If you already blog on a regular basis, you’ll know the power of running a successful site which provides a regular communications channel to your customers. If you’ve been blogging brilliantly for a while, you may also have noticed that you have a large following, you attract a great amount of traffic to your site, and people are starting to notice you.
What do you do now? Do you rest on your laurels, basking in your recent successes, or is it time to consider ways in which you can upgrade your site to cater for new, bigger, opportunities?
It can be difficult to think of ways to expand, once you’ve set up a great blog and settled in to your niche. You have a routine which works, you know what to write about, how often to write, and what your customers are looking for.
However, when you consider some of the business moguls of our time, you’ll notice one common factor which unites them all. They never stand still.
Every day, the social networking giants such as Google and Facebook announce new products that they have developed to stay ahead of demand, anticipating customer needs and meeting them before their customers even knew they wanted a new product.
This kind of strategic thinking is the key to ongoing development and success. People who make money online all tend to ask the same question. “What now?” what do I do, now I’ve succeeded in what I set out to do? Where can I go next? What do my customers want? How will I give it to them?
Establishing how best to expand your business
Once you have made the decision to upgrade your business to offer more products or services, the first thing to consider is what your customers want from you. Although it’s fairly easy to come up with ideas for business expansion, it’s not so easy to work out what will sell well and prove popular on your blog.
Different businesses provide different services to people, and your job is to work out exactly what you need to do, that will prove popular both with your existing customers, and in attracting new people to your site.
The best way to work this out is to ask people. Conduct polls on WordPress asking for feedback (they are easy to do, and very useful for gauging public opinion). Offer a range of different options, and ask for guidance from the people best placed to inform you of what your customers are looking for… the customers themselves. From there, you have everything you need to embark upon your expansion operation.
Setting everything in place to upgrade
There can be short-term downsides to expanding your product suite or range of services through your blog. The main one is working out how to fit the new workload in to your existing schedule. We all tend to work to capacity every day as small business owners, and the prospect of adding to an already-full day of activities can be daunting.
Work out how to streamline how you operate to fit the new tasks in to your schedule.
Another difficulty can be the potential for loss of income in the short-term, as you focus upon the expansion. Sometimes we need to take a leap of faith when we decide to increase our services, as the change can mean we lose some of our income from our regular activities, as we focus upon the expansion. M
ake sure you budget for the potential loss, and bear in mind that you are investing your time for the chance of greater financial return at a later stage.
You’re now all set to take on the new challenge. Be bold, think ahead, and go for it!
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I think you are absolutely correct! one should be on a constant look out for new avenues of growth and success, as the say opportunity doesn’t knock your door twice.