Good business coaches are able to look at a company objectively, ask pertinent questions, and guide the owner through the process of creating a plan for future growth. Consider a business coach your objective third party, the one who can sort through the processes that work and those that don’t work and help mold the company into a profitable entity.

For any business owner with an online presence (and EVERY business should be online!) there are many passive ways to build income streams into your website and products that will bring in extra money while you focus on serving your current customers. Passive income is good and will help your bottom line while you actively market your business. You’ve invested good money into your business and your website; why not make it work harder for you?

1. Affiliate Marketing

It is a simple way to make commission by recommending products or services to your audience. This process is similar to telling your friend or neighbor about the great pizza place where you just ate dinner. Simply sign up for the product’s affiliate program and place a unique link within a product review on your blog or on a web page listing all the business tools you recommend. Every time someone clicks on your link, they are brought to the product’s site and if they make a purchase, you get a commission. Affiliate links can also be added to eBooks or other digital products you sell. However, review the Terms of Service for all the social media platforms before posting an affiliate link.

2. Creating upsells in your sales funnel

It is another overlooked place where you can bring in extra money. Do you have a basic sales funnel in place, where you make an offer to your broad audience and then have more focused, more expensive offers for them to choose from over time? These additional offers bring your customers down the funnel toward your most expensive offer. Now, for each main offer in your sales funnel, think of an upsell your customer would find valuable. This may be free admittance into your private Facebook group or maybe it’s a report, checklist, form, or eBook for a nominal fee that is a no-brainer add-on to their order. For your more expensive offers, add a more expensive upsell, like a trial period in your membership site. The key is to choose relevant upsells that will benefit your customer and that makes sense to couple with the initial product purchase. In other words, don’t create an upsell that doesn’t make sense.

3. Back-end efficiency

It is important to any business, whether it’s strictly online or whether you also have a physical location. A business coach can objectively assess whether you’re working most efficiently and can offer solutions to make customer service, billing, and customer fulfillment (just to name a few areas) quicker and more accurate. Very often business owners are too close to the situation to see how everything flows (or doesn’t flow) together, similar to why having someone else proofread your sales copy is ideal because they are more likely to pick up typos, strictly because they didn’t write the copy.

If you need more help deciphering which strategies you are missing out in your business, schedule a discovery call with me.

What's Next?

Step 1: Revise Your Expectations And Expect Resistance

If you’re familiar with the principles for successfully growing an online business, then you know that Step 1 of successfully pulling out a strategy to optimise and grow your business is to shift your mindset. I share through this blog and social media channels some tips and tools to help you with that. Yet, we all know that it takes more than just knowing what to do to actually do it.

That’s why I want to invite you to revise your expectations. Know that there will be resistance along the way. You might say to yourself “I’ll have a look tomorrow again”, “that’s not so urgent”, “I’m not sure that’s for me”, “I don’t think this will work for me”, or many other things. Often when we’re stepping out of our comfort zone (a.k.a. what we’ve been doing until now) we’re finding excuses to keep on doing what we’ve always done. The first step in success is acknowledging that. So… acknowledge where you’re at. Then…

Revise your expectations bearing in mind your goals AND your life. Not everything that I’m sharing will resonate with you. Not everything will be applicable to you either. And that’s alright! But you’ve got to start somewhere.

So, as long as you’re clear on your goals and on your vision, take a conscious decision of what you want to apply starting from today. And if you are not clear on your vision, here are a few resources you might find helpful:

• Customer Journey Review Pack,
• Plan Your Funnels And Tripwires For Profits,
• Optimised Business Academy, or
• Schedule a call with me to discuss where you're at in your business and what you should focus on.

Step 2: Carve Out Time, And Make A Plan

That’s where carving out time, and making a plan comes in. You know yourself at that stage better than I do. Use that knowledge to implement a plan of action that will help you start making positive changes into your life, that will soon bring positive changes in your business and in your life.

If you're stuck wondering what to do next, I invite you to join the FREE Optimised Business Membership.

Step 3: Just start

There’s no tomorrow in success. Any successful path starts today, with a small change that you keep on building onto. Commit to starting today with ONE small thing, and share with me in the comments what it is. This commitment will help you start – and keep – taking action!

Step 4: Get Support!

We tend to want to do things on our own. I’m not stranger to that either. But I’ve learnt over time, and I’ve seen both with my personal coaching clients and professional mentoring clients, as well as with myself, that getting support helps to really create the change we’re after. So, if you’re stuck wondering what’s next, and you know you need help, I invite you to check out the many online resources I have created to help you save time and achieve faster growth in your business: Free articles, online membership, online books and courses. If you’d like private mentoring for your business strategy, you can also book a call with me to discuss the different mentoring options that are available for your special needs.

Step 5: Please Share!

If you like what I'm sharing, please do me a favour and share it with friends or colleagues you know would benefit from it! The more we are on this journey, the greater the collaborations, co-creation and achievements!