Hidden Sources of Online Profit

In going over things during tax season and assessing my online businesses, two things jumped out at me. I thought maybe others would be interested, too. We all want to make more profit, don't we?

The first thing I noticed was that I had allowed my costs to go up higher than I would have liked. Is there a simpler way to increase profits than cutting costs? Not in my book, at least.

I set about trimming the fat. Right away, I found several programs to which I was still paying membership fees, even though I was no longer visiting the sites. Resigning from a few of those lopped a small, but still significant chunk off my monthly expense.

Then I really hit paydirt. I analyzed the income from a more expensive program, which also had a significant advertising cost, and decided it just wasn't paying, and the monthly increases in the commissions simply weren't enough to justify the cost. I resigned from that one, too.

The result? Nearly $3000 per year in expense reduction. This year, that will be an addition to my bottom line. Granted, it's not huge, but who couldn't use an extra two or three thousand a year? Most of us are struggling or just sputtering along, and aren't in the "six figures club", so that extra couple thousand means something.

Next, I focused on my Pay Per Click Advertising. I recently purchased two ebooks that have greatly helped me to fine-tune my PPC costs and revenue.

Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide to Google Adwords gave me some great insights and tips that I would never have figured out on my own. Implementing some of the strategies he recommends has cut my PPC ad cost by at least a third, maybe even in half. As best I can tell, my sales have nonetheless stayed about the same.

Google AdSense Secrets opened up a whole new world to me, and I began using AdSense on a number of my sites immediately. The results so far have been pleasantly surprising. The revenues I'm generating cover a significant percentage of my own PPC advertising cost.

Between reducing my PPC ad cost and finding a source of revenue nearly equal to my advertising cost, I have effectively drastically reduced my expense. This was one of my biggest expense categories last year, but this year my goal is to come as close as I can to having it be zero. Doing so will add several thousand more dollars to my bottom line.

Finally, I turned my attention to increasing the exposure for my most lucrative affiliate programs.

Going over my records indicated that I was getting a healthy chunk of revenue from affiliate commissions on MLM leads, and that this was my biggest single source of revenue for last year. I also noticed that I get quite a bit of income (and residual income, at that) from affiliate sales of web site hosting accounts.

I decided first to develop some additional doorway pages optimized for additional key words related to these affiliate programs. Then I went to the various traffic and start page exchanges that I use, and made sure I had several links going to all of the doorway pages related to promoting these programs.

The final step in my "spring cleaning" will be to see what I can do to improve the results from the affiliate programs that I promote with the least success. It may be that some of them are not worth promoting, while others simply need a few more doorway pages, or better fine-tuning of the existing sales and doorway pages to more accurately target my chosen key words and phrases for those products.

The moral of the story? A few hours work and some critical thinking allowed me to add several hundred dollars a month (more than that, actually) to my bottom line, simply by cutting the fat out of my expenses.

I suggest that you take a serious look at your own expenses. Good luck finding some "hidden sources of profit" in your business!

source: emarketting blog