9 Areas to Focus on When Scaling Your Online Business

Have you nailed your product or service offering, the one thing that you do exceptionally well?

Do you feel it’s time to scale your online business?

When you combine a great product or service and a solid foundation to build on, the sky’s the limit for your business growth.

If you aren’t sure that your business is in a good place, scaling will not be your next step.

It is always best to get your business model right and perfect your product or service before attempting any growth.

As your business grows, you have to prioritise your focus on working in your zone on genius and ON your business and work less IN the business.

Your business can’t flourish if you continue to keep wearing multiple hats and doing the role of the bookkeeper, website developer, assistant and CEO and more.

When considering scaling your businesses, there are 9 areas you could focus on:

Make sure it’s super easy for your customers to buy from you. Review your current sales process and experiment with eliminating steps and making changes that create a ridiculously easy path to purchase.

Track your numbers closely and be intimately aware of every conversion metric – What’s your cost per lead, and your cost per sale.

Get very specific – what does an email lead cost compared to a social media lead etc. You need to also know what your different landing pages are converting at and where your top-performing lead sources are.

Unfortunately, you are unlikely to find a winning combination that you can “set and forget”, so regular monitoring and optimizing are required.

Seek out media exposure to highlight your expertise. By the time you are scaling your business you will have likely established yourself as an expert in front of your audience, but to scale you’ll need to get more exposure and the media are your answer.

Investing in a PR consultant is the quickest option or find ways to engage directly with journalists and get that exposure yourself.

Maintain a consistent social media presence and broaden your reach across other platforms. When starting out, it is best to pick one platform and do it really well.

When scaling your business, there is an opportunity to broaden your reach and cross-promote across multiple platforms.

Keeping a consistent brand across different platforms will help people to not only find you but also recognise you as the expert you’ve positioned yourself to be.

Creating systems and processes for repeatable knowledge is crucial to scaling a service business because it keeps work moving through your pipeline quickly and allows anyone to be able to step in and follow the process.

Outsource or delegate as much as possible everything that you’re not a pro at or don’t need to be doing, like accounting, setting up meetings or running your social media accounts to name a few.

Turning your services into a product is a necessary step to scaling up. If you think about it, any service you offer is a product.

Your clients buy a result from you, whether you’re a business coach or a web developer. If you’re not sure which service to productise or even where to start, consider what your customers are repeatedly asking for.

If you have been in business for any length of time, then you’ve probably heard that 80 percent of your future profits will come from 20 percent of your current customers.

Therefore, customer retention is so important, and this principle is not a new one.

After all, it’s less expensive and it’s easier to sell to a current customer than it is to acquire a new one.

It’s exciting to sign up a new customer but if you want to scale, you should spend more time figuring out how to hang onto the customers you have.

It’s worth considering what you could provide to your customers that will set you apart and what one new way can you let your customers know they are important to you.

Set up email automation to nurture your potential customers and promote your services while you sleep.

Just like every other form of online marketing, email automation requires testing different copy and regular optimization, but once you’ve worked out the perfect formula, email automation creates a system that promotes, nurtures and converts sales 24/7, even while you sleep.

A way entrepreneurs can scale their online business for bigger profits is by creating a sales funnel that runs on autopilot. This is something I’ve successfully implemented in my other business and I’m starting to pull together the different pieces for my own coaching funnel too.

Here’s an example of an automated sales funnel you can use for selling a service. It’s based on what I have planned for my coaching business:

Drive traffic to an opt-in with Facebook ads or by promoting the opt-in in various FB communities.
People opt-in to receive a freebie and on the “Thank You” page you offer an upsell to a lower-priced passive income product.

Leads receive a series of emails encouraging them to watch a sales presentation, webinar or similar.

Leads watch the sales presentation, webinar or similar that you created and are encouraged to buy a product or book a consultation.

For those that don’t book straight away, they’ll receive another series of emails encouraging them to do so.

They either buy a product or book a call with you.

If they book a call with you, then you can sell to them depending on whether or not they are a good fit.
Other than the call itself, each part of this sales funnel is created ahead of time and runs on autopilot. All you have to do is drive traffic to get it started.

And, if you’ve done your marketing homework, then your emails and presentation will do their job in converting leads into customers.

The good news about scaling an online business is it doesn’t need to cost a lot of money.

Don’t get me wrong though, you’ll need to invest. The investment can be cost effective like on software and tools, which is cheaper than having to employ people (although that may also be required at some stage).

Plus, simply having a website isn’t enough today. Real scale and success require leveraging your business’s presence online.

When you combine a great product or service with some great internet marketing, almost any goal that you set is possible.

Own Your Goal!

p.s I’d love to hear your take on this topic. Are you ready to scale your business and which area will you focus on first?

If you know someone who will benefit from reading this, share this post now. It might be the spark they need to give their goal a real go.

THANKS FOR READING & SHARING!