How to grow your small business FAST: 5 things you need to start doing TODAY!
How to grow your small business FAST? This is a topic we all mompreneurs always look around for. The video above covers 5 main points as described below to grow your small business. You can either read through the script below or click for the video and listen to these 5 things you need to start doing TODAY to grow your small business!
Start building an email list
Most small business owners these days have their online presence mainly on Instagram and Facebook. I have seen very fewer business owners actually have a website these days. While I was in college, the first social media that I got introduced to was Orkut, then later on facebook. Now in the last two years, Instagram became the most wanted thing. Do you remember there was Snapchat too in between and Instagram stories totally took it over?
So as a business owner, do you have a backup plan? We do not own any of these spaces. What would you do all of a sudden Instagram disappeared? You had built all your client base there. Right? So this is where the email subscription list plays an important role. You own your email list. Nobody takes it away from you.
You can start with a free service like Mail chimp to get your email subscription service.
There are different ways to collect email ids. I will be doing a detailed tutorial on these soon. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so you know when my next videos go live.
Claim your listing on Google, if you are a physical business
Oh my god! This is my favorite one which I learned a few days ago. This tip is for those business owners who have got a physical shop. Like a boutique, cafe, beauty parlor or something. Claim your business listing on Google. Whenever I move to a new apartment, a new area, I always search for “Beauty parlors near me”, of while outside “cafe near me”. Things like that. So a lot of nearby cafes show up on google and if you have claimed your listing, your customers also have the option to leave you reviews. Based on the reviews, your shop is more likely to show up in such searches.
And how do you get good reviews on Google? If you offer bad service, customers are very quick to leave a Google review. But getting a good positive review is not always easy. So here is a little strategy you can follow. Every month, pick 5 of your best customers and email them and ask them if they could take a few mins to leave a google review.
Points to take care:
Don’t ask for a positive review. That always turns down people. Ask them for an honest review and when you ask your best customers, you are likely to get a good review.
Don’t ask them for a review while they are in the shop. I said to send them an email because google is very intelligent. It detects the location from where the review was posted and when they see, it was done from the same location, they might just remove that review.
Revaluate your prices
It’s really time that we need to reevaluate your prices. This is especially difficult for those of you who are on the creative side of the business, like artists or if you if you’re doing crochet products and all these things, it’s difficult. How do you price it? You cannot price a product just based on the raw materials you use. plus a markup you add. That’s not enough actually. So how much time are you spending in creating that product?
If you’re spending like more than one or two days and you’re selling the product for just 50 dirhams or something. In that case, I would say it’s not really a business, it’s just a hobby only. So you’ll have to make sure that you reevaluate your products. Maybe you’re able to do a Bow in two hours’ time now, but maybe, in the beginning, you were taking two days for that. So now because you have become an expert, you’re able to do it in two hours’ time. So you need to put in your expertise also while you do the pricing of the product. So now you’ll ask me, so who’s going to buy it? If I make it a very expensive product that is also a concern. So when it’s a creative product, you will need to, uh, you need to aim your market. That or you need to aim the clients to be those who actually admire that creativity, those who know what the worth of the handmade products.
So you need to streamline your clients in such a way that it should be aimed at those of you who actually look at the value of the handmade product. And, uh, actually a few days ago I was discussing with one of the creative business owners. So she was telling me it’s not really beneficial. Her business is going, it’s not going to a profitable side because of the same reason because she’s not getting a lot of customers that are just a few customers. So how do you do so in such situations you should also start creating some evergreen products. When I say evergreen products, uh, it’s like printables. Uh, if you’re a crochet maker, then you can have the patterns which you can sell online. So once you create it, then you can keep reselling the same stuff. For that. You can actually just charge smaller prices like $1 or something, $2 $3 per printable depending on the value of that printable.
So you know, once you create, then you can keep on selling it forever. You might need a website or like a Shopify site for that, but once you create it, it has become an evergreen product for you. So keep creating such evergreen products also in parallel. And another thing is you should always have a business plan, like a, uh, especially in UAE we need to take a license for. So when you take licenses initially it’s a big expense for all of us. So you, but you should not see it. Like, you know, Oh my God, I’m spending seven thousand eight thousand dirhams in the first month distribute it throughout the year divided by 12. So it comes to like five hundred six hundred dirhams per month. So then you need to see what are the other expenses in maintaining your business so that you can actually see and do you have to put the target for each month?
Yes, this is the amount that I need to reach to make it a business, to convert my hobby to a business. Start really thinking like a business owner and once you start spending on your business, then you will actually start treating it like a business because you have already spent the money. So it’s not like if I have time today, I’ll make not like that. I know we are moms, we have less time, but once it’s a business, you have to start spending one hour or two hours. Whatever it is in your schedule Make sure to spend it every day. Be very consistent with it
Stop worrying about your social media numbers
If you have a hundred genuine followers who are likely to buy your products. That’s more than enough. Imagine a hundred orders!!
And if you are there on Instagram for the purpose of developing your business, you really don’t have to worry about your numbers, but you have to worry about your clients. I mean out of the number of people who are following you, how many of them are likely to buy from you? How many of them are likely to spend their money on you, on your service or products? So only give importance to that. We can grow, we can all grow slowly, but target habit, targeted growth, don’t simply get so many people to follow you. Then it actually reduces your engagement rate also on Instagram. So make sure you’re, you’re very targeted in your followers. Also, when you’ll do the Instagram marketing or Instagram growth plans, whatever strategies do you have?
DIY vs Outsourcing
Are you a person like me who likes to do everything yourself? I am like that. You know, I have spent like I think three, four weeks in the last month developing my website and it’s still not perfect. But the thing is that you know, there’s a lot of information available online. So, anybody who wants to do something themselves, they can research and do it themselves. But if you are really a business owner, it’s a mistake that I was doing actually because I could have used that, uh, that one month time what I spend on doing my website and research and to creating my products. So its the same case with all. You have to always weigh between time vs money. If I had outsourced it, if I had hired a freelance web developer, he would have done it in one or two days’ time. I might have had to pay him, but I have all the rest of the time that I spend on doing the website for creating my product. It’s the same as the case with all of you. So always weigh the benefits of doing it yourself versus outsourcing time vs money.
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