Showing posts with label Analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Analytics. Show all posts

Wednesday 3 November 2021

How To Work Backwards To Set Your Business Goals


Today I want to share my thinking process for setting smart business goals with you. I like to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that I want to buy a new car. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, I’ll bump the goal up to $600. In other words, I need to add an extra $600 (or more… more is always better) to my monthly bottom line. Once that’s done and I am seeing that level of income on a regular basis, I’m ready to order my new car. 

 

Once I know how much money I have to make, I can start to think about different ways to do just that. I could find more customers for one or several of my existing products. For example, if I have a $10 eBook, I would have to make an extra 60 sales per month. From there I can work backwards. If I know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the book within the first month of signing up, I need to add 600 new subscribers to my list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to my site. If that’s my plan, I know that my daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month. 

 

Of course that’s not my only option. I could also create another information product or eBook each month and sell it to both my existing and new subscribers. I could create a higher priced item so I need to make a lot fewer monthly sales to reach my $600 goal. For example, if I create a nice $100 product, it would only take 6 sales per month to pay for the car. 

 

Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be my own membership, or I could look into affiliate offers with recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there’s a lot out there that you can promote. For me, one option could be to create some content around content marketing and promote a PLR Membership like this one form [affiliate link to either biz or self-help membership]. It’s a $67 per month subscription with a 50% commission. That means I can expect over $30 in commissions each month. Let’s say it’s 30 to keep the math simple. I only need 20 members to pay for my car. Once I reach that number, I only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members in each month going forward should more than cover that. 

 

Now I have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing 20 people to sign up for the membership. My daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to the PLR membership, a short report about using PLR to build a targeted sub lists of people interested in using PLR in general. Then I start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the PLR membership. I may even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel. 

 

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could approach other writers to see if they would be interested in writing some guest blog posts, answering some questions for an interview style post, or even do a webinar, all of which would of course promote the membership. By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort initially, it won’t take me long to get those 20 signups that pay for my new car payment. Because I really want that new car, I’m going to be motivated to get it done and grow my business by those extra $600 per month. In fact, chances are great that I’ll overshoot the goal by several hundred dollars and it’s something I can continue to grow month after month. 



Increasing Traffic, Subscribers & Customers To Boost Your Bottom Line


To grow your income, you need more customers. That in turn means you need more people to sign up for your list. Where do these new subscribers come from? You get them by increasing the traffic to your site. Some of the things you want to do and track then are: 

 

  • Get more traffic from various different sources. This should always be a priority and something you work on regularly. Track your growth as you move along and keep an eye out for fresh new ideas to boost your traffic. 

  • Your next focus should be getting more subscribers. As you start to get more traffic, your list will start to grow, but don’t stop there. Tweak your opt in-forms to increase conversion. Create a new lead magnet to get the attention of a different sub-group of your target audience. Set up a few dedicated opt-in pages and start driving traffic to them. Do what you can to continually grow your list and pick up speed in the process. 

  • The third piece of the puzzle and where things get really interesting is turning those subscribers into customers. You want them to spend money with you either by buying your products and services, or through your affiliate links. Offer more products. Raise your prices. Find more attractive offers you can promote as an affiliate. Work on your funnels. There’s a lot you can do to grow your bottom line once you have traffic and subscribers figured out. 

 

The real power of this approach becomes apparent when you start to look at how these three things work in synergy. By getting more and higher quality traffic, while improving your opt-in rates, and creating higher prices products with sales funnels that convert well, you can quickly make a huge difference in your bottom line. Each of these elements alone will help, but by combining them, you will start to see exponential growth. 

 

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you start out with 100 new visitors per day. 10 percent of them sign up for your mailing list, which comes out to 10 new subscribers each day. One of these people buys one of your products at $10. 

 

Now let’s see you double your traffic. With nothing else changing, you go from making $10 per day to $20. But what if you can also improve your opt-in forms and get to a 20% conversion. You also create a few more products and each of your customers ends up spending 3 times as much as before. When we add all that up you go from making $10 per day to 40 new subscribers each day which means 4 new customers. If each of them spends $30 shopping around in your shop, you end up making $120. That’s a pretty big bump from $10 while still only requiring you to double your traffic. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? 



You Have To Know Where You’re At Right Now To Measure Growth & Figure Out What You Should Be Working On


Are you ready to take your online business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great. Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you’re at right now. 

 

Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now. 

 

Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information.  You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture. 

 

Traffic – To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from. 

 

List / Subscribers – Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers. 

 

Customers – Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates. 

 

Income & Expenses – Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis. 

 

Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service for example, but it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. 

 

Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years. 



Friday 29 October 2021

6 Steps to Making a Content Marketing Strategy that Will Boost Your Business


You may have heard that content is king in this digitally connected age. Here are 6 simple steps to get the ball rolling with some excellent content marketing in your business.

 

1. Define your goals. You can’t go anywhere without a goal. Set concrete goals for your marketing attempt, such as fortifying your connection with a particular audience or branching out to new ones. 

 

With all the analytic tools available today, you can easily be able to monitor your progress as you move along.

 

2. Define your audience. Who are you marketing your product or service to? If you don’t have a clear vision about this, you’ll be wasting your time and money trying to market to everyone—which is sort of like throwing pasta on the wall and hoping it sticks.

 

Instead, build a vision of your ideal crowd. Perhaps even make a storyboard about the “typical” person in this group to fill out your marketing attempts with genuine copy.  

 

3. Define your style. What exactly is your brand all about, and what’s the accompanying style that best matches with your message? 

 

If you bounce all over the place with your words and your appearance, you’re going to make your audience confused and lose potential customers. Solidify the details about your appearance—everything from colour schemes to fonts to content topics.

 

4. Learn from the past. Chances are, if you’ve been in business for a few years already, that you have some extant content out there already. 

 

Take a look at what did well, and what bombed, and try to figure out why. Build on your success, and stay away from failure as you move forward.

 

5. Assemble the team. If you’re a one-man band, that’s great, but once a business reaches a certain point, you’ll need multiple people on the team. 

 

One person could be blogging and incorporating SEO keywords, while another is interacting with the fan base on social media, and yet another is crafting and implementing Google ads. 

 

The more specialized each person can become, the more their expertise will increase the overall success of your business—but remember to keep everyone within a good loop of communication. 

 

6. Make a plan. Set up checkpoints, goals, and deadlines. Use analytic software to track clicks and see what parts of the strategy are working. 

 

Just like goals are crucial for creating a destination, a plan is crucial for getting to those goals.