How to Expand Your Online Business
You’ve built your business. You’ve scaled it and grown it to an engaged audience. And you’ve even monetized it well and realized it has real potential. The next step: how to expand your online business.
Expanding is a crucial step towards growing your customer base, increasing revenue, and achieving long-term success.
Whether you’re running an e-commerce store, a blog, or a service-based business, there are so many ways to expand your online business – some much easier than you’d think.
Let’s dive in and explore essential strategies for expanding your online business!
1. Expand Your Product or Service Offerings
Okay – let’s do this. How to expand your online business step one: offer new products or services.
Once you have an engaged audience and are earning revenue, it’s time to think about ways to diversify your income streams (more on that in step #2).
This could include creating new products, expanding your existing product lines, or offering additional services to your clients. Expanding your offerings allows you to both attract new customers and increase revenue from existing customers.
Win-win.
2. Diversify Your Revenue Streams
As I hinted in step #1, another way to expand your online business is to diversify your revenue streams.
This could come from adding new income streams, like affiliate marketing, sponsored content, or digital products (like eBooks or online courses).
For more of this and inspiration of what kind of revenue streams you can create, check out the post around 7 ways to your online website.
By diversifying your revenue streams, you can increase your income and reduce your dependence on a single source of revenue – solid advice for any online business owner.
3. Expand Your Marketing Efforts
Now that you’ve diversified both your product offering and revenue streams, next up expanding upon your marketing efforts.
I know it can be intimidating to ramp up marketing spend.
But if you’ve started generating revenue, reinvesting some of that revenue back into your business can be a powerful growth tactic.
Think about ramping up your advertising budget, implementing new marketing strategies, or targeting new customer demographics. By expanding your marketing efforts, you can reach a wider audience, increase brand awareness, and ultimately, revenue.
4. Optimize Your Website for Conversions
Optimizing your website for conversions is critical to marketing growth and expanding upon your online business.
Yes, you might have some traffic coming in and people converting to leads, contacts, and sales. But I can almost guarantee you that you could be converting better.
There are entire courses built around Conversion Rate Optimizations, books published on the topic.
You can always be improving your website’s user experience, adding social proof, optimizing your product descriptions, or simplifying checkout process, etc. The key here is two part:
- Researching what works
- Following best practices
- Experimenting and validating
Always be testing. Always, always, always be testing.
Test different headlines, different font colours, different images and placements, copywriting, size, calls to action, buttons, spacing, direction – everything.
By researching, following best practices, and A/B testing, you can be ahead of the curve and ensuring you squeeze everything out of your website that you can.
5. Expand Your Distribution Channels
Expanding your distribution channels could include selling on additional marketplaces, partnering with other businesses, or even opening a physical store or popup market.
In any case, it’s about finding more ways to get your brand and your product out in front of new eyeballs.
One strategy here I like and is often easiest to implement is to find affiliate partners. Affiliate marketing is essentially finding additional people to recommend/refer your product or service, for a percentage of the sale (just like a retailer would).
By expanding your distribution channels, you can reach new customers AND increase your revenue.
6. Expand Your Team
Finally, expanding your team is another way to expand your online business.
Yes I know – this is another one that costs you hard-earned money.
But at a certain point, you’ll only be able to get so far as a one person show.
Be sure to think outside the box of what works for you. You don’t need to hire a 9-5 person. In fact, it’s usually not the best thing for your business. Consider:
- Bringing on new part-time employees
- Working with a virtual assistant
- Outsourcing tasks to freelancers
- Trying an agency
- Partnering with other businesses
By getting extra hands, you can free up your time and focus on where it needs to be: growing your business.
Growing Your Business
Expanding your online business requires careful planning, hard work, and a willingness to try new things. It’s not for the faint of heart.
But by expanding your product or service offerings, diversifying your revenue streams, expanding your marketing efforts, optimizing your website for conversions, expanding your distribution channels, and expanding your team, you can grow your online business and achieve long-term success.
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