Scaling your business so you can work less
Now that you have your business up and running, you may be wondering how you can scale your business so you can work less, because we all hope that one day our business will be self-sufficient, thriving, and generating more than enough money to live comfortably. Luckily, you can scale your business without having to take on additional hours of work.
However, you always want to make sure your idea is a winner before you get too invested in the company. Validating your business idea is the most critical step that you can take. Unless you take the time to test the market for your ideas, you won’t have a stable and long lasting business.
The biggest argument for idea validations is to help you avoid wasting your money on an idea that won’t be profitable. If you want your business to make money, then you have to make sure that there is a market for what you are selling. When you take the time to research your idea, you can avoid making costly mistakes.
1. increase your prices
The simplest, most passive way that you can scale your business is by charging more for your product or service. This helps you earn more per sale, without having to devote any more time to marketing. While you may worry that raising prices will cause your sales to decrease, it has been shown that while you may lose a few sales, you’re still making more income from the higher prices.
2. create a sales funnel
An effective sales funnel will allow you to get the people at the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel in a passive way. Building a funnel and making sales a passive activity will not only save you time, but it will effectively increase sales. Here is a basic formula for creating an effective sales funnel:
- Create a lead magnet
- Promote it on your website, using SEO optimization to help it rank
- Promote it on evergreen sites, like Quora so that it can be found months down the road
- Set up an automated email sequence that goes out to people who sign up for your lead magnet promoting your product or services
3. Create an affiliate program
Set up an affiliate program that pays people a commission for promoting your business. While the idea of giving affiliates a commission might give you pause, the majority of the sales that you make because of the affiliates, you probably wouldn’t have made otherwise
4. Create Free or Paid Downloads Based on Blog Posts You’ve Created
If you create a lot of long-form content, you can repurpose those blog posts into downloadable eBooks, and guides. The process is simple, all you need to do is take your text and images and put them into a design program like InDesign and offer it as a freebie on your site to help you build your email list. Or you can sell it to them for cheap.
While it might not seem like it would be worth the time or effort to sell a product for $10 or under, there is a psychological trigger that gets tipped when someone buys from you. Once they’ve bought just once, they are more likely to purchase from you in the future because you’ve already established trust.
