Money Levers: The Levers You Can Pull To Generate More Revenue As Needed

Every business owner desires to increase revenue.

Perhaps it is just part of the continual push to increase your stats… or perhaps it is a short-term need (or want) to bring in a cash influx for some kind of expense coming up. Or to recoup some cash after a big outlay.

For instance, one of these…

I just recently bought that – and I paid cash for it. Plus, as any RV owner will tell you, there’s also the usual punch list of things to fix after you buy one and it isn’t always cheap. Tires alone for this thing will run about $3K. Sure, I have the money. But, I keep a certain financial plan in effect and, to keep that budget in alignment revenue needs to be generated.

We’ve all been there.

But, what do you do? How can you bring in additional revenue more or less “on cue”? What tricks can you pull out of your hat?

And is your business set up in such a way to give you some “money levers” you can use?

Money Levers And Being In The Driver Seat Of Your Own Business

I remember doing some business brainstorming a few years back about increasing the stats in my business. Managing by the numbers, as any manager would. And of course the only good statistic is the one which is increasing.

But, I remember sitting there and feeling like I had a shortage of what I called “money levers”.

A money lever is something you can do to drive revenue and sales. It is a direct cause-effect relationship. Similar to driving a car. If you want to increase speed or change direction, you know exactly what your controls are. You know that turning the wheel or hitting the gas will have a known, predictable effect. In business, those controls are what I call “money levers”. Its my own personal vocabulary. 🙂

At the time, my business was dependent exclusively on organic, free traffic. My website was getting a nice stream of traffic every day, but it seemed as if any desire I had to increase revenue was limited by that resource of traffic. I couldn’t just reach out and drive traffic into what I wanted on cue – at least I didn’t think so at the time.

I had the email list, of course. But, I wasn’t segmenting the list very well at the time. Which means any promotion I sent out would just be sent to everybody. And you can only run so many promotions before your list just grows tired of it.

Between relying on organic traffic and having a monolithic email list, my business was growth limited because I didn’t have enough money levers. It felt as if whatever happened…. happened. And aside from the occasional promo to the list, I was limited in my ability to grow the stats or generate a cash influx on cue.

The Flaw Was…

I had built an online business which, by most people’s standards, was doing well. But, it wasn’t adjusting with the times and it was up against a ceiling.

The standard formula for a blog-based business was:

1. Write a lot of blog posts.
2. Get people onto the email list.
3. Give subscribers value, then occasionally make an offer.

And hey, it worked. But, it had constraints inherent in the system (and I like to look at things like a system and find the constraints, as I talk about in my Academy course called The Finisher’s Formula).

Those constraints were:

1. It relied exclusively on organic traffic, which is inherently uncontrollable.
2. It relied too much on new content, which led to a lot of pressure to make more to rise above the noise.
3. It had inherent limits on how much I could “push” the email list. We all know that you can’t be overly salesy on your email list otherwise people will unsubscribe. And I wouldn’t blame them.

The only money lever I really had here was to publish more content with offers embedded into it… or to run a promo to the list. And that was something I could only do so often.

A Design Flaw That Most Bloggers Start With

If this design flaw placed an apparent limit on my ability to grow an existing business, imagine what it would do to an online business still trying to get off the ground?

Most blog owners are still trying to build their businesses on the flawed model. And it isn’t as if it can’t work (it clearly does in some cases). It is just that it is much harder to grow than it would otherwise be.

Being able to generate that revenue is, first, dependent on having something to offer. That’s a solvable problem. But, how do you verify the demand for a product before making it? And how would you sell it without a large email list?

Which leads most back to step #1 of the standard formula: Write a lot of blog posts.

And so that’s what most bloggers do. And it’ll either lead to dependable revenue or it won’t.

What Did I Change To Be More In Control?

How did I build more money levers in my own business?

How did I change things around so that I had more control over the direction of my stats and not feel as if I was relying on Google?

What did I do in order to not depend on special promotions to drive revenue (even though I still run them sometimes)?

I’m going to talk about all of this in this series here on the Academy blog I’m simply calling Money Levers. The series will consist of several blog posts… and I’ll be talking about certain business design fundamentals for your business. All of it going right to the heart of giving you a sense of control over your own growth and your own results online.

Because growing your business is a lot easier if you know where the controls are and know how to use them.

Sound like something of value?

Cool. See you in part 2…

– David