5 Proven Ways to Scale Your Online Business

Making a little extra money on the side is great, but most people want to know how to scale their online business to a full-time income. Whether you’ve just made your first sale or have been consistently converting leads every month, chances are that you’re looking ahead to your next big milestone and wondering how to get there.

However, like most business owners, you have limited time and resources to put towards growing your business. Most days it feels like you’re too busy running the day-to-day operations to create a growth strategy.

But what if we told you that scaling your business doesn’t have to mean more time and effort on your part. In fact, it’s quite the opposite!

In order to scale your business, you need to free up your time and energy so that you can focus on the higher-level task of running your business. Of course, every business is different, but each one can benefit from implementing these tactics to take their business to the next level.

In this article, we’ll be discussing how the following strategies can help you effortlessly scale your business:

• Upsell or cross-sell your existing products and services

• Build a functional sales funnel

• Create a seamless booking page

• Amplify your social media marketing

• Tap into new global markets

Let’s dive in.

Upsell or cross-sell your existing products and services

When most business owners think of scaling, they think of increasing profits. Whether you are a product or a service-based business, a simple way to scale your income is to upsell or cross-sell your existing offers. Upselling encourages customers to purchase a higher-ticket item, while cross-selling encourages them to buy related or complementary items.

For instance, if you offer different financial literacy workshops, you could create a higher-ticket item by bundling several courses together and offering them at a discounted price. Alternatively, you could offer premium packages where you include a one-on-one consultation in addition to the course itself.

This is a powerful technique for scaling your online business because it offers your customers more variety without needing to physically create more products. Plus, customer satisfaction increases when they feel like they’re getting a good deal on something.

Book Like a Boss offers a large selection of booking pages, from 1-on-1 appointments to webinars, events, and even digital or physical products. Having a strong booking page makes it easy to bundle offers, particularly if you run a service-based business.

Build a functional sales funnel

Converting more leads into paying customers is an essential part of scaling your business. This often involves cultivating a relationship with your customer that takes into consideration each stage of the journey customers goes through before making a purchase. In essence, sales funnels are a systematic way of generating and nurturing your leads with the goal of eventually converting them to paying customers.

Typically, a sales funnel targets the 4 stages of consumer purchasing:

Stage 1: Awareness

The customer first learns about your business through online searches, social media, advertising, or even word of mouth.

Stage 2: Interest

The customer evaluates their interest in your business by considering how your offer can help them solve a problem and how you compare to other competitors.

Stage 3: Decision

The customer investigates your offer in greater detail to help make their decision.

Stage 4: Action

The customer purchases your offer (or decides to abandon cart.)

Understanding this process is fundamental to growing your business because it allows you to be strategic with your marketing efforts. You can help guide your customers through your funnel using the following tactics:

• Have a clean, clear, and concise landing page that highlights the unique benefits customers will receive from purchasing your product or service.

• Use a lead magnet to capture their email. This usually involves offering something of value for free, like a template, ebook, or guide, in exchange for their email.

• Create an email marketing campaign that shares educational content about your offer to build up the customer’s interest and set you apart from your competitors.

• As your customer moves into the decision phase, nudge them in the right direction by including an extended free trial or special discount.

• Even if the customer walks away without purchasing, keep the communication going. Check back in every few months and continue to engage and educate. Some leads just need a little more convincing!

The prospect of building a sales funnel can seem very daunting, but it’s the easiest way to automate your lead generation, and ultimately, scale your business. Tools like ClickFunnels make it easy to put together high-impact sales funnels that do the work of selling your offers for you!

Create a seamless booking page

Arguably, the easiest way to scale your business is to increase your conversion ratio. In other words, increase the ratio of visitors to your site vs paying customers who actually purchase your product or service.

You can do all the leg work of creating value-filled offers and driving visitors to your website, but if you don’t have a solid booking page, all that work will be for nothing. The process of purchasing your service needs to be as effortless as possible or else customers won’t make it past check out.

Luckily, you don’t have to be a tech wiz to set up a top-end booking page. Book Like A Boss (BLAB) offers fast and easy setup of your booking page (under 17 minutes, no less!) It also gives you the option to connect PayPal, Stripe, or Square to receive payment and integrate your favorite apps like Zoom, Meet, Zapier, Google Analytics, Youtube, and more.

With BLAB, you can find booking pages that are fully optimized for the following services:

• Scheduling appointments

• Booking one-on-one coaching sessions

• Scheduling video calls

• Booking conference rooms

• Scheduling group meetings

• Hosting online classes

• Hosting single and multi-day vents

• Selling digital and physical products

Integrating online booking into your online business will not only make you look more professional, but it will save you the time and hassle of manually booking clients. As an added bonus, BLAB offers a 14-day free trial so that you can test out different booking pages and decide which one is the best fit for your business.

Amplify your social media marketing

Scaling your online business isn’t just about scaling your production, it should also include scaling your social media presence. Whether you like it or not, social media has quickly become the future of marketing. In fact, 67% of consumers expect businesses to have a presence on social media. This is because most consumers see social media as a major source of information for company products and services. Therefore, your social media presence is a critical way to build consumer trust. Plus it’s a great opportunity to share your brand story and deepen your connection with your customers.

Furthermore, according to a 2019 survey, 37.9% of respondents indicated that they made a purchase after viewing an ad on social media. All that considered, social media is a powerful marketing tool for attracting more customers to your business and creating awareness of your brand.

But with so many platforms out there, it’s can feel impossible to publish consistent content. We recommend implementing the following strategy to expand your reach on social media:

• Batching content

• Automating manual tasks

• Repurposing your content across multiple platforms

Let’s take a closer look at what each of these looks like.

Batching content

Batching social media posts is a great way to be purposeful about your content and improve cohesion in your social media messaging and branding. Regardless of your main social media platform, your content should seek to inspire, educate, inform, or entertain your audience.

You can use online graphic design services, like Canva, to create a few different post templates using your brand colors and fonts. Then you can duplicate each template over and over, switching out the text and brand images, to create 100s of social media posts relatively quickly. Canva even lets you resize your templates with the click of a button so that you can optimize the dimensions of your posts for different social media platforms.

Automating manual tasks

Once you’ve batched your content, use social media management software, like Hootsuite or Later, to schedule your social media posts in advance. These platforms will automatically post your content, captions, and hashtags across multiple social media platforms.

This allows you to show up for your audience without having to worry about logging on daily to manage your social media, freeing your time and headspace for more important things.

Repurpose content across multiple platforms

Work smarter, not harder. Don’t just post your content to one platform and call it a day. You’ve already taken the time to create a post or video, why not get more bang for your buck by resizing it (when applicable) and posting it to multiple platforms?

Most apps let you cross-post between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.

Being active on multiple platforms has never been easier– and more social media platforms equals greater reach (and greater reach means more potential customers for you!)

Additionally, the other benefit of social media is that you can use it to drive traffic to your sales funnel which we have previously discussed in this article.

Tap into new global markets

Most business owners tend to cater to their geographical region for simplicity’s sake. It can seem overwhelming to try and figure out how to accept different currencies, let alone deal with foreign taxes and shipping. In reality, expanding your reach to the global market is relatively easy for online retailers.

Popular e-commerce platforms, like Shopify and BigCommerce, offer cross-border tools to help you sell your products and services to a larger audience by creating localized online storefronts for customers from other countries. They even have built-in calculators to ensure that your pricing structures take into account territory-specific taxes and shipping fees.

Using an e-commerce platform makes it easy to display prices in the customer’s local currency, translate product descriptions, display taxes, and set up international shipping. You can integrate PayPal, Stripe, or other online payment systems to accept a variety of currencies, with no transaction fees.

You could be missing out on a huge demographic of potential customers by only setting up your online store to cater to one area. Leveraging these powerful platforms allows you to easily tap into a broader market that your smaller competitors may be ignoring. Why not think big if the tools are easily available to you?

Conclusion

Scaling your online business is all about working smarter, not harder. Luckily, there are a few proven tactics that produce big results with minimal effort that will help take your business to the next level.

Specifically, finding ways to streamline and automate your processes wherever possible creates a more positive customer experience, increases conversions, and frees your time and energy to focus on other aspects of the business.

To recap, here are 5 highly effective ways to scale your online business: