MBA2089 4 Quick Revenue Strategies for Tight Times

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 Arm BA show, helping you build the business you want every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn four quick revenue strategies for tough times. Listen, we're entering one of the biggest recessions of all time and you may not have the revenue to spend spend on marketing, to advertise, to bring in new customers, to bring in more revenue. You might even have customers canceling your contracts or your subscriptions and you want to be able to bring in more revenue to make up for that. So in today's lesson, I'm going to show you four strategies that you can implement to gain more revenue to have that financial safety net even if you don't have money to spend right now to attract customers. And these are quick to implement, they're not hard to do, and they'll allow you to bring in more revenue in the next few weeks or months. The best part is once you install these strategies in your business, you can continue to benefit from them even when times get better and you don't necessarily need them for extra cash. They just become a new revenue stream for your business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Alright, let's jump into the first of the four quick revenue strategies I want to pass on to you. The first one is probably the fastest one to implement, the easiest one to do, but requires a little bit of thought on your end before you start implementing. And that's creating partnerships with other companies, with other brands that work for your business, your brand, your audience. Let me explain what I mean. Your business, your service, your product can't do everything. But your audience might need other things. For example, you might be a web developer and you create websites for your clients. That's your bread and butter. That's what you do. But your clients as a website owner have other needs, like SEO needs. Maybe they have needs for Facebook and Instagram marketing. Maybe they need help with accounting. The point here is that you can partner with other business owners, with other organizations, with other software that are willing to give you a commission on a recommendation. Now you might be saying, do you mean like affiliate marketing? Omar yes, but I like to keep it tighter than affiliate marketing, where it's just like, I recommend products, they go buy it and they use my link. I want to make sure that I introduce my audience to this person. Like a consultant, like a partner. In my business, I am vouching for this person. Why? Because I want to build trust with my audience to increase the sales and the conversions and say, hey, this is the person I trust when it comes to xyz. I'm recommending them to you. And one easy way to do this is you can do a live workshop or webinar together. You introduce this expert to their audience and at the end of the workshop and they're interested in their services, you can then send them your affiliate link. That way you get a commission or you get some sort of recognition for the sale. That way you can work that out with a partner. And you could do this with four or five key areas around your business and run these types of workshops every six months. You can even do this with software. This is actually really easy as software so when I was building websites for my clients back in the day, I think it was like a decade ago, they wanted email marketing software. So I chose three levels of email marketing, like one for beginner, one for intermediate, one for like an enterprise business. The ones I felt were ones I trusted or I liked or I've used before and on my website, in my portal or even just via email. I say, hey, you should sign up for one of these three. Check them out. These are the ones I recommend. These are the ones I can easily install or integrate with your website. And you make their life so much easier because you don't have to do the research. You've done it for them and you get the kickback, the affiliate commission for the recommendation. Of course, in any of these situations, it's important for you to just to be upfront about it and say, hey, I will get a commission for the recommendation, but you're not going to pay anything more or less. I've even seen other software companies put affiliate links in their cancellation flow, meaning they're another email marketing software. They have a cancellation process on their website. And when people leave their software, they actually recommend other email marketing software and say, hey, if we're not a good fit for you, these might be a good fit for you. And that's all affiliate commission. So partnerships and affiliates, Easy quick win tip number two, sell more of what your customers already have. If you have customers that are paying you a retainer in your service or they have a contract or they're signing up for your software and they're on a monthly or annual plan, these people already bought into what you have. They are sold. They got the value, they enjoy what they are receiving, they have a relationship with you, they trust you. So the easiest sale is from them. And I've done this in the past where you just reach out to your best customers and you say, hey, I have a special offer. If you want to go from monthly to annual, you'll get, you know, a discount or a bonus. And that ensures you secure this customer for the long term. And it gives you a lump sum of cash or revenue right then and there. If they're already on annual, go with two years. If you are selling services, sell a discounted package of hours. If you're selling physical products in e commerce store, I've done this before where you basically give them a coupon that kicks in after they spend a certain amount of money. So for example, they get $50 off when they spend $200 or more. Now the key here is that this is your opportunity to ask for a bit more money than you normally would with a sale. A larger lump sum, whether it's going from monthly to annual or annual to biannual or bulk buying, or increasing the size of their shopping cart. On E Commerce, this is easily done by just going in your database, looking at your top customers. You can even go to your payment processor and see who are the people that paid you the most, look at the top 10 or 5% and email them and give them that offer to have them stick around longer and pay you a little bit more upfront. Tip number three presale. I've done this one before as well. The concept here is you have an idea of a new product, a new course, a new training program, and it's not fully fleshed out yet, but you know what the promise is. You know, basically the general idea of what you're going to be offering, what it's going to include, all that kind of stuff. You can easily put together a one page sales page in a day or two, shoot a video and pre sell this product, even if it's months before they're going to get their hands on it. The point here is that you don't have to do all the work of creating that product or service before you start selling it. You can just do the sales portion of it with the pre sale, with one page, give them a sweet deal, a discounted rate versus what it's going to be when it's for sale after you launch. And it's a very, very quick way for you to make some great sales. This is especially effective if you have some sort of timed course, a cohort, a live course that you're going to do because people need to plan ahead and say, okay, I'm going to block book this in my calendar, you know, two months in advance. That way I know that I'm going to attend. This is also a great way for you to validate a concept. Now I'm going to give you a little twist here because we talked about what if you don't have a lot of marketing dollars, you first market it to your current customers or you just put it on your, you know, your main offering, but now you want others to help you market it. So what I did is I created a referral system on the thank you page after they pre bought the product. So after they bought that product as a pre sale and they said great, I got it, I can't wait two or three months from now when I get it or start that program. They're provided a link that they can share and there's rewards for these shares when people sign up, and these could be up to you, they could be like, if they refer five people, they get their own fee waived. Or they might get some swag. They might get something as a bonus, maybe a coaching session. Whatever it is, the point here is get your customers to do the marketing for you. There's a lot of options out there when it comes to this type of referral marketing. Rewardful is one of them that I've heard that does this. Well, I used another company back in the day that's no longer here, but it's an easy, simple way to get people to share your presale.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

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All right, tip number four. Now, we talked about partnerships, but now we're going to flip it. We're going to talk about sponsorships. Yep. I'm talking about people coming on to sponsor your already existing content, whether you a YouTube channel, a podcast, a blog, a newsletter. These are all assets that you have. You have an audience, whether big or small, that are reading or watching or consuming your content. And there's lots of other companies and other brands that want to get exposure to your audience. Now you might be saying, omar, I don't have a big list. I'm just getting started. Trust me, it doesn't matter how big or small you are. Even if you only have like a thousand or five hundred people on your email list, it's still a regular newsletter. It's still 500 people and getting eyeballs, and it's still worth something. Okay, to sell that sponsorships package. Whether you want to put a, you know, a sponsored spot in your newsletter or running a sponsored guest post or doing a feature on your YouTube channel, the point here is, is that there's a lot of opportunity because a lot of brands are looking to get started and want to sponsor other creators. If you're like, I don't know where to start with this. I don't know how to actually find sponsors. Well, I'm going to make it super simple for you. ConvertKit, the email marketing service that we use, they just launched a network that will allow them to bring you sponsors into your newsletter. They'll take a cut but they'll manage the whole process. So you can look that up if you want to do your own sponsorships. This is very simple. If you are in tune with your community, if you're on Twitter, if you're looking at other brands that are looking to grab sponsorship spots, you can ask other creators that have sponsored newsletters or blog posts or YouTube and ask them, hey, how did you get your sponsors? How do I do the same thing? And if you do a weekly newsletter, and even if you only charge, you know, a few hundred dollars a week, that's an extra thousand plus every month using an existing asset you have the only caveat here is just like what we do with our podcast, we only bring on sponsors that actually help our audience, that's actually valuable to our audience, are like our recommendations, like we would use it ourself and that it's adding value to the actual content, the actual podcast episode or blog or whatever it is. And that's usually not so hard because those sponsors that are attracted to your audience are going to be attracted because they see your audience as a good fit for them. That wraps it up, guys. Let's recap. Strategy number one, partnerships and getting commission based on that partnership. Strategy number two, upsell and offer more to your existing customers so you can lock them in for a year or two years. Strategy number three, pre sell an idea you have already. Strategy number four, sponsorships. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Hit, subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Whatever you're using right now to listen to this podcast, whether it's Spotify or Citra Radio or Apple Podcasts or Himalaya, we're on every single platform, so make sure you hit follow or subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm a big believer that with constraint comes creativity. When you are forced to be creative, when you have limitations, this allows you to come up with creative ideas. It's actually easier to be creative when things are kind of tight rather than you have all the options in the world, then you have kind of an overwhelm. So use that to your advantage. And if any of the tips I gave you today, any of the strategies work for you today, implement, try it out, see if it works, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save Big. It feels good to Geico.