4 Tips for Making Your Website Profitable

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

Building a website up almost feels like you’re sprinting up a hill. The effort to reach the top results in the details along the way flying past as a virtual blur. With website ownership, at some stage, it’s worth pausing to catch your breath and look at what you’ve created. Then it’s time to optimize it for greater profitability.

Here are 4 tips for making your website either turn a profit in the first place or to increase existing profits.

1. Understand How Online Businesses Are Valued

Many online site owners love creating the site and building it out, but they don’t necessarily have an eye to a digital exit. They’re so intent on what they’re currently doing that a valuation model is beyond them right now.

Only later do they begin to think about determining the value of an online business and how that relates to what they’ve been building out.

There are many different valuation models for online businesses:

Ones that aren’t profitable, for instance, still have value for their traffic level, existing content, social media followers, and if they can be modified to develop revenue streams in the future. For sites that already deliver revenue and profits, there’s always more to be done.

Some sites are valued based on a multiple of their profits for the trailing year. Others may include inventory if selling physical goods online. It’s necessary to see how your site fits into different valuation models to determine what it’s worth.

Use this new knowledge to fuel your enthusiasm to find more profits in your existing site.

2. Optimize the Marketing Approach

Look at how the site has been marketed to date. Whether that’s through content marketing, video marketing, advertising, or strong word of mouth alone.

Assess the customer acquisition cost of each marketing approach. Isolate the ones that have been the most affordable and are likely to continue to be effective into the future. Fund the marketing strategies with the best ROI and reduce or eliminate ones that have proven unprofitable or not worth the time and resources.

Doing so can reduce marketing expenses to increase site profits every year.

3. Reduce Other Business Expenses

Site owners are bombarded with offers from companies wanting to sell them a new subscription. While some of these are for useful services or a SaaS or two, others can be sidestepped because they either overlap what’s already being used or will be wasteful.

Go through all the existing subscriptions and other business expenses to prune back what’s no longer necessary. If you’ve been going hell-for-leather in a high growth phase, then you’ll probably have many expenses that are no longer required.

Trimming business expenses and then keeping a tighter rein on them will boost profitability and maintain it in the future too.

4. Improve Site Speed & Usability

Site loading times have become a critical factor in the success of a site. Now that many people choose to visit websites on their smartphone rather than a PC, sluggish sites either grow slower or lose visitors.

The usability of the site is also important. This includes how complicated it appears, whether the navigation is simple to use, and if the content or service is presented well.

By attending to site speed and usability issues, visitors stay longer. When they do, there is either a higher chance that they’ll buy something or for sites that generate significant ad revenues as a publisher, ad revenue increases. Also, a higher time-on-site is a metric that Google pays attention to.

While increasing traffic and going in for flashy promotions can certainly boost site visitors and potentially profitability too, taking a beat to make other improvements is also effective. Results from the latter are far more under your control and can increase profitability and the site’s valuation.

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