Financial freedom online - web site business for an online revenue stream

How to Grow your Business with an online Revenue Stream

Are you thinking about expanding your business by adding online revenue streams? Maybe, you're thinking about creating a new online business? If this is the case, many "gurus" are awaiting the opportunity to share the intricacies of their wisdom with you for a very high fee. While some are good... you'd better know precisely what type of assistance you're seeking or you'll see your fees eaten up long before you even get close to accumulating any return on your investment.

Put simply, building an on-line revenue stream requires skills in 2 areas:
1. Bringing the right kind of visitors to your web site
2. Persuading them to take the action you want

Let's examine an example wherein:
- Selling your product for $100.
- Attracting 1000 visitors monthly to your site.
- Expecting 1% of these visitors to purchase your product.

Using the following formula, your short-term revenue is
derived:
Product price x (# of visitors) x (% of visitors who buy)
Or, $100 x 1,000 x .01 = $1,000/month

So to grow your revenue, for a given product price, you can
- increase the traffic to your site
- increase the % of visitors who buy (your conversion ratio)
- or both

However, conversion ratios and traffic aren't independent factors. The source that's referring your visitors and the kind of visitors might and can seriously impact your conversion rate.

You may be asking "What options do I have when it comes to attracting visitors to my website?" Only a few key strategies exist:

1. Traffic for Purchase.
Go ahead and buy traffic from options like banner ads, Pay-Per-Click (PPC), or off-line advertising to quickly bring visitors your way. Warning: these options may be complicated, and costly. And difficult to control. Many inexperienced PPC buyers lose out making avoidable common mistakes.

2. Build Traffic
This means optimising your web site to gain a high position in the Search Engine Results. While this can be highly effective, and deliver significant "free" traffic, it takes time, experience, and ongoing management effort to acheive and sustain an envied placing on the first page. And your efforts can be quickly trashed by competition, or simply a change of policy by the Search Engine. Unless you already have the experience, in practice this means a steep learning curve, or paying an SEO consultant to do it for you. So much for "free" traffic!

3. Dig for Traffic
By this I mean using your own existing customer lists and taking them to your new offer on-line. This can be an excellent approach for those who have an existing list of customers right for the new proposition. But what if you don't?

4. Traffic to Bring In through Public Relations.
Promote your offer on radio and TV or in magazines and newspapers. Plus, put your website address on "advertorials", articles and press releases for readers to know where to find more about your topic. If you have good media contacts and if you're wise, PR is an effective avenue.

5. Traffic from "OPT", Other People's Traffic.
Find several resources that are related to your topic.
These resources contain thousands of subscribers who are on their circulation lists. Thousands of online newsletters and magazines editors are hungry for great, pertinent content. Imagine if a resource publishes your advert or article along with perhaps a personal endorsement to their circulation list, you can then expect a deluge of visitors. Unless you repeat the same act to another list or submit a new article for that first publication, this surge may soon recede.

But of course you can't do everything all at once! So what sort of start-up sequence should you consider?

1. Conduct a quick market test by purchasing traffic from a keyword-targeted resource and then test the viability of your ad copy, your offer and your niche. (Obviously, if your current client-base is right for your new offer, conduct your test with your existing clients first.)

2. Do you believe your niche is viable? Have you established your opt-in rate or conversion rate? If so,
you're ready to use "OPT". Bring your offer to your preferred publishers and negotiate a deal that's good for
all involved, so that the publishers can carry your ad or article. You should be carry this out regularly over a long period of time and use a variety of publishers that touch different market segments.

3. Follow the key Search Engine Optimization rules when building your sales website. Include developing in-bound links, relevant content, a clear and focused theme, and so on in your site. By increasing your site's visibility on major Search Engines, your traffic is bound to grow over time.

4. Report newsworthy news in a timely fashion to TV, newspapers, radio and so on for these mediums to carry it.

As a final point, repeat these online revenue streams as long as profitable.