As a business strategist, a frequent issue I come across and work through with my clients is a lack of sales. Obviously, making sales and generating income for your business is a crucial element to keeping your business going but many people find it difficult to begin making sales and then getting those sales numbers to increase. For me, I follow two very simple strategies for making and growing my sales numbers and I want to share those with you today to give you an understanding of how sales work and how you can get your income growing!
Strategy #1: Promote more to your current following or list
The first strategy I use to help me earn and grow sales for my business is to promote to my existing following. When you get started with running a business, list building and growing a following is a critical step to ensure you begin to earn a steady stream of income, but some business owners don’t realize that it’s not enough to mention your business every once in a while or leave a link to your online shop in your social media profiles. You need to actively promote your products and services to your existing audience in order to make and grow sales. A common issue I see when it comes to actively promoting online is that some businesses believe that they have too small a following to begin promoting, but as soon as you begin to get followers you need to start promoting regularly. I personally follow the 80/20 rule when it comes to promoting my business, which means that 80% of the content I produce is informational and value added for my audience and then 20% can be purely promotional. So how often you will need to promote your products or services will depend on how much content you are already (or plan to) create. One thing to keep in mind that can sometimes be confusing for new business owners, is that although it’s good practice to begin promoting immediately, you can really only expect about a 3% conversion rate for how many sales to followers you can expect online. So, if you have 100 followers on your list and you promote to them, you can reasonably expect 3 sales. If you get more than 3, you are doing very well with your promotion and content, and if you get less than 3, perhaps check your content to ensure you are following the 80/20 rule and make sure your promotions are clear for your audience.
Strategy #2: Take steps to grow your following or list
The second strategy I use to help me grow sales for my business is to take steps to actively grow my following. Like I mentioned earlier, list building is an important part of business and if you aren’t currently receiving enough sales for your business, the only way to help that number grow is to take action to get your following to grow. Remember that 3% rule for the ratio of followers to sales? If you have a sales goal for your business, you need to reverse engineer how many followers you would need in order to hit your projected or desired income. Now, once you have that you’re done the easy part! The hard part of all this is to take the steps necessary to increase your following by attracting more eyes to your platforms online and/or to your email list. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is through original content. Developing content for your social platforms and producing content on a regular basis that is designed to attract your ideal customers is the way I grew my following from 0-100,000+ on social media and my blog from 0-1.5 Million annual page views! Because of this, my business earns a regular full time income for me at a conversation rate of 10%+ as opposed to the global average of roughly 3%! If this seems impressive, that is all a result of the great business planning principles and processes I use and rely on everyday!
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I hope these strategies give you some better insight into how you can grow sales for your online business. I’d love to hear in the comments below about any struggles or specific sales related questions you have so I can help address those for you either one-to-one or in a future blog post, so please make sure to share.
xoxo,
