Posts Tagged ‘Growth’

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Having an active community behind you can increase sales, build your brand, and serve as your very own volunteer promotional army to help get your word out. But how do you go about creating one? How do you jump start that feeling of community on your site so that you’re able to leverage it?

Your users are what makes your community cool and worth following, so always make sure you are promoting your users rather than promoting yourself on your site. Give them something that they can get behind and be passionate about in their lives. People want something that strikes them and brings out their passion, so always provide a product or service that will enable them to get behind it, as recently suggested on Small Biz Trends.

Create some sort of board that announces the main contributors to your site. They are the people that ultimately help your site and community grow, and they are the ones constantly giving feedback, posting comments and passing on the word about your site. So give back to them by showing off their constant contributions to the site.

In the end, always make sure that you are protecting your site. There should be some sort of order that is held in your community and as the site owner it will be your responsibility to keep that order among the community members.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: luc legay

Many business owners are looking for ways to grow their profits every year. They keep hoping there will be easier ways to see their profits go up on their charts, but sadly many of them don’t know of any easy ways to help their profits grow. Below are some tips on growing your profits easily, located recently on Entrepreneur.com.

Your number of leads on customers you contact and those who contact you regarding your business are an important key factor in your profits. The amount of those people who actually make a purchase in your store are another important key factor. Figuring out your conversion rate is rather simple. Say 4 people out of 10 purchase something in your store that day, your conversion rate would be 4 out of 10 people or 40% for the day.

Average number of transactions: The number of purchases the average customer will make over the course of a year. Again, it can be an estimate. This number will probably be larger in a retail setting than in companies that operate in a professional services industry.

Increasing the profit margin for your store is another great way to grow your profits for the year. Your profit margin is simply the percentage of each transaction that is just profit. So if you sold a sweater for $100 and your profit from that sale was $25 dollars, then your profit margin would be 25%. Many get intimidated by handling all of these numbers but with a quick course in finances, profits, and sale margin’s you will better understand what you are looking at on a daily basis.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

 
photo credit: annnna.

Many business owners wonder if their business truly needs a blog or if it is just a waste of their time. Below are some reasons stated recently on Startup Nation that pinpoint why you should have a blog for your business today.

• With a blog you can listen and learn. Remember when you were younger and your parents and teachers always said “you can never have too much knowledge”, it’s the same in business, you can never have too much.
• This is a great way to test some of your ideas that you are not quite sure about. If they do well on your blog, then you can pretty much assume they will do well in other areas.

Uncover New Opportunities. The more you blog, the more opportunities will present themselves to you. For example, I was contacted by a PR firm earlier this year to create a series of blog posts for the launch of a new website.

• If your blogs that you post do well, it is possible for them to rank very high in most search engines that people use everyday, which ultimately means a lot more traffic to your website and thus, more business for you.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.