You must have Googled “how to grow your business online” and found me in the mix. Well you are in luck! My skills got me to the top of Google and I'm on a mission to help small businesses learn the best tactics to grow.
Just a heads up though: this is an overview. I can point you in the right direction, but it is up to you to take the initiative. Let's get into the 5 ways to grow your business online now.
How to Grow Your Business Online.
At its core, figuring out how to grow your business online seems simple. You either improve your offer, drive more traffic, or close more sales.
In reality, it’s not that easy.
To understand how to grow your business online quickly you will need to use the actionable tips below. Those same tips led to my first $10k month in course sales after making just a few improvements.
Read to the end as the sales tips are game-changing.
1. Create a Competitive Analysis.
The quickest way to get new ideas on how to grow your business online is to do a little bit of sleuthing online.
Find your competitors, determine what they are doing well, and replicate the pieces that you think will work for your business.
The biggest hurdle on how to grow your online business fast is understanding what marketing channels your competitors are promoting. If you have a digital marketing background, you might be able to eyeball what methods your competitors are using.
But for the rest of us that can't, use a tool like SpyFu or SEMRush to figure to see what is really driving the traffic. These tools will spit out reports that are easy to understand.
Every company will be different. Their way is not the only way. In fact, you will likely want to go in a different direction than your competitors to focus your budget on things they are not trying yet. Here is a great competitive analysis template you can use.
2. Improve your offer.
Most businesses are perceived as a commodity. Grow your business with website optimizations and an offer that cannot be refused.
It’s easy to compare email scraping tools and decide on which one offers you the most value. A tool that’s one of a kind, like Loom, doesn’t have a frame of reference. It makes it infinitely easier to focus on benefits rather than price when selling the product.
What does that mean for your business online?
You will want to create a category of one so that you don’t compete with other businesses that have learned secrets to how to grow your business online.
This could mean a few things:
- Narrow your niche. Selling weight loss programs is much different from helping men aged 50+ lose 20 lbs in 6 weeks.
- Offer bundles. Instead of selling a massage, you can sell a wellness weekend that includes a massage and aromatherapy.
- Re-frame your offer. You can shift from selling affiliate marketing consulting to offering a service that gets your affiliate program launch in 30 days with only 30 minutes a day of your time.
At the end of the day, you need an offer that is too good to say no.
Take the example of Alex Hormozi. When he was building out his gym business he would offer a guarantee that was almost too good to be true.
Lose 20 lbs within 6 weeks and get a full refund for your $500 sign up fee. His gym would still make money selling supplements and other services while clients felt like they got the best deal.
Alex has turned this into a $100,000,000 business and teaches others how to improve their offers on his Youtube channel. If you are looking for ways to improve your digital sales, try Alex Kru Marketing.
3. Drive more traffic.
As your conversion rate increases, you will want to drive more traffic to your offer.
Two ways you can do this include:
- Build your backlink profile.
- Improve your blogging and SEO.
You might be wondering “what are backlinks?” Brian from backlinko explains it wonderfully.
“Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.”
When Google is ranking search results they typically ranks websites with a better backlink profile first. Why? Backlinks are difficult to obtain and when provided by experts in your field (or relevant fields) they represent a vote of confidence for your website.
For example, this blog post is focused on the keyword how to grow your business. After this post goes live, I will be guest posting all over the internet, backlinking to this post with the term ” how to grow your business” hyperlinked to this page. This has incredible value to help my site and blog post rank higher on Google.
To grow the backlinks you can:
- Find relevant content with lots of links, make something better, then ask those linking to the original to link to your content instead.
- Find unlinked mentions of your brand, then ask the author to make the mention clickable.
- Reach out to others in the field (or in similar disciplines) to do short guest blog posts.
To grow your blog and improve your SEO you can:
- Include links to your other blog posts on your own. This helps create more backlinks and can help people find your other articles easier.
- Periodically refresh old content every 12-18 months as older articles fall in Google rankings over time.
- Optimize blog posts for topics that have low competition and med-high traffic. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz can help with this research.
Together, this optimization will increase your traffic and get more people to see what you offer.
Also, don't sleep on social media. It can be time-consuming to learn how to grow my online business on Instagram and other platforms, but it is a great and free platform to gain expoure on.
4. Close more sales.
Finally! You’re excited about your amazing offer and increased traffic. What’s the next step to how to grow your business online?
It’s time to start closing more sales and to start making more money.
There are a couple of ways to go about this. Let’s walk through an example with my own affiliate management course.
1. Create Urgency
“Start making more money with your affiliate program. If you sign-up today you can join the next cohort that starts Monday.”
We are not always logical and like to wait until the last minute to get things done. By introducing urgency to join now with the risk of missing out people are much more likely to sign-up.
2. Introduce scarcity.
With a cohort based course there is a limited number of spots as we work closely with the students enrolled to improve their affiliate program.
This actually helps create demand as spots sell out quickly and the anticipation builds. People want what they can’t have or what is difficult to obtain.
3. Add bonuses.
You don’t want to devalue your core offer by discounting it. Instead, try offering bonuses. What does this mean?
“If you are one of the next 5 people to sign up for the course you will receive a complimentary consultation call worth $149. Spots are limited! Sign-up before full.”
4. Include testimonials.
The biggest risk with buying a service is that it will not accomplish what you want it to do. To decrease this perceived risk you need to include testimonials from your successful clients.
In turn, this reduces the perceived risk for potential customers.
5. Offer guarantees.
Finally, you can choose to offer a guarantee to make the sale a no-brainer.
This can take the form of a conditional guarantee. Ex. If your client completes all of the steps outlined in your course and they don’t land their first client in 60 days you can refund the cost of the course.
A great way to fulfill that guarantee is to have outstanding customer support. If you are looking to create this type of experience, but don't have the employees to do it, check out Gorgias for an amazing solution to this problem that many online businesses face.
5. Open an affiliate channel.
A good affiliate channel can create 20% additional sales for your company within 12 months. A bad one will do nothing though.
The first question you need to ask: Is affiliate marketing worth it? Read through this guide and decide if it is the right time to create an affiliate program.
Do not create an affiliate program without a plan and a budget. Affiliates will not magically join your program
If you need help launching your affiliate program, I know a guy.
FAQ
How do you attract customers online?
To attract customers online you will need to grow your website traffic. To grow your traffic you will need backlinks from other websites and improve your site ranking on Google.
What is the fastest way to grow a business?
The fastest way to how to grow your business online for free is to go viral. But there is never an easy button to push to make that happen.
The second fastest (and most sustainable) way is to grow your online traffic through backlinks and social media.
Get in touch with current and past customers, ask them for testimonials, and use to help you get more sales.
How to grow your business online in three easy steps?
3 simple steps can help you grow your online business:
- Improve your offer. Make it too good to say no and people will feel silly turning you down.
- Drive more traffic to your website. Increase your backlinks from other websites and improve your SEO.
- Close more sales. Introduce urgency, scarcity, and bonuses as tools to help you grow your sales and succeed.
Wrap it up, Dustin.
Now that you know how to improve your offers, grow your traffic, and make more sales… it's time to take action!
We would love to hear more about your results. Let us know in the comments below how this article helped you.
