7 ways to create consistent income in your business (without launching a membership)

You can make offers to your audience without putting them off and the people who unsubscribe or unfollow because you sold to them, we're never going to buy from you in the first place.

 

7 ways to create consistent income in your business without launching a membership.

 

Now there's a bit of a buzz in the online world. If you want to call it that where people think that if they want to create recurring income, consistent income in their business, it's going to be retainer clients or some kind of membership or some kind of ongoing group program, whether that's a mastermind or something like that.

While those are all really great ways to create that recurring income and create that consistency, there are still other ways that you can do this in your business if the membership model is not for you.

The membership model is very demanding. Let's put it that way. I've had a membership in the past and it was really hard to constantly keep on top of the amount of content and the amount of community to manage all of that. I didn't have a team back then and it would probably be easier with a team now.

But there were other reasons why I chose to close that membership down and it was mainly because the content I was teaching was better suited to an online course than it was to a membership.

This blog will help you how to create that consistent income in your business without launching a membership.

 

Build your email list and make offers to them regularly

Now we might be building that email list and forgetting to email them, or maybe we're building that email list, but we are only emailing them our free content and we are too afraid to sell to them because they might unsubscribe.

I understand, I've been there. It's taken me a lot to work through that to learn to be okay with selling to them and learning to not be afraid of people unsubscribing when I try and sell to them but I still deliver loads of value and I've learned that if somebody unsubscribes because I sent them one email that's giving them offer if they unsubscribed because of that, they were never going to buy from me in the first place.

The year is going to look like finding that balance where you are still delivering value to your list but you're still making offers to them often enough that they know how to work with you. They are taking that next step to work with you and it's creating that consistent income.

Now, I just want to clarify when I say making offers to your list, that doesn't mean that it has to be a launch. It doesn't mean that it has to be a discount, a limited-time promotion, anything like that. It can be a new product. It can be a new service. It can be a service that you're offering for a limited time only.

 

Start including offers in your lead magnet

Nurture sequences and consistently drive traffic to those lead magnets. Now, if that sounded like Greek to you, I will explain. So a lead magnet is a free piece of content that somebody is getting in exchange for giving you their email address.

Probably something like a free ebook, free mini-course, free training, and a nurture sequence is the series of emails that they receive after they've given you that email address in return for that free piece of content.

Now, what we want to be doing in those email sequences after they've given you that free piece of content is we want to share a few things that they need to know but we also want to make some offers. We want to tell them, Hey, you know, you might be the right kind of person because you've downloaded this free piece of content. You might be the right kind of person for this service. If you want to keep working with me, this is how you can do it.

And then we want to constantly try and drive traffic to that lead magnet. Promote it on your podcast, on your blog, wherever you are showing up online, on social media, and on Facebook ads.

If you're a guest on somebody's podcast, give that as your call to action. Hey, if you want to learn more from me, I have a free ebook on X, Y, and Z pop over here to download it, rather than giving somebody a call to action straight to your services page, because they might jump on there and be like, oh yeah, I'll sign up in a month time and then they've forgotten about it.

Whereas if they are on your email list, you have that regular touch point with them. So these are all lead magnets. So people are coming onto my email list and then when somebody signs up, they get on my email list and those emails drive them to the podcast, to the Launch Magic wait list, etcetera.

 

Offering payment plans for your digital products

If you have a course or group program, adding a payment plan can make them more accessible. The downside is of course that it does delay your cash flow. So you know where you might get somebody paying upfront a thousand dollars in a month.

Now, there's the time value of money, which is a concept I'm not going to go into. It's like finance one-on-one but basically, it's a theory that money that you have in your pocket right now is worth more than the money you will get in the future and that's it.

So that is one of the reasons why we charge premiums for payment plans. There is another reason why we do it and that is because we are not a bank and we don't have a way of determining your credit risk or your likelihood of defaulting on the payment plan.

But if you asked somebody who prefers to have that consistent income coming in, adding a payment plan or giving people extended payment plan options can help as well as making it more accessible to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it.

 

By becoming an affiliate for someone else's product

For example, I am an affiliate for Kajabi because I think it's a great platform for course creators to host their courses. I use it in my own business and I refer other people to it. Each time somebody signs up, I get a percentage commission as well as a percentage of their lifetime revenue. So I think I get about 30%.

And that's just a little nice recurring monthly passive income that I get into my bank account each month without really having to do much for it. I've also been an affiliate for several friends' course launches and when somebody buys on a payment plan through me, I get a commission.

 

Put your clients on a retainer or on longer contracts

Rather than just offering one-off projects or one-on-one one-off consults, if you can try and offer your clients the opportunity to work with you over a longer period, it means that they will typically get better results. I know it personally and obviously, this will vary based on your business.

Now, what you might find is that if you are doing a six-month program or six-month package where somebody is meeting with you every week or every two weeks on zoom and then you might decide that you can charge more for their access to you in between those sessions. So they've got unlimited email access or unlimited messaging access or Voxer access to ask you questions in between those sessions so that you're giving them ongoing support. You're giving them more support.

You're setting them up to get those better results because you don't then have to work with as many clients. You're not spending as much time trying to constantly rustle up new clients. You can give your existing clients more of your energy and help them get those better results. It's a much more stable way of running a business. That might be a way to set up that consistent income

 

Make sure that you have lots of different ways for someone to work with you

Just because some people like coaching doesn't mean everyone wants that ongoing coaching. So creating different ways, VIP days,  one-off consult. I know, I just said don't do but maybe that is what somebody does need to work with you as a one-off consult.

I've had plenty of one-off consults in the past that have led to people signing up for my courses and have led to them signing up for longer-term services, which I no longer offer but have a different range of offerings even if it's essentially the same service but just in different containers. So having those different offerings can help more people since not everyone wants to work with you in the same way.

 

Sell more often

The seventh and final way to create consistent income in your business is to sell more often.

Admittedly, I'm not great at this. It's taken a lot for me to become comfortable with selling, but the biggest mindset shift that I've had around selling is that selling isn't sleazy if you do it right.

You can make offers to your audience without putting them off and the people who unsubscribe or unfollow because you sold to them, we're never going to buy from you in the first place.

I recently surveyed my audience. I do this a couple of times a year where I survey and, you know, find out what kind of content I can create for you and I also, for the first time ever, I included a question that asked which of my offers are you aware of? And it was multi-choice.

And less than one-third of my audience had heard of my course boost your brand superfans. Because I keep forgetting to promote it. I keep forgetting to talk about it, I keep getting to sell it and I thought I had talked about it quite a lot.

So a lot of the time, we're just not actually talking about our offers enough and we need to sell more. We might think our audience is sick of it, but they probably haven't even heard it.

 

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