This post originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com - #Growing Your Business
Consistency is more reliable than inspiration.
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The lack of consistent income is one of the hardest parts of adjusting to entrepreneurship. When you work a nine-to-five, you’re getting a reliable paycheck every week or bi-monthly. You know roughly what that check will be and can plan accordingly. You don’t get that as an entrepreneur.
When you work for yourself, you get paid when you generate revenue. Successful entrepreneurs have cracked the formula for creating consistency in generating that revenue. This isn’t a mystery. In a business, you get out of it what you put into it. So, if you ready to work and grow your business, here are three simple ways to create consistent income online.
Related: 21 Ways to Market Your Business Online
1. Create a recurring revenue program.
One of the beautiful parts of an online business is being able to create digital information products and courses. You can take your knowledge and experience around a topic and put it into a monthly membership program. Through software such as ClickFunnels (and others), you can drip that content over a period of time.
These programs could be thirty minutes to one-hour videos. They could be written content or they could be audio based. You create a program that you break down into pieces and drip those pieces out over a month. You then charge a monthly fee for customers to get access. You can open and close the cart to buy access to the program at the end of each month.
With a recurring revenue program, you know how much money will hit your payment processor on the first of every month. The stats have shown that most people forget about recurring payments when they sign up. And, if you give out great content each month, members won’t cancel and will bring others to check out the sales page.
Related: 17 Passive Income Ideas for Increasing Your Cash Flow
2. Start each day with income-producing activities.
We tend to start our day based off of what we see when we grab our cellphones the first thing in the morning. We are reactive instead of being intentional. One way to create consistent income is by starting the business portion of your day by doing things that will lead to money.
This could be responding to leads that have expressed interest in what your business sells. It could be creating sales posts and messages. It could be sending out pitches. It could be up-selling clients that have already purchased from you. There are many ways to do this online. The point being, start the first portion of your day in an intentional way. Start with planting the seeds that lead to income.
Related: How Laura Roeder Built Her ‘Edgar’ App to $150,000 Monthly Revenue in 13 Months
3. Create a plan to promote your business.
Creating consistent income requires a plan. Success doesn’t happen by accident. In a promotion’s plan, you set specific periods on the calendar when you’ll promote what your business offers. You can use software or go simple and create this on a document.
Start with all the services and products your business offers online. Look at when it makes sense to promote each one during the year. Certain offerings do better based off of the time of year. Assign your products and services to a specific month. Then, the entire month before, your content should point towards what you have coming up the next month.
In this sort of system, you’re adding value to your audience for an entire month. You then come to the end of the month with a way for your potential customers to get more help or take the free content you gave them to the next level. You’re priming your audience which leads to more sales. You’re also creating consistent because you’re promoting each month and making money.
Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be a money roller coaster for you. You can create consistency and grow from there. The Internet and social media offer you the opportunity to add value and reach billions of people. You can build a successful business just through the Internet or use it to grow your offline business. You these strategies.
