In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast we are talking different ways to grow and scale your online business.
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It’s very easy to get into a comfort zone when running an online business. This zone is especially dangerous when you reach a satisfying effort/income ratio. This comfort zone should be feared and destroyed as soon as you start noticing it. I’ve mentioned on several occasions how I destroyed my online business by getting comfortable. More on that later.
In some cases we might feel like we’re working hard but our business simply isn’t growing anymore. That’s another issue that could be prevented (and it should!).
In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast we’re talking about growing and scaling your online business.
Diversify Your Traffic Sources
The very first thing that every online business should pay attention to is traffic diversification. Imagine if most of your traffic comes from Google Adwords. One day Google might drastically change its policies (as they have done several times) and your traffic tickles down to zero. That’s the comfort zone I mentioned earlier: just because it’s been working well until now doesn’t mean it always will.
Diversifying your traffic sources will help scaling your business. If all of your traffic is organic and comes from search engines, why not get more traffic from social media platforms? Why not try out PPC? In a recent episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast I talked about creating “viral content“. I mentioned that you need to reach out to influencers and have them talk about you. When they present you to their audience, you’re getting new fans, new visitors and more traffic.
Track And Analyze Everything
The second thing that will help you scale your business is tracking and analytics. You can’t predict how your audience will behave but you can track their behavior and help them have a better experience. At the very least you must have a Google Analytics account and you must have all of your websites on it. Google offers great certification courses (completely free) where you can learn how to take full advantage of the platform. Analyzing your site visitors will help you improve your website, lower your bounce rates and increase conversions.
I won’t even try to explain all of the things you can track with Google Analytics but you should start using it ASAP.
Another great tracking tool that I could recommend is a Heatmap. There are many plugins and software tools, both free and paid offered on the market. A heatmap will help you visualize what exactly your website visitors are doing on your website. Where do they click, where do they not click, what annoys them and so on.
A while ago I wrote a promotional blog post with affiliate links in it and got some great results. When I installed a heatmap plugin I realized that many visitors were clicking on the image of that product. The problem is that the image did not link to the product’s sales page. I added that image for demonstration purposes but people saw it as a “call to action” and clicked on it. When I figured that out I linked that image directly to the sales page and increased my conversions by 100%! You read that right. I doubled the income from that blog post by simply adding a link to an image. I would have never guessed it if I didn’t use the heatmap.
Another example of a heatmap comes in the form of split testing. If you look at the top menu on this very blog, there is a link called Radio Show. When I first launched my podcast I naturally added the “Podcast” button to the menu but it seemed like no one clicked on it. I then changed the button to “Radio Show” which resulted in a higher number of clicks. This is when I understood that a lot of people still don’t know the technical term “podcast” but can easily relate to “radio show”. Through the use of heatmaps I was able to test this small difference which helped me make a decision on the final text for the button.
Do What Works
You want to scale your business because you’re already seeing some success with it. In order to scale you simply need to figure out what works best for your business and do more of that. I know it’s easier said than done so let me explain.
In 2016 I nearly doubled the traffic of the Extra Paycheck blog compared to 2015. My biggest secret: quality content.
I knew that most of my traffic is organic traffic. The more rankings I get on the search engines the more traffic I get to my blog. In 2015 I hit the publish button on my blog about 50 times. In 2016 I did it close to 70 times. Besides the fact that I published more entries the quality of my content also went up. This increase in content resulted in an 85% increase of traffic. Do what works.
You might be saying that you don’t have time to create more content (or that you don’t have ideas) and this is where outsourcing and delegating comes in. Your business is already making money so why not reinvest some of that money back into the business? You will have a lot more time to do research if you are paying someone to write the actual content.
My personal goal is to publish at least 100 blog posts on top of 50+ show notes pages that I publish every Monday when I release a podcast episode. I am spending a lot of time researching the topics that I want to write on, finding guests for my podcast, writing the content and so on. The plan is to hire someone to help me with these tasks so I have more time to do the important tasks.
These are the three main topics covered in this week’s podcast episode and you should definitely scroll up and listen to the full episode for more details.
Today’s resources:
Episode #83: How To Build And Grow Your Own Email List For Profit
Episode #91: Using Pinterest To Grow Your Business With Kate Ahl
Episode #94: How To Create Viral And Profitable Blog Posts
Google Analytics
Heatmaps for WordPress
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