Double Your Website’s Revenue in 30 Minutes

I know that sounds like some get-rich-quick scheme, but hear me out.  I promise you that the vast majority of sites that I have ever worked with were able to double their revenue with 30 minutes of work (or less).  Here’s how.

In most cases, our efforts to increase revenue center on increasing traffic.  In many cases, in fact, that’s the only method we’re using to increase revenue.  We get so close to our sites that we develop tunnel vision.  Everything is in place, and we think if we can just keep generating enough content, and growing our readership, and if we can just find some higher paying advertisers, surely, somewhere down the road, our sites will be really successful.  We can see the progress, slowly, day by day, so we know we’ll get there eventually.

Quite likely, though, we’re so close that we can’t see the forest for the trees.   Let’s take a big step back for a minute.

On average, what percentage of your visitors performs a revenue-generating action?  1%?  Half a percent?  For the sake of our discussion, let’s suppose that it’s 1%.  That’s probably a pretty fair guess.

Now, how easy would it be to raise that 1% to 2%?  That’s not a very big jump by any means.  Quite likely, you could jump to 2% or even 3% by doing nothing more than tweaking your AdSense colors, ad size and/or placement.  Little tweaks.  Nothing major at all.

Let’s say you make a few tweaks and get to 2%.  What just happened to your revenue?  Well, if you go from 1% to 2%, you’ve doubled your revenue — just that easy.  Twice the revenue from the same amount of traffic in maybe 30 minutes’ worth of work.

Not bad, huh?   In less time than it takes you to go grab some lunch, you’re suddenly generating twice as much revenue every day.

Here are two quick-hit areas to look at.

Advertising

Is your advertising working as well as it could?  Could those ads look less like ads and thus get more of your visitors looking at them?  Are you choosing ads that appeal to your users?  Have you tried different placement?  Different presentation?  Different ad networks?

Are you running advertising at all?  If not, that’s easily the fastest way to boost your revenue.  Sign up for an AdSense account and get some AdSense ads running ASAP.  Then go back and learn more about advertising by reading the articles here and the resources they link to to learn how to tweak your advertising for better performance.

Conversion Rates

What keeps visitors to your site from generating revenue?  Where do they stop short?  Take a good look at your site, and you can probably make some good guesses about where they might get hung up.  If you’re unsure, ask a few friends what they think.

Then once you’ve identified some problem areas, figure out what needs to be done to fix them.  For instance, you may have a form that’s way too long.  How about splitting it into two steps?  Making the first step significantly shorter will lead to more people starting the process, then once they hit the second step, it’s not so much trouble to finish it out.

Fix a few of those problem areas, and you could see a significant jump in your conversion rates.

Conclusion

Does this work?  Absolutely.  In fact, I’ve personally seen it work on countless sites over the past few years, and it was never more than just a few minutes’ work.  And the best part is that I didn’t trade anything to get it.   The users who clicked away were evidently going to leave anyway, because click rates on the rest of the elements of the sites stayed consistent.  So, by giving them some options for leaving the site, I actually got paid when they left, rather than just losing them for nothing.

So spend a few minutes today taking a fresh look at your site.  You’ll be very glad you did.