Switch your focus and make some money

I've recently been offered the chance to buy a small business. It's a coffee shop / sandwich bar / free wi-fi place, and I met with the owners last week. The background to how this came about, and what I plan to do about it aren't relevant to this post, but if you're subscribed to my newsletter, I'll let you know all about it in the next one. You can join the community using the form to your right.

Image: Gregory Szarkiewicz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Of course, I wanted lots of information to enable me to make an informed decision, so we had a meeting for them to talk me through what the business is currently doing. Imagine this scenario, if you will:

"The business is doing really well - we get an average of 56 customers per day, and 4 or 5 pleasant comments in our guest book. We're focusing really hard on increasing those daily customers to 70, and we've embarked on a program designed to get more and more people to write in the guestbook."

What do you think? Is this a good business to buy?

We can't answer that can we? If the 56 customers per day all buy one cup of coffee and enjoy the free wi-fi for an hour, we're not even going to cover the rent. The pleasant comments are nice, but they don't bring in any business or revenue.

That was obviously not how the current owners answered me.

They told me how much they were taking each day, how much margin they were making on the food and the drink. They talked about areas they could increase both of those, and shared their thoughts on why some days the takings were higher and lower than others.

The focus was on the financial stuff.

In ten minutes they gave me a full financial rundown on the business, and proved they had a really good handle on how and why they make a decent profit every month.

And yet..ask the average blogger (and I'm talking about bloggers who are doing so to earn money) how the blog is doing, and you'll get an answer just like the one above. I have done it myself:

"Fantastic! Traffic is up to 1500 unique visits a day, viewing 8000 pages, and I'm getting more comments than ever."

So what?

And here we have the problem. We are focusing on the wrong metrics. Too much effort goes into generating more and more traffic and not enough into maximising the traffic we already have.

Go back to the coffee shop scenario. The owners could spend all their time on the streets with leaflets, bringing more and more customers in for their one coffee. But they don't. They invest their time in the shop, creating a great display of enticing treats, asking clients if they'd like another drink, or a pastry to go with the coffee.

But we bloggers often do the opposite. So much of our time, energy and effort goes into the great traffic race, that we're left with little for the things that really matter, that actually make us money. Not enough effort goes into:

• Creating really high quality products to sell - and that doesn't mean knocking out an E Book based on old posts
• Writing a carefully crafted series of autoresponders that gently market your products in the right way
• Producing professional sales pages that give solid features and benefits to readers - reasons they should buy
• Designing our blogs so that they direct people to the right places to learn about what we have to offer

And before you pipe up with "More traffic equals more potential sales." I agree, but only to a point. If you produce a crappy product, throw up a hopeless sales page and then don't help people to find it or give them solid reasons to buy it, then I don't care how much traffic you get to your site - you won't make a decent living from it.

It's time to change your mindset. It comes back to thinking like a business person, and business people measure what they are achieving in terms of income, and the bulk of their daily effort goes into increasing that income, by selling more of whatever they are selling.

Switch your focus.

How's your blog doing?

These might be interesting:

1/ Your blog as a shop

2/ Creating a Twitter landing page

3/ More time for blogging - two hour blogging sessions