Listen up: If you’re a busy entrepreneur looking to scale your business, you need to know how to identify and prioritize money-making activities in your business.
But if you’ve heard this advice before (and you probably have!) and thought something like, “Sounds great, but how?”…you’re in the right place.
Here are a few tips and tricks you can use to figure out what’s actually making you moolah in your business–and what’s simply wasting your time (and money, too!):
Step 1: Review Your Financial Statements
This one’s easy, but often overlooked: At the end of the month, take a look at your income statement in your bookkeeping software (or even your payment processor). What were the top 1-3 revenue-generating products or services? Go ahead and write them down–I’ll wait.
Now, take a look at products and/or services you just wrote down. These are your main money-makers–and they’re the products & services you should pour most of your time, energy and efforts into–at least for now. (If you’re not sure that part looks like, it could be something as simple as adding a call-to-action for each of these offers to the bottom or your weekly newsletter, or as robust as creating a whole new launch around your best-selling digital product. But I digress.)
Oh and by the way: If simply looking at your income statements doesn’t seem like enough data, you can also use online analytics tools to track exactly where your revenue is coming from. For example, if you run an e-commerce business, you can use Google Analytics to track which products are selling the most and specifically which pages on your website are generating the most revenue.
Knowing exactly which products and services your people are loving–and more importantly, buying–is fantastic information. And you can use it to drive your marketing and business goals for the next month, quarter or year, so you can be sure you spend more time promoting what’s already working (and less time crafting elaborate sales funnels for offers your people don’t seem to vibe with).
Step 2: Dig Into Your Marketing Activities & Analytics
Let’s be real: There are a million and one different ways to market yourself online these days. The problem, though, is that not all of your marketing efforts will actually equate to sales (read: money-makers).
While it can be fun and even insightful to measure engagement and other vanity metrics when it comes to your marketing, it’s even better to get clear on exactly which specific marketing activities are bringing cold hard cash into your business. Do your emails tend to get opened, read and purchased from–or do they sit ignored in your ideal client’s inboxes? What about your Instagram posts–do they results in DMs from dreamy clients-to-be, or do your Stories seem to get more traction?
Write down the top 3-5 marketing activities in your business that you know regularly lead to sales. You might need to do a little digging to find this information–including scrolling through past DMs or emails and/or diving deep into your Google Analytics account.
Once you know which marketing activities are actually bringing in sales, you should make a concerted, calculated effort to double down on them. For example, if email marketing is a big money-maker in your business, how could you either a) prioritize it (say, over another marketing channel) and/or b) do more of it? These are the types of questions you should ask yourself–and then, act on them.
Also, once you have this information, you can also use to see what’s not working–so you know what to de-prioritize, too.
Step 3: Don’t Forget about ROI
Return on investment (ROI) is important to consider when figuring out–and then prioritizing– money-making activities, too. Because while a certain offer or product (or even marketing channel) might be bringing in loads of money, it’s just as important to know how much money it’s taking out of your business, too.
In order to figure out ROI for an individual offer, you’ll need to track your expenses related to each revenue stream. This includes costs like advertising, website maintenance, and product creation–and yes, the time you pay your VA, designer or copywriter to create or manage the product, too. Then, you’ll need to subtract the expenses from your overall revenue. Et voila–you’ll have your ROI!
If you discover your big money-makers are also big money-sucks, make it a priority to figure out ways to lower expenses so you actually get to pocket more money when all is said & done.
Step 4: Revamp Your Schedule & Your Resources
Once you know what your money-making activities are, the next step is to figure out a way to prioritize them–aka, do more of them.
The best place to start? Re-vamping your weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly schedules (and goals!) so these tasks are at the top of your To Do List.
For example, if you find email marketing’s your marketing breadwinner, be sure that you’ve carved out time for it every single week. If it’s doing well especially well for you, you can even double or triple the amount of time or energy you’re pouring into it. This might mean writing a daily email instead of a weekly newsletter–or it might look like starting smaller, by ramping up to 2-3 emails a week from one.
And don’t forget–you don’t have to do this alone. You likely have tons of content already out there that your team can help you refresh and re-send to your email list.
Besides revamping your schedule, it’s also important to re-arrange your business’ budget so you’re allocating more resources to the offers (and/or marketing efforts) that positively impact your bottom line. What does that look like? Well, maybe it’s time to up your Facebook ad budget for that successful ad campaign, finally sign up for a Tailwind subscription so you can post on Pinterest more consistently or press “Go” on hiring a graphic designer and/or social media manager to get more creative (and eye-catching) content out on the ‘Gram.
When you start pouring more time and more money into what’s already working, you just might be very pleasantly surprised at the results.
