5 Tips to Rapidly Grow Your Small Business Online

Every small business owner wants his business to grow. How to stimulate this growth remains a very challenging enterprise for many. Experienced small business owners say there is no generally accepted formula for stimulating small business growth. This is the reason most are in favor of a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional approach. However, there are a few things you can do well enough to give your small business the best chance for growth. These 5 tips if properly used can be helpful.

 
1. Pay Attention to Digital Marketing

The first challenge a small businesses owner faces is how to get his business in front of potential customers and customers. No business grows without people becoming aware of its existence. What is the best and cost-effective method to promote this awareness? It is certainly digital marketing. Digital marketing is one of the best ways for a small business to promote itself. That makes it hugely important and imperative to develop a digital marketing strategy for your small business right from the outset of your marketing activities. This strategy must take into account many factors to ensure its effectiveness. These factors include the type and form your marketing activities will take inclusive of the marketing channels. You can thus consider marketing through Emails, paid ads, social media platforms, search engine optimization (SEO) and suchlike proven digital marketing techniques.

2. Understand Your Customer Base

Every business is all about serving customers/clients. If you cannot serve customers well, your business can never grow. Understanding your customers is the first step to serving them well. For this reason, you must always factor in their needs/wants when you’re developing products/services for the market. How do you know if you are serving your customers well? It is through honest feedback from them. Honest feedback is one of the best ways to build a better understanding of your customers. By taking into account all issues raised by customers in their reviews as well as conducting surveys, you can build a great relationship with your customers. You can in addition better understand the current market demands and market stimuli. These can help you to improve on the areas where your business might be lacking and to grow the business.

3. Prioritize Good Customer Service

According to the popular marketing cliché, the customer is king. You are in business to serve him. No matter the scale/size of your business, you cannot afford to ignore your customers. You must pay keen attention to your customer wants/needs at all times. Always explore any and every way to serve your customers better. That now brings into sharp focus, the issue of customer service. To get the best from your customers, you must engage better with them. Be sure to have a social media presence where you promote more engagement with your customer base. You can in addition have a great opportunity to listen to their concerns and ideas. These are great ways to improve your customer service. If you can as much as make quality customer service a key feature of your business strategy, it is sufficient to stand you out from your competitors. That means a lot for the growth and profitability of your business.

4. Network Widely

In any business, a great network is business strength. As a small business owner, never miss the opportunity to network widely. Many of such opportunities can be found in seminars conventions, sales promos, social media, product launches, talk shows, new tech intros or any such public events where you may get to meet many other persons in your business industry. Even if the people you meet at these events may not necessarily be working in the same business niche as yours, they can more often than not become very valuable contacts for your business at some other time. Some of these people may become your business partners, investors, suppliers, creditors, vendors, customers and even employees.

5. Make Employee Training Essential

When your employees are growing in knowledge and service, your business grows in tandem. For this reason, the growth of your business doesn’t depend only on your drive or your products, your employees are a crucial factor too. Therefore, if you deliberately create a well-trained, motivated and effective marketing team, your business benefits immensely. If you remunerate your staff well and offer them excellent opportunities to advance their careers in your business outfit, you can always get the best out of them.

Conclusion

Running a small business no doubt presents huge challenges. The prospect of growing your small business might seem daunting, but with the foregoing tips, good results can be obtained. The real marketing advantage of small businesses is that they can deliberately offer personalized and attentive experience to customers more easily than bigger outfits. Even if their ads budgets can’t match competitors, deft investment in digital marketing is one great way they can get noticed. That ultimately helps them to boost traffic, leads, customers, sales and revenues.

Why Everyone Needs a Business Coach

In any human venture requiring growth and development, everyone needs a coach. In business, investing in a business coach automatically means investing in yourself and your business. A business coach is a pillar of support and mentorship for everyone even if you are just struggling to get the business off the ground or you already have some considerable experience in growing the business. Coaches mostly play the role of objective third parties and even business partners who can help speed up your business process by routinely identifying areas the business needs improvement and offering guidance in areas where the business is weak. It may require some expense to get a good business coach but many professionals who hire coaches like to testify that doing so is an extremely worthwhile investment. So, no matter what business you are in, are you considering hiring a business coach or you already have one? Professionally, a Business Coach:

Helps to Confront and Address Your Shortcomings:

Your business may be yours to do what you like with but only a business coach has the gumption and the authority to tell you hey man, doing it this way can give you better results. Your team members and colleagues may not always feel comfortable doing so for obvious reasons. A good coach won't just tell you what you want to hear. He tells you boldly what is good for you and your business not what is sweet in your ears. He considers it his duty to actively push you to question yourself and confront your shortcomings in a positive manner.



Helps you to Learn from an Unbiased and Experienced Viewpoint:

No matter what business you are in, you’ll always need a third party opinion for an unbiased overview of your performance. That’s where the business coach comes in. No matter how successful you believe you are in your business, there's always room for improvement. The exact reason you will always need an objective and authoritative source of feedback which a good coach provides.

Helps You to Have New Networking Opportunities:

Most business coaches in line with their professional duties are always very experienced and well-connected persons. Thus, they are always able to help people they are coaching to expand their professional networks, which is very valuable for business. Of course, every business person knows the enormous value of a network which a coach easily makes available as an integral part of the coaching package.

Helps to Align your Business and Personal Goals:

The first major challenge of a good business coach is to intimately understand you and your business. That done, it becomes fairly easy for him to provide you a true outside perspective to help you align your business objectives with your personal ones to avoid conflicts. When your business goals conflict with your personal goals, it is difficult if not impossible to make meaningful progress therefrom. That is where Coaches help you to pull the brakes where needed and to stay hyper-focused in the real areas of need.

Helps you to be Accountable for facing your Fears:

Every good business Coach always likes to hold the person he is coaching accountable. That is why they always challenge their clients to step out of their comfort zone and to take the requisite risks in their business. That is what gets the needed results as needed.

Helps You to Find Clarity:

Any good business coach always helps his clients to find clarity, to break through business barriers and to generally change for the better. Most business experts do recommend that anytime you hit a rut in your business, and it becomes difficult for you to know where to turn or what to do next, just talk to a coach. Hitting a rut in your business is at times more common than what many business owners like to admit. The coach helps to get clarity at such points.

Helps You to Gain a Break in your Routine:

Good business coaches always help their clients not to get stuck in the rut. They are available to help find new and practical ways to continue to grow a business. Granted that procedures and routines are quite important for business consistency, experience has shown that after a while, most businesses run the risk of becoming stagnant. A stagnant business by all definitions means a business that is not making progress by its inability to grow. That is undesirable and most good coaches know this and they do help to find a way to engender growth.

Helps You to Hear Constructive Criticism:

It is the business of a coach not just to sing the praises of his client but to criticize and correct as needed. Employees and associates may be uncomfortable to criticize openly but a good coach can do so and be tolerated more if it is in the overall interest of the business. Most business coaches habitually make it their business to provide constructive criticism on the areas of any business they feel needs some improvement. That is what gets the results the business owner really needs.

How to Use the WAVE 3 X-Cards in SFI

WAVE 3 X-Cards are awesome SFI business promoting tools. They are cute, trendy and very easy to use. You can hand them out easily or give them as gifts to friends and relatives as well as rewards to some of your affiliates. For best results, it is good to hand them out physically to people you know or are acquainted with. You can routinely hand them out:

1. To strangers in public transportation, pubs, gyms and social events.
2. To family members at home.
3. To friends and acquaintances in their homes or offices.
4. To your neighbors in their homes.
5. To teachers and other workers in your children’s schools.
6. To co-workers in your office.
7. To professional care givers like Doctors and Lawyers in their offices.
8. In restaurants to fellow diners.
9. To your employees if you are a business owner.
10. To members of your social club, sports club or religious organization. 

 

 

How Being an SFI Affiliate can Change Your Life

This is a very interesting topic because being an affiliate in SFI changes many people’s lives in many and varied ways. If what you mean is changing your life for the better, the following readily come to mind. When you become an SFI affiliate, your life changes for good!

1. You become a business owner.
2. You become your own boss.
3. You get the real satisfaction of working for yourself.
4. You follow a simple work schedule designed only for your own convenience.
5. You become highly sociable with fellow affiliates through a2a and the forums.
6. You become a fun-loving person by participating at the Trivia Games.
7. You become a knowledgeable person from SFI’s trainings.
8. You become a good reader/learner.
9. You become a good marketer/salesperson.
10. You become a good Business Manager.
11. You become a good Team Leader.
12. You become a good entrepreneur.
13. You become a major contributor to the e-commerce activities of your country.
14. You become a very valuable world citizen/business player earning a legitimate living.
15. You change from being poor to a middle level income earner or even a rich one.
16. You become a good business negotiator.
17. You become a good co-operative manager/member.
18. You become a generally happy and satisfied person. 

From the foregoing and more, you can see why your being an SFI affiliate can always change your life for the better.

 

How to Market Yourself Well as a Business Owner?

“Everybody lives by selling something.” --- Robert Louis Stevenson

Just listen to this! The first thing a Salesperson markets is themselves. They must be able to market themselves effectively before they can succeed in marketing any product or service. If you can’t sell yourself, you may not be able to sell any other thing. The reason is simple. Nobody knows you as you know yourself. According to Robert Louis Stevenson, “Everybody lives by selling something.” Every hour of the day, buying and selling is going on. At every stage in your life, if you are not buying something, you are selling something. This is what keeps humans busy and humanity gainfully engaged. It is all a buyers and sellers world.

Manufacturers sell goods which Customers purchase.

Footballers sell skills which Club-owners buy.

Teachers sell knowledge which their Students buy.

Hoteliers sell rooms which their Lodgers buy.

Landlords sell shelter which their Tenants buy.

Filling stations sell petrol which Motorists buy.

Musicians sell music which their Fans buy.

Entertainers sell fun which their Fans buy.

Doctors sell their skills which their Patients buy.

Restaurants sell food and drinks which their Customers buy.

The list is endless. Everyone is either buying or selling. In such a business that involves everybody, succeeding despite all the odds requires some skills. This is why sellers must first be able to sell themselves to buyers before they can succeed in selling any other thing. Remember, whatever you can accomplish in life has a direct bearing on who you are. You must therefore be extremely skillful at selling yourself to others. This requirement covers all fields of human endeavor.