You went into business to make money, but are there any opportunities for extra money you may be losing out on?

Sometimes it’s hard to objectively look at your business since you’re so entrenched. Unfortunately, we business owners can only see what’s right in front of us. A good analogy to compare is that we look from inside a bottle (choose your bottle of choice!) while others look at our business from the outside of the bottle, they are the only ones who can accurately read the label!

When I started my business way back when in 2013, I had no clue what I was doing and had no guidance to help me along. I struggled for years and made tons of mistakes until I started investing in myself and my business. The best investment I made for my business was hiring a business coach to help me with aspects of business I had never encountered before which allowed me to grow so my side hustle could eventually turn into my full-time business.

One word to the wise though, not all business coaches are worth their weight in gold.

Good business coaches are able to look at a company objectively, ask pertinent questions, and guide you 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.

I know you’re probably thinking “Business coaches are expensive. There’s no way I can afford one when I’m just starting out.”

You’re right. In most cases, business coaching is expensive and hard to justify when starting out. That’s why I wanted to make business coaching more accessible to nurses just starting out in business and developed Nurse Pivoter Academy to help those who may not be able to afford a 5K package right out the gate. Check out Nurse Pivoter Academy if you’re interested in starting, growing, and scaling an online business.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the most common ways businesses lose out on extra money! With everything going on in the world right now (ongoing pandemic, inflation, etc) it’s super important you hang on to as much money as you can as a business owner.

The one thing I tell all business owners I work with is that you should work on building income streams into your business that will bring in extra money passively. I love passive income. Passive income can save you when you have shipping delays or defects in the products that you previously ordered. If all hell breaks loose and something goes wrong with your active products and services, you’ll have something to fall back on when times get hard. 

The passive income stream from my books saved me when I got furloughed from my NP job a few months earlier than I had intended to quit to focus on my business full-time.

In the long run, passive income is good and will help your bottom line while you actively market your business. You’ve invested time and money into your business; why not make it work harder for you?

Here are 3 ways to generate more passive income in your business:

1. Affiliate Marketing is a simple way to make passive income by recommending products or services to your existing audience. This process is similar to telling your friend or neighbor about the great Mexican restaurant you just had lunch at. Simply sign up for the product’s affiliate program and place a unique link where you list all the business tools you recommend (here’s my resource page so you can take a look). Every time someone clicks on your link, they are taken 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 from Amazon. 
2. Creating upsells in your sales funnel 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 on the backend? 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 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 in determining passive income streams in your business, consider joining Nurse Pivoter Academy for coaching, courses, and community. If you need more help and want personalized private coaching, book a time on my calendar for a 1-hour coaching session.