Nothing lasts forever. Many of your current clients — and that recurring revenue — will likely be different in five years’ time – if you slack on building strong relationships with them. Simply maintaining the status quo could easily see you ending up with less clients on the books, and a rapidly dwindling income.
When you're looking to develop long-term relationships (and more importantly, reliable income), it pays to introduce multiple recurring revenue streams to keep business flowing. Diversifying your cash flow means you’ll have more ways to keep the money rolling in.
In this piece, we’ll look at three strategies that can help you diversify, including reseller hosting, as well as care and maintenance packages. However, before that, let’s take a look at why you might want to implement recurring revenue streams in the first place!
Why you should implement recurring revenue streams and look to diversify
Recurring revenue streams — essentially a parallel, secondary income source – can do much more than increase your bank balance. If those revenue streams are also diverse, they’ll help you promote yourself as a three-dimensional business with a variety of services.
For example, while you might offer web design as your primary service, providing search engine optimization (SEO) or graphic design skills, as well, can boost your reputation, offer access to a new client base, and ensure a more steady income.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other practical reasons to implement diverse and recurring revenue streams, namely:
- Your business won’t be reliant on one source of income.
- You can switch focus, depending on the success of a specific revenue stream.
While there are a number of clear reasons to diversify, it’s worth noting that the extra effort may cause some administrative hassle, and take you away from your core offerings if you’re not careful. To avoid these problems, it helps to focus on recurring revenue streams that are proven winners.
3 recurring revenue streams to bolster your income and help retain clients
While this list doesn’t encompass every recurring revenue stream available, these options are both potentially lucrative and simple to get into.
1. Comprehensive, ongoing web support packages
This first tactic is arguably a no-brainer. Simply offer existing clients the services you’ve already provided them, but on an ongoing basis. Since you’ve worked with these clients on their projects, you’ll have intimate knowledge of their needs and infrastructure. Offering this service at the project completion stage helps to prolong both the relationship and establish recurring revenue.
Implementing this strategy is simple in practice. Make sure you begin to explain the benefits to the client during the project, if possible, so you can slowly warm them up to the idea. You’ll likely want to offer a number of different scaled packages to encompass your clients’ ranges of needs and budgets. Finally, remember to clearly define the boundaries of your new service. After all, additional work completely off scope is going to quickly eat away at any monetary gains you make.
2. Care and maintenance packages
You could consider care and maintenance packages to be scaled-down versions of your primary service. While this is similar to the previous revenue stream on paper, it involves working more with general WordPress grunt work, such as updating plugins and monitoring security. As you can imagine, you’ll likely target your less tech-savvy clients with this offering, although time-restricted clients will also be good candidates.
Getting started with this revenue stream will once again mean you’ll need to sow the right seeds throughout the project (if you’re targeting an existing client). You may find that signups will increase if you make offers during a project rather than after the fact.
Either way, the success of this service is all about how well you sell it to the client.
So it’s a good ideas to keep it simple and “high-concept” on the surface, but stress its value to encourage clients to purchase it.
3. Reseller hosting
Reseller hosting takes some effort to implement correctly, but the rewards for your business can be substantial. This technique involves offering domains, hosting, and much more — from your own website — along with bespoke branding.
Clearly this isn’t going to be an impulse purchase for a lot of clients.
So your main business will be from those who need a comprehensive website package, and have the budget to match. It’s also going to warrant a fair amount of time on your end, so it shouldn’t be considered simply an easy way to get recurring revenue.
While there are plenty of ways to get started with this revenue stream, we’d recommend checking out GoDaddy’s reseller hosting program. Not only will you get the same quality you already expect from GoDaddy’s services, you’ll also be able to leverage their payment-processing options, harness the ability to upsell to your customers, and completely white-label your storefront.
Conclusion
Relying on just one source of income enables you to focus all your time and energy on success. However, syphoning off some of that focus to other recurring revenue streams means you have a fallback source of income — at worst — and a brand-new way to make money at best.
In this post, we’ve looked at how to diversify your revenue streams to help lessen the pressure on your primary business offering. Let’s quickly recap the three streams we’ve introduced:
- Comprehensive, ongoing web support packages
- Care and maintenance packages
- Reseller hosting
Now go forth and start growing your cashflow!
