How to 10x Your Business in 2017

First things first. Let’s be clear. What do I mean by 10x? Does it work for everybody? What is the catch? What is it?

What do I mean by 10x Your Business in 2017?

Main objective of any business is to make a profit. Some of us are fortunate enough to make a meaning while we make a profit. If you are one of those, my sincere congratulations.

What I mean by 10x Your Business is to increase your profit, not necessarily your revenue or sales or any other vanity metrics.

Does it work for everybody?

Probably not. Every business is different. So is their way to growth.

However, if your business has an online presense (who doesn’t these day? :) and your customers interact with you online, then this may be a good path for you to take.

What is the catch?

Here is the catch. In a single word, we call it perception. In other words, in almost anything in life if you want to 10x something or more, you need to change your world view or how you approch this particular challenge.

This situation is no different. This is not the only way, but a way to 10x your business.

So, what is it?

What you may not know is that every 100 visitors on your site, only 2 of them may do what you want them do on your site. Buy your product or service. Book a meeting. Call your number. You get the point.

2% conversion rate for your website if it is in a good shape.

Still 2% is not that much, I know. Here is a visualization for you :)

How come 98% leave your site?

Mainly there are 2 reasons:

1. Bounce Rate?—?50%
2. Buyers Journey—48%

What is a bounce rate?

It is a percentage of people who leave your site right away. They came there by mistake. Or find your site totally irrelevant. Or many other gazillion reasons we don’t have time to list here :)

No worries, it happens even to the best of us. Actually to all of us. Industry average bounce rate is 50%. There is not much we can do about it.

What is Buyers Journey?

Some call this “Customer Funnel”, we call this User Journey. In a nutshell, it is how we treat our site visitors.

Most websites and their owners treat site visitors as one time events. Are you one of them?

It is like going on a date and asking for a marriage right away. This would sound creepy, wouldn’t?

You want to sell your product now. You want to offer your service today.

It is totally fine that we should generate revenue and earn a profit to keep doing what we do. However, just focusing on the money today is a short term approach.

A better way

There is a better way. Before we jump on to it, let’s put our selves into the shoes of your visitors.

When was the last time you purchased some thing online? Did you go to an online shop and ordered right away? Unless, you already know the product and this online shop in advance, this rarely happens. Hence, the 2%.

Besides, depending on the product or service, it may take a short or long time to make a decision.

Buying an iPhone charger

For example, if the charger for your iPhone is broken, you need one. It is as simple as that. You may visit Amazon, find the one with 4+ reviews at a decent price and order it. This is pretty much it.

Choosing a vacation for your family

This is a different ball game. Especially, those who are married know exactly what I am talking about :)

The whole decision making process can take up to weeks or even months. First, you need to agree about the destination, sight seeing, activities, etc…The list goes on.

When you visit a travel site at this point, the only thing they offer is tour packages, they lose you as a customer.

You are not ready yet since you don’t know your destination.

Instead, if they offer a useful information how to make your decision making process easier free of charge, you might give it a try.

Hook

Free useful information (ebook, white paper, audio file, etc) offered in exchange for email to a user.

Step by Step Guide

1. Understand Your Customers
2. Put yourself in their shoes. What problems do they have? What are they looking for? How can you offer a solution? Not your product, not your service. But a solution.
3. Create a Free Valuable Content
4. Pick one of the pain points of your ideal customer and create a solution. It can be an ebook, a webinar, a white paper, audio or something else they can easily consume. It is better if it is short and to the point.
5. Offer This Content as a Hook
6. Offer the content you created as an exchange for their email and / or contact info. You can do this via landing pages or as a popup form inside your website. You can use a tool like SumoMe https://sumome.com
7. Listen, Learn & Educate 
8. Once you have their contact info, get to know them personally. You may drop an email and ask some questions. Once you know more about them, you know where they are in buyers journey. So you can adjust your approach to this specific buyer. You can guide and educate.
9. For sending automated emails and marketing emails, you can use Cloudy: https://www.cloudy.email
10. Sell
11. All these above will be a waste, if you don’t close a sale. It doesn’t have to be pushy. No one likes that. If your product or service is genuinely a good fit for this customer and if you educated your buyer properly, then sales at this point should be very easy. To track your sales with your buyer, you can use HubSpot CRM: https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm

Hope you find this article useful. Let me know if you benefited from this.

Especially, your success stories if you will implement this for your company.