Track What’s Working: Your Key to a Profitable Business
The easiest path to a profitable business is to track what’s working. What parts of your business, what projects, and what products are making you money? Which ones don’t? What type of customer is most profitable for you? Where is your most profitable traffic coming from?
Taking time to dig into your stats and calculating ROI (Return on Investment) is one of the best things you can do for your bottom line.
Your Products
Look at your products. This could be info products, physical products, any coaching you do, anything you resell, or even advertising you sell on your site. List it all out.
Next to each item on your list, note down how much money each product has brought in. You can break it down by month, or look at long-term figures like year-to-date profits or revenue generated over the past 12 months. Use whatever number seems most helpful.
Next, think about how much work each of these products or profit streams take. Selling advertising space on your site or a simple little kindle book may not make as much money per month as that big info product you created or the one-on-one coaching you offer, but they also don’t take hardly any time to create and maintain. Assign a value to each item on your list.
Once you have all your data, it’s just a matter of creating more products of the type that’s most profitable for the time you invest in them.
Your Customers and Prospects
Taking a look at your customers and prospects is also a good idea. Where did they come from? Who is your core customer base? These are the people that buy everything you put out and are singing your praises to their circle of influence. They may also be repeat customers that come back to you over and over again.
What prospects are most likely to turn into paying customers? Are they people that were attracted by the freebie you offer to get them on your list, or are they people that found you via the great blog posts you write?
You can find a lot of this information by looking at your customer database and by comparing subscriber lists to customer lists. You can also learn a lot by talking to your customers and subscribers. Start a conversation via email, on LinkedIn, or in a Facebook group.
Your end goal is to pinpoint who your most profitable demographic is and then figure out how to put yourself in front of more of those people. This brings us to our last point…
Your Traffic
It’s time to dig into those website stats. Where is your most profitable traffic coming from? How do they find your site, what do they look at once they get there and what funnel do they go through until they become part of your most profitable customer group?
Tools like Google Analytics are your best friend here. Spend a weekend learning more about the different reporting you can set up, what you can track and how to read the numbers.
Once you know where your most profitable traffic is coming from – be it Search Results, LinkedIn, your Affiliates, or Facebook Ads – put on your thinking cap and figure out how you can tap into more of that traffic or something similar.
Keep tracking, tweaking, and improving your bottom line. Make it a goal to get more profitable every month than you were last month and you’ll see your business and bank account grow in no time.
Whether you have a profitable business or not relies on more than the balance in your checkbook.
Are numbers a challenge for you? I get it, not everyone is good with compiling the information and assessing the results. My background is in bookkeeping so I love numbers. Schedule a call with me and find out a simple method to track and assess your numbers.