Diversify With Multiple Revenue Streams

Have you ever experienced a time when you were getting poor sales through your website and didn’t have any other form of income?

I have.

I started to panic and make irrational decisions like chucking out considerable discounts to encourage sales (which is always a bad idea!).

Or, we’d launch so many new products to excite people that we couldn’t keep up with the stock demands.

I’m sure some of you will know exactly what I mean and have gone through this yourself.

I knew we had to diversify and have more than 1 revenue stream to help balance the bad days and capitalise on the good ones.

So that’s what I did; I slowly introduced more revenue streams to help spread the load. Now, when one of our revenue streams has a bad day, or week, at least we know we have revenue coming in from other places to balance things out.

It’s been such a stress buster, but remember that you have to be very disciplined when setting these up. You have to ensure you’re not creating more work than it’s worth, and anything you set up needs to fold into what you currently do to make it all work seamlessly.

What do I mean by this?

For example, we at Cosy Aromas launched Craft HQ a couple of years ago, a fragrance oil supply business. A different company with a diverse customer base. But, from an internal point of view, our production team could quickly fill the bottles, and we use the same dispatch processes to send out the Cosy Aromas and the Craft HQ orders.

So, from an internal point of view, it all looks like the same company as it’s fully integrated.

This is key when introducing multiple revenue streams; you need to ensure you can use your existing systems and processes to operate them all efficiently.

Examples of multiple revenue streams

I’ve already touched on this, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to diversify your offering and create multiple ways of earning money through your business.

It really doesn’t have to be as extensive as setting up another brand as I have. Here are some examples of other revenue streams you can introduce into your business:

• Introduce a subscription box.
• Get wholesale customers.
• Get sales reps to sell your products to their friends.
• Sell on Etsy, eBay, Amazon and other platforms.
• Launch your own website if you don’t have one already.
• Launch internationally.
• Contact garden centres and other stores and ask to have a pop-up shop.
• Have a stand at local fairs and festivals.
• Launch a new brand focused on a different demographic.

Each of these are things which, when set up correctly, can be relatively easy to manage. But, each can produce their own income, which helps balance out your overall business.

Managing multiple revenue streams

If you want to launch multiple selling platforms online, such as your website, eBay, Etsy and Amazon. Then I recommend using a tool such as Linnworks or Veeqo (there are many others). These tools allow you to pull orders from all of the sales channels into 1 place. You can manage listings and stock from this 1 platform too.

This makes listing and selling on multiple platforms simple and helps you save time going into each platform to list products and print orders.

We use a system called Shipstation which pulls all orders into 1 location. We don’t sell on third-party selling channels like eBay, so we don’t need the listing and stock management functions.

I speak a lot about building wholesale customers; it’s reasonably easy but requires time and dedication. So, to help, you could hire commission-based sales reps who work in various territories across the UK and will sell your products in stores on your behalf. You can find these people easily on Linkedin.

Final thoughts

Setting up multiple revenue streams is not a quick task, and you need to plan them out and ensure everything is integrated to run efficiently; otherwise, it’ll be too much work for you to manage.

But believe me when I tell you that this helps to reduce stress levels in difficult times; it really does.

If you need help exploring these, please let me know, and I’ll happily offer support where I can.

Hit reply and let me know if you have multiple revenue streams and how they work for you.

As always, I’d love it if you would subscribe to my YouTube channel, as we’re trying to launch helpful videos as often as possible.