Once you have achieved your target of a stable online income stream, you may be inclined towards upscaling your online business. There are many ways of improving your revenue and growing your business but in this post, I am discussing the first few steps you can take in the right direction.
1. Customer Loyalty Programs
Before you go for upscaling, it is critical that you do not lose any of your customers when your focus has shifted to certain new things. The best way to achieve this is to initiate a customer loyalty program. It has been proved very effective. What this program does the best is that it holds your current customers by giving them few incentives and keeping them engaged with your products and services. Customer engagement is the biggest dream of all online business entrepreneurs and the easiest way to achieve this is by setting up an email autoresponder and a customer loyalty program. We are not discussing the list-building in this post but for customer loyalty program, you can do the following:
- Start a discount program by giving your clients a card with 5% discount initiative. Your customers will come
- Start a token-based referral program. If someone sends you a customer, give them gift vouchers etc. Here you are not just holding your customers but getting new customers.
- Exclusive Offers. If you get something special to offer, keep it for your loyal customers.
- Clearance offers. Use your list to sale the items you want to get cash for. The prices should however be significantly lower and throw away type. It is straightforward to compare prices now a day and you can get the advantage of it while getting some valuable cash for the items you failed to sell otherwise.
2. Invest in SEO and SEM
These are the investments you would never regret. However, these will cost you some of your hard-earned money. Therefore, few important considerations are listed below:
- Before handing over these jobs to any marketing company, you should understand the basics of SEO/SEM strategies. If you are not familiar with the tricks of the trade, chances are anybody can rip you off with a bit of technical jargon. If you stick to our website or any similar internet site, you can learn alt within a short span of time.
- Google and Facebook are the two biggest players in SEM game. You should understand the basic difference between Google AdWords and Facebook advertising. LinkedIn and Twitter are also starting up their marketing wings but still very new.
- Understanding of Keywords is critical for Google AdWords while the knowledge of targeting is essential for Facebook Ads.
- In the beginning, you should always focus your content strategy on informational long-tail keywords which start from some question, such as how, what, why etc. Once you can rank for few of these, you can include some head (single word) or body (two-words) keywords. Also, when biding, chose your keywords with care because you can quickly lose much money without results.
3. Outsource Shipping
If you want to focus on growing your business, you should try to outsource few things and shipping is one of them if you have an online store. Only one piece of advice for this is that select someone who has an extreme attention to details. Shipping mistake could be quite expensive as well.
4. Go Public and Make Contacts
This is one of the things people care the least. If you look around on about pages of various websites, you may notice that not many website owners tell about themselves. In this age of social media, people want to know about you, who you are, where are you located and many more things. So do not hesitate to be open and upfront. Nobody is perfect, just explain what you have to offer and you will always find someone willing to get your services. Believe me there is a demand for every skill you could imagine. You just have to outreach and find it for your set of skills.
5. Diversify with relevance
This is a thing which is one of the most common advice you might get online. However, in my opinion, diversification can backfire you if you try something too far from your set of expertise. So, if you think, diversification is the only option left for you, then do not move too far. Stay in an area close to your current business. It would almost always be better to stick to your business and grow it.
No comments:
Post a Comment