With numerous industries struggling from the economic shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic and global inflation, creating new revenue streams has become an even more important recovery, continuity, and diversification strategy.
Creating new revenue streams is, however, difficult for most small and medium digital businesses.
Aside from the difficulty of ascertaining what products or services will best generate new income in your market, the cost of setting up, scaling, and selling the new business model could be hard for most, especially when trying to juggle this new project with the business’s primary offering.
Thus, businesses should take a structured approach when launching additional products and services, which requires doing thorough operational and market research. That way, they can seamlessly integrate new offers without shrinking profit margins on existing products and services.
Before we get into our 9 ideas for creating new revenue streams, let’s first take a look at why your business should even begin to think about spreading out above and beyond your main business model.
Diversification Strategy: The Importance of Finding New Revenue Streams
As with most business decisions, creating a new revenue stream must be approached strategically to be profitable.
Diversification not only helps organizations to absorb unforeseen market shocks; it also accelerates growth by maximizing a company’s resources and by extending a customer’s lifetime value (LTV).
To succeed, however, businesses must think and plan ahead to mitigate the risks of diversification.
The following steps can help businesses determine how exactly to go about launching additional revenue streams.
- Evaluate your current assets and funnels: An in-depth assessment of your current assets and business funnels will help you identify profit leaks that need to be plugged in. Such profit leaks could be unexplored channels, such as digital service or product deliveries, or customers dropping out of the sales funnel when they can be upsold or reengaged.
- Explore trends: New wealth can be found in trends that create emerging market gaps, and businesses should look out for new demands and movements that fit into their mission and model. During the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses that delivered services online were generally more profitable than those that only offered physical services.
- Meet the needs of your clients: Listening to your clients unravels new ways you can serve your target audience better. By directly asking customers questions and monitoring their voices via social media, brands can discover new products to offer
- Expand product and service offers: Businesses can evaluate potential auxiliary products and services that they can stack onto their primary offers.
Subsequent to determining your current business assets and market demands, you should select a product or service you can sell with minimal marginal costs.
These nine ideas could be ideal.
How to Find New Revenue Options: 9 Rapid Yet Profitable Products and Services Digital Businesses Can Sell
Thanks to emerging technology, digital businesses – whether in B2B or B2C industries – can easily offer profitable products and services at scale to generate more income.
Some of the ideas they can explore include:
- Selling airtime
- Reselling gift cards
- Bill payment services
- Creating rewards/incentives programs
- Offering crypto exchange and reward services
- Selling informational products
- Entering business collaborations
- Consulting services
- Selling physical or virtual assets
Read on to see why these are great alternative revenue options for digital businesses.
Sell airtime and data bundles
An airtime or data bundle transfer service – whether made for domestic or international recipients – can create a profitable stream of income for digital businesses.
Airtime transfers is a service that can be offered in seconds by simply integrating an airtime API on your existing websites or application, allowing your business to provide a product that has growing demand across the world, especially in emerging markets.
As mobile phone coverage increases across the globe, so does the demand for prepaid phones that are reliant on airtime and data bundle purchases. Additionally, airtime is money, and often used for remittance and rewards in many countries.
Many companies have already found quick success in adding airtime services to their business model.
Cinet, a Cote d’Ivoire online payments company, sold over $15,000 in airtime monthly after launching its airtime service.
[Want to build an airtime top-up service to create a new revenue stream? Contact our support team and learn how to integrate airtime services on your website, app or social media channel.]
Resell gift cards
Businesses can start selling digital gift cards online instantly.
Gift cards are powerful marketing incentives used to stimulate engagement, drive awareness and build communities.
In addition, individuals are increasingly purchasing gift cards for themselves and as gift items for others. All year-round, the demand for gift cards is sustained, and it becomes atop the wishlist during holidays.
By simply integrating a gift card API, businesses can help individuals and other brands purchase gift cards and generate revenue while doing so.
[You can start selling digital gift cards instantly. Learn how a gift card reseller API works here, or get the help you need by contacting Reloadly’s support team.]
Offer convenient bill payment services
Making payments for utilities and other common service providers can be a herculean task in many parts of the world.
Businesses that help consumers make mobile payments for cable TV subscriptions, internet bundles, electricity and water bills are serving a large but underserved market.
By offering flexible and convenient bill payment methods, businesses can make life easier for users and drive revenue from it.
[With Reloadly’s bill and utility payment API, you can easily integrate with top service providers to allow your customers to seamlessly pay common bills.]
Create reward/incentives programs
Rewards and incentives create massive returns on marketing investments.
Non-profit organizations, researchers, and analysts also use incentives to encourage participation in surveys and other programs.
Moreover, businesses can increase engagement and sales with rewards and incentives.
Looking ahead, rewards programs will potentially be one of the most effective metaverse marketing strategies in the new digital universe.
Businesses seeking to create a new revenue stream can offer gift cards and airtime rewards as incentives through points and loyalty programs.
Offer crypto exchange and reward services
Cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly accepted globally by individuals, and national governments are creating regulatory frameworks, with El-Salvador now famously enacting Bitcoin as legal tender.
With rising interest in cryptocurrencies, more people are interested in acquiring and transacting with cryptocurrencies, thus creating a revenue stream for businesses – the exchange of cryptocurrencies for fiat, airtime, and the use of cryptocurrencies as incentives.
In 2020, Crypto2Mobile.com, a platform enabling users to access the global mobile top-up market with cryptocurrency, was launched with help from the Reloadly API.
Sell informational products
Businesses can create and sell ebooks, courses, and coaching programs in their domain of expertise.
The demand for informational products remains high, and businesses can package their expertise into high-value courses, webinars and other info products.
Enter into business collaborations
Business collaborations can create new income streams in a variety of ways.
These partnerships could help enter new markets, raise money as an affiliate, or sell website space to advertise another business.
Indeed, there are many ways collaborating with other businesses can create new revenue streams.
For instance, businesses could offer to resell another company’s products – either a physical product, a service, or software. Affiliate marketing, dropshipping, and the use of other brands’ products via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are also collaborative approaches to revenue diversification.
Companies can start by looking at businesses in their own network or supply chain for potential partnerships. If you already work with a company in some form, funding will also be easier to acquire.
Consulting services
Team members can aggregate their expert skill sets to offer consulting services to other businesses.
However, first they need to determine what they can offer, identify their target audience and offer project-based or retainer services to them.
Sell physical or virtual assets
Digital businesses can sell digital assets. Asides from cryptocurrencies, NFTs and virtual wearables are assets that businesses can launch to create profitable revenue streams.
Digital businesses can also benefit from offering physical products. Ebooks, for instance, can be printed for sale, just as branded items too.
Final thoughts
Diversifying your business revenue stream increases profitability, but it also requires creating an additional offer that is easy to manage, fits your value proposition, and is in demand by a hungry market.
With Reloadly, you can diversify your income streams through any of our easy-to-integrate, no-contract APIs that open your company up to booming but underserved markets.
Talk with our customer support team today to see how you can seamlessly stack your revenue streams with new offers.
