never too early or too late to think about increasing your income for your online business. Making money online is not about investing more time into your business, but rather, making smarter moves and focusing on the actions that will generate more profit for you and your business.