The easiest way for most people to start making more money from their website is to improve what’s already working for them. In this post, I’m going to share with you our best tips for earning more money through passive income streams.
Consider this:
You are making $1000/month from selling an eBook on your blog.
To make $3000/month, you could release two new eBooks.
But is that the best way to spend your time? Will that give you the best ROI? There is no doubt more products will mean more money, but in most peoples’ cases you can make more money quicker, if you focus on what’s already making your money.
Improving our checkout page doubled our sales.
Adding a popup opt-in doubled the amount of people that signed up for our list. Our sales come from emails, so again, this doubled how much we were making.
When we significantly increased our page speed, our search engine traffic went up, people spent more time on our site and conversions went up too. All we had to do was spend 5 minutes hiring a page speed expert.
There are opportunities all around us. If you’re not satisfied with where you are right now, perhaps you should ask yourself, what isn’t working as well as it could.
Start here:
9 Ways To Setup Your Website To Make Money From Passive Income
#1. Add Upsells to Current Products
Most decent online marketers make as much money on the back end as they do on the front end.
By that I mean, if they sell a $97 product, when a customer goes through the checkout process, they spend at least another $97 on other products before they complete their purchase.
When I first heard about this, I thought it was an unbelievable statistic.
However, we couldn’t ignore something that sounds so promising.
The first upsell we ever created was for PopUp Domination. Customers would buy our software, then during the checkout process, get offered purchasing options for multi-site licenses and additional popup designs. Incredibly over night this doubled our sales, just like we were told it would.
It makes perfect sense. The customer is already in buy-mode, they have already got their credit card out and ready to buy something. It’s impulse. They see something else they like that’s related and all they have to do is click one extra button.
Our good friend Yanik Silver had a rule of thumb I like to quote:
“60% of people should take your first upsell if it is priced at 60% of the front-end product price.”
That would be a good place to start for most people.
So for example; if your front end product sells at $49, an upsell priced at $27 should convert well.
The only problem we have ever had with creating upsells is the technical side of things. The first time we did it, we had to ask customers to re-enter their credit card details for every upsell they wanted to buy.
No doubt this had a negative effect on conversion. Although we were still able to achieve that industry standard of making just as much from our upsells as the front end offer.
We are not tech guys and even asking a programmer to set something up like this can be a pain because it’s just not something people have much experience with.
However things have moved along quite a lot since we first played with setting up upsells.
Our current checkout software SamCart, allows you to create upsells in seconds. All you have to do is insert the sales video code, set the price and it’s done.
Customers go from purchasing a product, to upsell page 1, upsell page 2 and finally the download page.
Here’s how we setup our upsells:
- Click upsells on the left hand side of your SamCart dashboard and then select funnels from the drop down menu.
- Click “new funnel”, add your funnel name and a short description, then click “create funnel”.
- Select how many upsell offers you’d like to add from your product list and then select “enabled.” You’ll have the option to add up to 5 upsells and 5 downsells.
1 Click Upsell Powered by SamCart
#2. Improve Your Checkout Page
The checkout page is a huge part of the sales funnel process, and is often forgotten or brushed off. I remember 4 years ago reading a forum thread about the beta stage of Clickbank checkout page design. They allowed premier users (top earners) to customize the design of their checkout page from the default 1 style design. Users saw as much as 3x higher conversions by simply matching the header and background color to the one used on their sales page.
Checkout pages should have the following characteristics:
- Sales copy reminding customers of exactly what they’re getting.
- Branding that matches your main site.
- Product image.
- Clear instructions.
- Satisfaction Guarantee.
Another top tip is to remove any checkout fields that are not 100% required. The easier it is to sign up and pay, the higher your conversions will be.
Our checkout pages are hosted and setup with SamCart, which makes the process incredibly easy.
Simple and clean landing page with low bounce rate powered by SamCart.
#3. Add a PopUp Opt-in Box
Adding a PopUp to our websites was a great decision for our list building. Within the first 24 hours of promoting our free giveaway on the site, our subscriber rate increased by 524%
After seeing just how powerful it could be, we developed it into the first WordPress plugin of it’s kind. When we first released it, a lot of the top bloggers and gurus did not like it and even spoke publicly about not liking the plugin. In 2015, all of them have popups on their sites.
Here are 10 different ways we use PopUps on IncomeDiary.
High converting PopUp used on IncomeDiary, powered by PopUp Domination
#4. Launch an Affiliate Program
Having an affiliate program has allowed us to do $x,xxx,xxx in sales with zero advertising budget.
Affiliate programs give you the ability to track and pay people on commission for selling your products. Take PopUp Domination as an example. We let customers promote our sales page with a special tracking link. If they convince someone to click the link and they end up buying from us, we give that person a cut of the money for bringing us the business. This is all handled effortlessly by our merchant.
This is a great, low risk way to drive traffic to your sales pages. You only have to pay for the traffic that converts.
Affiliate programs are among the best ways to incorporate passive income streams into your business. Once your sales page is setup and you have affiliates promoting your products, you don’t have to do anything to drive traffic and make sales.
PopUp Domination‘s clean affiliate center which was created with OptimizePress
#5. Setup Autoresponders
An autoresponder automatically sends emails to email subscribers that you have setup before hand. We use them for all of our mailing lists. When you subscribe, you will automatically receive an email from us. Then again the next day and again two days later and so on, until all 30 emails have been sent. This means you can write a sales email today, then in the weeks to come when someone subscribes, they’ll get that email automatically, read it and hopefully buy whatever you are selling.
As far as we are concerned, the more autoresponder emails the better. We regularly look back over past emails we’ve sent to our lists, copy our most successful ones and add them to our autoresponder.
This will be one of the most important tools you’ll use in your internet business. Autoresponders have been one of the most powerful passive income streams we have ever used. Everyone should have a mailing list and everyone should be sending emails. It doesn’t matter if you are a blogger, software owner, if you sell eBooks or want more clients.
We use AWeber to run our email campaigns and recommend you sign up and start building your lists today! They currently have a $1 trial.
One of IncomeDiary’s followup autoresponder series made possible by AWeber
#6. Increase Page Speed
Speeding up your website is a guaranteed way to get more traffic and make more sales.
Google openly states that page speed is part of their search algorithm. Which makes sense because they want to connect their users with the best match. The best match is not a slow loading website that infuriates you.
We do a combination of things to increase our page speed. You can read more about it here.
The most important being:
1. Perfect code. Be careful which WordPress theme you are using.
2. Minimize page load by not having things slow the site down. One thing a lot of people do is have far to many WordPress plugins.
3. Pick the right host.
4. Use caching software. We use MaxCDN to significantly speed up our site & decrease server load. MaxCDN duplicates your website content across several servers globally, which presents your visitors with website content from whichever server is closest to their location. This increased proximity decreases page load time.
Improving our website speed with MaxCDN
#7. Make Your Site Mobile Responsive
One in every three minutes spent online, is via a mobile device. If your website isn’t responsive, you’re losing money. Our websites are made with Genesis framework and all of our sales pages are created with OptimizePress. Both platforms are 100% mobile responsive!
Check out 15 best practices for responsible responsive web design.
Example of a fully responsive website using OptimizePress
#8. Improve Sales Page Conversions With Split Testing
Split testing is crucial for making money online and is something all successful marketers do on a regular basis. Most have tests continually running.
A split test is when you split your web traffic between multiple pages to see which one converts higher. For example, think of any sales page, now duplicate it, so you have two exact same versions of this page. Change one of the pages so that the buy button is a different colour. Now send 50% of your traffic to each of these two pages. After 100 sales, see which one made the most money.
There is a lot you can test. And you would be surprised how much small things can add up. Here is a list of things to start testing:
- Headlines text, colour, font, size
- Background colours
- Images
- Videos
- Videos Vs Images
- Video Vs Text
- Short Vs Long
- Price
- Scarcity
- What you are offering
- Name of your product
- Testimonials
- Guarantee
I could go on for quite some time… you can test EVERYTHING!
Both SamCart and OptimizePress allow us to split test our checkout pages as well as sales pages to ensure the highest possible conversions regardless of the product.
#9. Don’t Keep All Your Eggs In One Basket.
There are quite a few reasons why this saying is true for online business.
Firstly, if you only have one income stream, then you are screwed if for whatever reason it disappears. And don’t think that’s impossible because it’s happened thousands of times, to people far smarter then you or I. Let me give you an example:
Say you are a blogger and have 5 different income streams for your blog. You are making a lot of money. You should feel safe right?
NOPE.
Not if all your traffic comes from one source. Often I’ve heard horror stories of top bloggers being slapped by Google and losing all their traffic, therefor losing all their income.
You can’t set and forget about a business if it has a foundation like this. Diversify and make sure you have multiple traffic sources such as Search Engines, Social Media, Podcasting, Email Marketing and so on.
Ok, let’s put traffic aside and focus on blog monetization techniques.
Say your site is getting great traffic and it’s all good, but you only make money from Google Adsense.
Well Google can come along and ban you for 1 of a million terms violations. Again you are screwed.
Ok, it’s 2017, not many people do that. How about you sell an eBook online and all your income comes from that. You are doing great, in fact this month is your best month ever, you made $30,000!
Perfect, no troubles, right?
WRONG!
Your merchant shuts you down or puts you on hold because it’s worried you may be doing something fraudulent. Countless times I’ve heard online marketers moan about how their PayPal accounts have been put on hold for months and they can’t withdraw money. Why? Because PayPal would rather be safe than sorry. Although in most cases, PayPal eventually took these people off hold, how would you deal with not being able to access your money for months on end?
Another reason not to keep all your eggs in one basket is it just isn’t a smart business decision.
Take IncomeDiary for example. Say you are coming to the site today and the only adverts we have up are for our PopUp Domination software. If you already have a copy of it, then you can’t buy anything. These adverts are irrelevant. People love choice and you need to be able to show them multiple things they can buy to have the best chance of making a sale.
Like life, variety is key to business.
You must diversify.
There is so much you can do.
So many opportunities you are not taking advantage of yet.
I hope today’s post has shown you that.
There you have it, that’s our top 9 ways to improve your website, to make more money from passive income. Enjoy.
Read more: ‘14 Ways To Actually Make Money From a Website!’