Do: Diversify Your Business Offers
If you’ve been in business a while, you may have reached the top of your growth curve unless you find a way to diversify your offerings. If you want to keep growing, you’ll need to find a way to offer more to current customers or offer more to a new audience. There are various ways to diversify your business offers that make sense.
Fill in the Gaps When you organize your products in order from entry level to highest cost products, can you identify any gaps in your offerings? For example, your income stream might look like this: website/blog, affiliate products, your own products, and courses and training. You could then add in coaching and memberships to the mix successfully.
Open Other Locations
If you have a business focused on one location (whether digital or brick and mortar) and it’s profitable, figure out if your business is duplicable. For example if you’ve written one book, why wouldn’t another book do as well? If you have one store in the north side of town, can you open another in the south side?
Teach Others to Do What You Do
If you’ve made a good business for yourself and it’s something other people can do, you can create a course to teach others how to do it. You can then even help them set up the entire business.
Create a Joint Venture
Working with someone who sells complementary products or services can help you get new ideas for more products. Breathing new life into your business with a new person involved can help you become more creative.
Sell Complementary Products/Services
For example, if you sell a course to build WordPress websites, you can offer a done-for-you opportunity to that same audience. They may then decide, even upon learning how to do it, that they’d rather pay someone.
Write a Book
A really great way to offer a new product or service is to write a book. Once your book is published you can use the book as the start of a course, speaking circuit, how to and more.
Join the Speaking Circuit
A great way to diversify is to create a speech or talk and join the speaking circuit. When you start speaking to audiences you’ll find new offerings start coming to your mind, as you try to give the audience what they need and want.
Expand Your Target Market
Another way to diversify is to find another target market. For example, if you have training for moms to learn to work from home, you could rebrand the same training with a few tweaks for almost anyone if you take out the mom part. For example, you could rebrand it as ways for retirees to work from home.
When you think about your offerings today, you should be able to organize them in a way that makes it easy to figure out where you have gaps and where you can expand and do more. You’ll increase your profit and grow your business smart if you give this a lot of thought and research.
Don’t: Leave Your Email Signature Blank
A good email signature is about as important as a good business card. After all, many times the first information anyone gets from you is an email. Providing the additional information in your signature will help you solidify connections, build new connections, and help move people to your social media and even get them on your various mailing lists if they’re not already.
It’s important to take time to make a professional-looking email signature instead of leaving it blank or maybe worse, incomplete or unattractive. Today, there is a lot of good software available to help you make attractive email signatures that will be more noticeable to recipients.
A good business signature on your emails should consist of:
- Your name – The name you’re known as online.
- Your business name – Your main business name.
- Your slogan or catch phrase – It’ll help them know what you do.
- Social media links – The ones that are relevant to the audience.
- Your website link – Your main website link.
- Your phone numbers – This is optional and only necessary if people need to be able to call you.
- Your address – In email marketing you’re required to include a business address.
A bio link
A great way to extend the signature is to include a link to your online biography.
A map (when relevant)
If you have a local business, a link to a map to show where you’re located can help.
Your email address
A link to your email address; even though the email comes from your email address this is helpful.
A vCard (optional)
This is an electronic file you send along with the email that people can download into their contacts info. There are cases that attachments aren’t a good idea; you be the judge.
An offer
In addition, you want it to look really good. You want your branding to appear in the signature space. Today, this is simple to do using HTML. There are software programs that will help you create a signature. You can use HTML to manually create it, plus you can use online services like Xink.
When you include this information on each email, it will give recipients of that information a chance to connect with you in other places. Plus, the offer is a great way to bring private email recipients into your email list, social media networks and more.
It’s super-important to include an email signature because it’s part of your business identity, and email is one of the most important aspects of your online business marketing endeavors. Unfortunately, so many people think the email signature isn’t necessary and seems to have low value. This is just not true because email is the main way that we communicate today in business, with few exceptions.
Think of it this way – if someone reads your email, the little added extra way that you can stand out is at the bottom, which is your email signature. This is a reminder of who the email is from and gives a little extra information about you and your business that can help your readers trust you even more.
Do: Watch Your Virtual Body Language
You’ve likely heard the jokes about miscommunication via online methods – whether it’s email, social media messages or chatting online. The reason is that text communication is missing the verbal body language cues that in-person communication affords.
Interactive technology can often be deficient in allowing communication to occur without misunderstandings. But, you can end those problems by understanding what your virtual body language is telling your customers, and learn how to fix it when needed.
Proper Use of Emojis
Today, even if it feels silly at first, it’s important to use smiley faces, frowns and so forth to help you get your point across. People tend to read tone into messages without knowing the tone that you really meant. If you’re sure how you’re coming across to your audience, conduct a survey and ask them, or ask trusted friends to read over a few of your messages to see what they think.
Your Profile Image
Does your profile image or other images of you represent the type of personality you want people to see in you? If you’re not showing your face, or have dark pictures, people will see your personality differently than if you have images that show your smiling face and your eyes.
Using the Right Terms
One way to expand your virtual body language is to use the right words. You may need to use more flowery language than you would in person to help draw a picture of your words in the minds of the reader. This can help tell your story in a better way so that there is no room for misinterpretation.
Add Video
Go Live and In Person
The fact is, nothing can change the fact that full communication can really only happen in person. If you really want to take your online persona to the next level, take it offline. Start going to and participating in live in-person events and your fans will start understanding you better than ever before – even when you’re back online.
Accept the Differences
Remember that online communication via technology does suffer from lack of information, whether unconsciously or consciously received. This applies to video, simulated in games with avatars, text such as with chat and email, or even over the phone.
Most of us are very dependent on the myriad of social signals that are communicated mostly unconsciously to each other in person. We try to take that online and often are abject failures at it because we want it to be the same. But, it’s not the same, so we need to go further and try harder to be expressive in a way that gets our point across and lets our clients know who we really are.