More Profitable Home Businesses

Whether you consider yours a home based business or an internet business, the goal is profit, right? More profitable home businesses are what we all desire and strive for. What follows is a brief summary of some of the things that I've done recently to improve my own profitability. Chances are, you can do much the same.

In going over things during tax season and assessing my online businesses, two things jumped out at me. The first thing that 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 ongoing membership fees, even though I was no longer visiting the sites. Resigning from a few of those lopped a small, but still nice 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. The monthly increases in the commissions simply weren't enough to justify the ongoing cost, so 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 and/or just sputtering along, and aren't in the "six figures club", so that extra couple thousand means something. Profitable home businesses and internet businesses grow slowly for most of us, and require work and strategy. That's what my whole cost-cutting thing was about.

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 just a few 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, and in a couple of cases, I think they have actually gone up.

Then, 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 new source of revenue nearly equal to my expenses, I have effectively drastically reduced my advertising cost. 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, with no loss of sales.

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 my sales revenue from affiliate commissions on MLM leads, and that this was my biggest single source of revenue for last year.

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 new and existing doorway pages related to selling MLM leads.

While I haven't seen any increase in the results from the latter yet (it's only been a few weeks since I implemented the changes), I certainly hope to, especially after those new pages have been spidered and indexed by some of the search engines. My traffic logs indicate that the highly optimized pages on my sites seem to draw the most traffic.

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! Profitable home businesses are indeed possible! It just takes patience and a little strategy now and then.