Growing your online business isn’t easy. If you are a bootstrapped marketer or newbie affiliate, you need to control your costs until you start making money. However, cost-cutting can damage your online business growth over time. If you intend to grow your online business successfully, you need to implement effective growth solutions.
Here are 7 cost-effective ways to grow your online business, attract more customers or clients, and make more affiliate sales.
1. Focus on Your Customers’ Pain Points
Don’t use your email marketing to try and sell an affiliate offer or product or service to customers directly. Instead, the goal of these messages should be to pique the customer’s interest so that they will click through and view your offer.
Focus on building valuable solutions around solving the customer’s problems. You can use social listening and surveys to uncover their pain points. By doing it this way, you’ll create value products and services or choose the right affiliate offers that people want to buy and use.
2. Leverage Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is one of the best ways to get traffic to your affiliate links or website. It makes your existing customers share your content, which makes you seem more trust worthy to new customers.
Some ways that you can leverage referral traffic are by creating videos, shorts, ebooks, PDF guides, and other shareable content. By creating a system around getting referral traffic, you can maximize your ad spend. Furthermore, you’ll also benefit from organic traffic to your online business long term.
3. Pinpoint Your Target Audience
Trying to sell just any product to a niche audience is one of the main reasons why affiliates fail. Worse, when online business owners do this they have likely spent many thousands of dollars to create products no one wants. To avoid this failure, make sure that your target audience is an audience of potential customers. Your target audience must need the products or services that you are promoting. They should also be able to afford to pay for it.
For example, if you are selling a $997 high ticket affiliate marketing course to a list of newbie marketers, chances are they are not going to be able to afford it. Instead, the target audience for a product like this one is actually online business owners who are already seeing success. These online business owners are agencies, consultants, and other professionals who understand the value of such courses.
On the other hand, a free or low cost tool should be marketed primarily to an audience who are willing to use your tool daily. If they see your tool as a one-off purchase or optional upgrade, they are less likely to pay for it. One of the easiest way to uncover your target audience is to learn a lot about who signs up for your email newsletter or website.
4. Be Clear About Pricing and Upsells
Before they buy, your customers want to know exactly how much your product will cost them. Be clear about the pricing and upsells as it can affect your conversion rate. Pricing transparency will help customers to trust you more.
Make sure that customers understand that upsells are generally recommended. While they may get a working product out of the box, upsells typically have all of the scalability features, These are the features that you need to grow your online business at scale.
5. Create Avenues for Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is critical when it comes to building your online business. However, asking customers directly for feedback doesn’t work in most cases for affiliates. What you can do instead is look out for opportunities to engage with your customers by seeing what they share online. Social listening is critical to finding out exactly what your paying customers want from you.
6. Publish Stories and Case Studies
Content marketing is highly effective for growing your online business. While it takes some cost and effort to implement, promoting stories and case studies is effective. It helps you to build authority as a trustworthy voice in your niche. Even better? Publish your customers’ or students’ success stories.
7. Start a Niche Community
Successful online business owners see better results when they focus on growing their community. A community helps to bring the gap between product vendors and customers. The more you reach your target audience and bring them into your community, the more sales you’ll get.
Building a community for an online business can take many years and is a challenge for many. Get the ball rolling with a YouTube channel, Facebook Group, Discord or Slack channel for your online business. Then, leverage your community’s growth to engage in sponsorships and JV partnerships. This is how the top affiliates and online business owners dominate their niches.
Further Reading:
- 2023 Software Trends for Freelancers, Affiliate Marketers, and Agencies
- 7 Cost-Effective Ways to Grow Your Online Business
- Why Affiliates Need Website Visitor Tracking
Grow Your Online Business With Front End and OTO Links
As an online business owner, you have to take action to grow your affiliate or product sales.
While there are many growth strategies out there, these 7 methods are all cost-effective and sustainable. Get started now and these methods and set your online business in motion to grow.