Whether you are working online or offline, selling products or providing a service, are a one-man band or have business premises brimming with staff, there are four basic ways to grow a business.
In no particular order, these are:
1. Get more customers
Most people online probably think this means getting more people to your offer and assume it involves becoming better at driving traffic. However you don’t have to be the one driving traffic. If you can offer a good commission and recruit affiliates you can leave it to them to drive the traffic. In this case your job is to find the right affiliates. This is important because you need customers of the right type. Ones who will be interested in what you offer and remain interested enough to become loyal customers.
If you intend to increase traffic using a paid for method you should also consider the cost of acquiring these new customers. For example if you spend $300 on ads to attract new customers and gain ten new customers as a result, the cost of acquisition for each one is $30. Now hopefully these new customers will spend more than $30 with you, but if they do not you will have lost money.
However getting more customers does not have to mean getting more traffic to your site. If you can improve your conversion rate of prospects to customers you can increase your number of customers with the same flow of traffic. This usually means split testing your optin and sales pages. This can take time but is well worth it, especially if you are paying for traffic to reach your site.
2. Increase your customers average spend
This can mean increasing prices, having more products to sell or services to offer, and/or diversifying what you provide.
The easiest and quickest of these is to increase prices. However this can also lose you some customers and make acquiring new ones harder. If your products and services are good quality most customers will be willing to pay extra as long as they see value. If you are going to increase your prices it will be necessary to carefully track your income and react to any fall in revenue.
Diversifying and increasing your product or service range takes longer to set up. If you can keep your offers relevant to the wants and needs of your customers you can have a series of upsells, downsells and cross-sells that you can progressively present to your list.
If you can maintain the relevance and quality of your offers it’s often the case that you will not be able to exceed your customer’s demand. They will always be hungry for the next product or service you offer.
3. Increase the frequency of sales
Some product creators are reluctant to continually put offers to their list. They are afraid that they will be seen as being too salesy or pushy.
Some markets will be so thirsty for products that they will not mind being presented with a new offer every couple of days. Other markets will respond best to a more relaxed approach with fewer offers.
Again the solution is to test and track. You could look at how often your competitors push for a sale and use that as a starting point.
4. Increase your efficiency
The above methods focus on getting more money into your business. This approach looks at ways to reduce your expenditure.
Efficiency often means finding ways to get tasks done in less time. This could mean better ways of completing tasks, automation or even outsourcing.
However this approach also needs careful monitoring. You don’t want to be doing things quicker if it reduces the quality of your work. Cutting costs and corners too much can lose you customers and have a negative impact on your reputation.
So, four ways to increase your income. You can address them all at once or work out which is easiest to implement while giving the best return for your efforts and concentrate on that one first.