Ideas to grow your online business

Nearly all businesses have an inherent desire to grow their online business, and are keen to look at ways to achieve that growth. But sadly, many businesses are doing little to achieve their growth in a systematic fashion, and are instead dabbling with various initiatives that have a fairly unpredictable chance of actually achieving growth.

Instead of investing in new features that don’t give you a decent return on investment, it is far better to copy what successful companies do, and adopt clear and proven strategies that are more likely to achieve growth systematically.

Here are some ideas that can help you to bolster online growth:

1. Define some key performance indicators (KPI’s) for your site and set some specific goals (e.g. ‘grow online sales 100% by mid 2008’). Plan detailed actions and projects to achieve these goals, and secure an adequate budget to follow them through. Then assign responsibilities and obtain regular progress reports.

2. Use analytics software to continuously monitor how well you’re doing, and how people are using your website. Use this information in a smart way to drive action. Don’t be bamboozled with reams of data; what really matters is how well the site is driving business and your profitability. For example, is all of your Adword spending really converting to new customers?

3. Get smart with your organic and paid search campaigns to attract more genuine prospects. Use ‘long tail’ key phrases and ‘message-matched’ landing pages to drive more ‘pre-qualified’ traffic to your site to increase chances of conversion. Too often money is spent on internet advertising that fails to drive real prospects and therefore pulls down conversion rates. Get this properly managed by people who will be accountable for the level of business (not traffic) that they get to your site.

4. Be realistic and make sure you know who your online customers really are. So many companies we talk to think they know but are, in many cases, quite wrong. This is often due to the mistaken assumption that their online customer is the same as their offline customer. Just like the offline world, knowing your customer and understanding their needs and behaviours is crucial. Once you have a clear picture of this, you need to re-work your website content and features so that they address what these people really need.

5. Test your website with real prospects so you can see where it is failing to satisfy. Doing this with work colleagues, family, or friends is a total waste of time, as these people are not your customers: they are too close to give honest and objective feedback. Identify short term priorities (low-hanging fruit) and get them fixed. Test and optimise your site regularly to continuously increase your site’s effectiveness over time.

By adopting some or all of these ideas, you’ll have a more solid and systematic basis for growing your online business.

More tips next time.