Bebe Akinboade

8 WAYS TO EXPAND YOUR HOME BUSINESS WITHOUT LEAVING THE HOUSE

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Growing a business isn’t as simple as putting the pedal to the metal and
working as hard as you can anymore. Sure, hard work is important when it comes
to execution, but you’ll also need business savvy and an effective strategy to
expand your business successfully. Regardless of whether you want to grow your
business by offering a new service, expanding into new territories, or simply
getting more customers to buy your product, there are steps you can take to
make the growth process easier.
These days, the key to making the difficult process of business growth
easier is to maximize your ability to connect with potential customers and to
automate tasks that don’t need your full attention, so you can focus on the
ones that do. Follow these eight steps to better reach potential customers and
to learn what tasks you should be automating:

DOUBLE DOWN ON YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
More than half of consumers — 59 percent to be exact — use Google in the
hopes of finding a reliable, local business. Even if you’re running a
one-person business, using a 5-year-old website and your personal network isn’t
good enough anymore. Update your website so your landing page is up-to-date,
and make sure that your website functions well on mobile devices too. If you
don’t have the skills necessary to revamp your own website and lack the funds
to hire someone to do it for you, you could start with do-it-yourself tools
like Wix or Squarespace. While these tools won’t provide as original a result
as a totally custom site would, drag-and-drop design tools will let you create
an attractive website that relates the information your customers need to know.
MEASURE YOUR ONLINE SUCCESS
If you truly want to grow your business, you need to find out what works
and what doesn’t when it comes to your website. Luckily, there are many
analytics tools out there that can tell you how consumers interact with your
website. A good place to start is with Google Analytics, a free, easy-to-use
tool that offers robust functions. Google Analytics lets you track traffic, see
how users behave and pinpoint any problems in your conversion funnel.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE FREELANCE ECONOMY
As you’re expanding your home business, there are many tasks that need to
be done but might not justify a whole new hire. Thankfully, in today’s world,
the freelance economy is growing, and hiring someone on a project basis is
easier than ever. Even if you want to do something complicated like create an
app or convert your old business website into one that is mobile-responsive,
platforms like Toptal can connect you with freelancers for that task. Once the
job is done, you don’t have to keep them on the payroll, ensuring that your
business isn’t paying for idle hands.
AUTOMATE YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Email is a powerful tool for converting new customers and keeping previous
customers loyal to your business, but sending emails to your entire client or
consumer list is a time-consuming process. MailChimp is a service that
automates your entire email campaign system, offering easy-to-use drag and drop
design tools and helpful analytics to boot. Using an automation tool for your
email marketing needs will save you time and make your campaigns more
efficient.
RAMP UP YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE
In today’s world, consumers expect great products with great service. In
fact, 66 percent of customers will take their business to a competitor if they
experience poor customer service at a company. To build brand loyalty and a
great reputation, start using cloud-based based customer support tools like
Freshdesk, which provides a single place to track all customer queries as well
as automation for many steps of customer interaction. This will help you
quickly respond to all customer questions while again saving you time.
GROW YOUR PRESENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
The average internet user spends 1.72 hours every day on social media,
making social media platforms valuable places for your business to attract new
customers. Services like Hootsuite allow you to manage all of your social media
accounts on a single dashboard, automate posts, and track the success of all of
your engagements. Not only does Hootsuite reduce the amount of time you need to
spend on handling social media, it will also help you develop stronger insight
on your audience’s behaviors. 
TRACK YOUR TIME
When you’re running a business by yourself or with just one or two
coworkers, time management is paramount to success. With so many different
roles to fill within your business, juggling multiple responsibilities is
difficult. Time trackers like Toggl help you structure your day and make sure
you don’t spend too much time on one task. If you want to track time for an
entire time, Harvest is a great option to coordinate everyone at your business
and delegate time and responsibilities properly.
STREAMLINE YOUR PAYROLL
If your business has reached the point where you are expanding your team,
congratulations. It’s a big step forward, but handling payroll can be a time
consuming pain when you’re too small to have an HR employee to handle it for
your business. Tools like Zenefits and Gusto provide software to take care of
payroll, employee benefits, and taxes. With these services, you’ll find
software that provides a neat and organized solution to onboarding and
documentation, and you won’t need to hire anyone in HR until your business gets
significantly larger.
Many people have great business ideas, but it takes a great entrepreneur to
execute that idea and turn it into a successful, growing business. Use these
tips to grow your consumer base, and focus your energies on the big problems
that no list of tips can solve.
Source : entrepreneur.com
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