If you build it, they will come. If you’re running an online business or sell digital services this doesn’t sound like how your business is doing. There won’t be a breakthrough moment when suddenly customers pour in and you’ll have so much requests that you have to decline them.
No, sir. The reality is different. You will primarily experience slow, steady growth most of the time, if your business grows at all. To keep it growing, or to get it onto a growth trajectory in the first place, you have to devote yourself in continuous work. Period.
Tactics for steady growth
Publish content on your webpage on a regular base. If you’re lucky, a post goes viral or you get a shoutout from another online venue, but in any case, it keeps your page interesting. Online readers turn away when your latest news post is from 2017. It’s impossible to predict what posts on your page will take off, however, one thing is for sure: your blog post from 2017 won’t. Even if you don’t notice growth at first, over time, it will gain momentum.
Ok fine. But what to publish in the first place? Well, people like to cheer. So if you reach a milestone, then write a short piece about it. For example, say you have implemened an app. You can celebrate the first user registration, the first 100 downloads, you being mentioned by another business, a billboard with your work, the monthly recurring customers reaching 1000 and so on. Basically, every metric that you can think of can be used to create content.
If you write something, never forget the call to action. Ask your users ask readers to subscribe, comment, and share and put buttons into headers, footers and emails.
Share on social media every time you publish something on your web page. Depending on the platform, you can give potential readers idea of your content or even publish the whole thing as series of tweets, for example.
Add testimonials to your page. If you receive a compliment from a customer, ask them if it’s ok to share it on your page. You can also actively ask your customers for postive comments on your business.
Partnering with other businesses also helps you to reach a bigger audience. Consider to repost works of others that fit to your business. In exchange, ask for them to do the same. You’ll be surprised how many people will just help you. I know this perfectly, well, we do this on a regular base.
Most of us don’t like to be too self-promotional. But today’s extrely competetive attention ecosystem, you simply have to nunge other to notice you. Your existing customers also won’t mind being reminded that your business still exists.
Key Takeaways
It takes time and you have to set up a routine to get onto a digital growth trajectory. The more you grow, the easier it gets. You won’t notice your inflection moment, but the important thing is to keep going, knowing that everytime your reach a reader with your online content, this help you find more readers.
Set achievable goals. Our goal is to post once a week. Sometimes it’s more, which is goos, but we always try not to fall below our target. Truth be told is that we sometimes do. There are 1.000.000 resons for it. But we try to compensate for this by creating more content in the weeks where we not so prolific :-).
Experiments and routine. Your routine tasks should be low effort and create the baseline. For example, a routine piece is to write about a new customer. While the reward might be low, but they add up over time and contrinute to a steady, consistent growth. Experiments, on the other hand, are more involved and require more of your time. They could unlock a whole new segment of potential customers for you, or simply not pan out. For example, you could try to promote your products on product hunt or sell gigs on fiverr. If you have a app, why not try to sell it on fiverr?
Plan ahead and monitor your efforts. We don’t. But we know it’s a good thing to do. So go ahead and do it.
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Photo by Martin Zaenkert on Unsplash
