One of the things I have noticed business owners struggle with is making money from their startups in as short a time as possible. Because if the business is not making money, it is likely to sink in debt and when bills can’t be paid, the business is likely to die.
But how do you make money from your business?
The answer to that is simple. By attracting a good number of buyers/customers/clients. A good number of customers can be anything from 100 to 10,000 depending on the product you are selling.
However, one thing I have noticed is that a lot of business owners set 1000 sales of their products/services as a milestone. For the purposes of this article I will presume a 1000 sales means purchases from a 1000 customers.
So how do you get 1000 customers?
The answer to this is not so simple, nor is it straight-forward. Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Research has shown that a satisfied customer is 60-70% more likely to buy from you again, while a new prospect is 5-20% likely to buy a thing from you.
For instance let’s say you run an eCommerce website that specializes in custom-made shoes. You have a new batch of shoes and announced it on your Facebook page. Let’s assume that two sets of shoe-addicts saw it: Abigail and Dagrin. Now Abigail has bought one of your shoes in the past and she loved it while Dagrin stumbled on your announcement.
Who do you think will immediately click the link with the intention to check it out and purchase it?
If you guessed Abigail, you are right. Because of the pleasant experience of her last purchase, Abigail will buy anything from you, once she likes it.
Dagrin, on the other hand, would be skeptical. First he has to be sure your website is legit, then he has to be sure the shoe really looks good, then he has to be sure you will deliver his shoes, then he has to be cajoled into parting with his money.
But if your business is new, then you will have to know how to convert Dagrins into Abigails. To help you with this, I will explain how to build your customer base then show you a practical case study after that. Ready? let’s delve in.
How to build your customer base
1. Determine what you will sell
In this article, I will assume that you already know who your ideal customer is. I will also assume that you already have a website or blog. Next you have to determine what you will sell on your blog. There are many ways to make money from blogging but the most popular ones are:
- Through Affiliate sales
- Through Ad placement
- Through sponsored posts and reviews
- Through selling your own physical products
- Through selling your own training courses/ ebooks
- Through selling your services
The model you use will greatly depend on the type of business you ventured into. For instance if you are a catering company, your revenue will most likely come from selling your own meals or outdoor catering services or training courses on how to cook spectacular meals. CrockPot Restaurant is an example of this as shown below:
But if you are a food enthusiast who just loves to write and talk about food, then majority of your revenue will come from affiliate sales and Ad placement. For instance Jenn Segal of OnceUponAChef uses adverts in multiple sections of her site to monetize her site’s traffic
Don’t worry if you are a bit hazy about this at the beginning. You can figure this out as you get website visitors and begin to discover what they like, don’t like and what they need solutions to.
2. Set a realistic goal
Often times I see newbie entrepreneurs hoping to break even and start making a healthy profit within a month or two. Not only is this hard to achieve, such expectations can quickly dampen your spirits when you fail to meet them.
For instance, if you started a photography blog, do not expect to get 10,000 unique visitors within a month of starting that blog. Many 3-year-old blogs can not boast of half of that traffic.
According to Shanelle Mullin, Director of Marketing at Onboardly, “The key to setting achievable marketing goals is to spend time evaluating your current position. Many startups set lofty, unattainable goals and end up discouraged, which can be detrimental in the early days. On the other hand, some startups set easy, insignificant goals and end up missing out on growth potential.”
So it is important to balance it out. Don’t set goals that are too difficult to reach and don’t set goals that are not challenging.
3. Build a robust marketing plan
“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.”
– David Packard, co-founder, Hewlett-Packard
And David is right. No matter how good your website looks or how terrific your content is, you must actively promote it. Do not expect your customers to find you. Go out and hunt them down! When Noah Kagan, founder of Appsumo and the OkDork blog, launched a new product, How To Make A $1,000 A Month Business course, he knew he had to develop a spectacular marketing plan. His target was to sell 3,333 memberships to the course within 12 months. He reached his target in 10 months!
How did he achieve this?
By breaking down his big goal of 3,333 memberships into monthly goals. Each monthly goal is further broken into daily goals. So each day, he had a benchmark to reach.
According to Noah, “Overall there’s no ‘right’ goal; you want something that isn’t easily achievable but also something that’s realistic so you don’t feel overwhelmed.We break our goal into a daily target so––even if our goal is a billion––we know on a specific day if we are on track; for example, in January when we had to be at 10,000 uniques a day.
A key thing with goals that I learned from Facebook is to only have one goal for a specific period of time. It helps with saying no to other distractions you will face during the year.”
Noah reveals a lot of the marketing strategies he used to achieve most of the stellar successes Appsumo has experienced in this article: Create Your First Marketing Plan
4. Always Act this: “Customers come first”:
Customers determine how fast or slow your business grows, so they should be treated like royalty. This treatment might involve tweaking your marketing plans to accommodate the needs of a vast majority of your customer base. Do not be rigid. Happy customers lead to a thriving business.
Carry out frequent surveys of your customers to find out what they want and develop strategies or modify your products/services to suit them.
For instance if you planned to sell a course on “Starting a Photography Business” to your customer base but found that 80% of your email list need to know “How to take a spectacular photo” then you now know you must change your original course to the one your customers need.
If you wanted to create an ebook on “How to prepare delicious African Delicacies” but your survey revealed that your email list needs video tutorials, not an ebook, then you have to adapt your original plan to what your email list wants.
If you run a fashion eCommerce store and from your stats, found that most of your eCommerce visitors navigate to the ‘dresses’ section or ask for ‘fashionable, formal outfits’ then you know what to stock up on to increase your sales.
Also do not make your prospective customers uncomfortable in any way. According to Neil Patel in this article on Kissmetrics, ways you can make your prospective customers uncomfortable include:
- Unexpected Shipping charges
- Forcing prospective customers to create an account before they can complete a purchase
- Being too stingy to offer discounts
Case Studies:
Now its all good and well to state what people should do to grow their businesses. But many atimes, practical examples are the best ways to demonstrate this. For my case study I will tackle an interesting field: Fashion Blogging
How to get 1000 customers as a Fashion Blogger:
1. Have an idea of products you can offer on your blog:
As a fashion blogger, you can make money from any of these avenues:
- Being a fashion consultant and offering your services on your blog
- Writing and selling a fashion ebook
- Making money from Ads
- Making money from subscription services
- Making money from Affiliate sales
2. Set a realistic goal:
Your blog will only make money if you have a good amount of traffic. To get 1000 customers, you need traffic of at least 10,000 email subscribers. To get 10,000 email subscribers you need a minimum traffic of 100,000 annually. Now if you are a newbie fashion blogger, there is no way you can hit 100,000 website visitors in a month, unless you are well-connected in the fashion blogsphere. First break down 100,000 into achievable monthly amounts.
100,000/12 = 8333
Now we have a more manageable number. Do not fret if you don’t hit this number in your first two or three months. Simply subtract, then stack up the remaining months with the leftover.
Example: January you got 100 visitors
that’s 100,000 – 100 = 99,900 visitors
Divide by the number of remaining months
How many months left: 11 months
therefore your new monthly target is: 99,900/11
= 9081 visitors
So how do you meet your monthly target? You need a marketing plan
3. Marketing plan for a fashion blogger:
As a fashion blogger (or any type of blogger) your marketing plan must first tackle how you will attract targeted traffic to your site. Then when you do that you have to convert this traffic to subscribers. When you achieve that milestone, you will then be able to reach out to these subscribers as many times as you want and hence have many more opportunities to convert them to customer.
So first how will you hunt down your prospective customers and entice them to your site?
Follow these guidelines:
- Who is your ideal customer? Who would you love to visit your blog?
- Where does your ideal customer hang out? This would include Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and other popular fashion sites. Build a list of these popular fashion sites.
- Start blog commenting on these sites. To attract traffic from these sites use the name of your site as your name. A few newbie bloggers do link-spamming or link bombing as shown in the image below: While this can be effective, many website owners frown on it and will delete your comment immediately.
- Build a Facebook fan page
- Join active fashion groups on Facebook. Be active on these groups and post links to your latest blog posts here. I have found Facebook groups to be a highly effective and cheap source of driving traffic to a website. I use them personally. The trick is to be active on these groups. Don’t be selfish and post only your links. Build relationships by commenting on other people’s updates too. This way the group administrator will not be forced to block you from the group.
- Run a giveaway.
- Make sure your website design is good. Your website is your fresh impression online. The better that impression, the more likely your website visitors will stay and check out other articles.
- Make sure you have an email marketing plan in place. This involves signing up for companies like Madmimi or MailChimp. I use madmimi and love their customer support, so I recommend you try them out. To understand how powerful email marketing is, check out this post by Dan Shewan on Wordstream titled “Is Email Marketing Effective? Three Examples That Prove It Is”
- Make sure your email optin forms are super visible.
- Offer a better bait than “free weekly updates” for your email optin. Consider something like “15 ways to rock a skater dress from work to party on a tight budget“
- Make every new email subscriber love you. How? Ask every new subscriber what their pain point in fashion is. You can do this with an autoresponder. This way you know what future articles to write and what future products to create. Also make sure that when anybody tells you their problem, you answer that email immediately with a solution. Sue of successfulblogging.com does this for every new subscriber she gets:
- Keep delivering super, quality content that is shareable. How do you know shareable topics? Head over to Buzzsumo, then copy and paste the link of one of the top fashion blogs you compiled. The more shareable your content, the more eyeballs you can attract to your website and the closer you will be to hitting your target.
- Make your website interactive through quizzes and comments. Kamdora uses quizzes as shown in the image below:
Encourage people to comment on your articles by responding to each comment. Then if you are having trouble getting comments, consider partnering with fellow fashion bloggers to trade comments on each others sites. Read all about this technique in Neil Patel’s article:The Day After: 11 Things to Do After You Publish a Post
When you have reached your milestone of the number of monthly visitors, you should take a critical look at your email sign-up rate. Typical industry averages are: 3% to 11%. Anything higher than 11% is stellar. That means for every 100 people that visit your blog, 3 to 11 are likely to signup for your newsletter.
Then next take a critical look at the problems most of your email signups complained about. Is there a common problem complained about by most of your email subscribers? Write articles packed with solutions for these problems. Are these articles widely successful? Or more popular than any other articles on your blog? Then you have identified a pain point. You can cash in on this pain point in the following ways:
- Find already existing solution-providers and become an affiliate for them: this is the easiest way to cash in
- Find already existing solution-providers and write sponsored posts or reviews for them
- Find already exiting solution-providers and pitch an advert space on your blog to them.
- Start offering a consultancy service that solves this problem: This means you will develop a solution and sell it to your email list.
- You can setup a subscription service like the one Kamdora did, where your subs have to pay a minimal amount weekly/monthly to access your best advice. (Did you also notice that Kamdora is running a giveaway?)
And when you start hitting your monthly goal, you can start displaying google ads on your site. I normally advice new bloggers to forget about using google ads on their site until the site is 3 months or older. Because without a great quality of traffic, google ads is useless on your site. In the article, “How to build a profitable blog” Kay Rockley shows us that Huffington post makes $2,330,000 from just ads. When adopting the ads model, your ‘customer’ is anybody who visits your blog regularly.
Click here to see the full infographic
When adopting the affiliate sales model, your customer is anybody who buys through your affiliate links. Pat Flynn made up to $123,853 from mostly affiliate marketing.
When writing sponsored posts or reviews, your customer is any company that pays you to write the sponsored post or review. Enstine Muki makes a killing from this model of revenue generation as seen in this post. He also makes a killing by selling advert space to specific solution-providers.
When offering subscription services, your customer is any person that pays for this subscription service.
When selling an ebook, your customer is any person who buys the ebook from you.
4. Remember Customers come first:
As you try out each type of money-making model on your blog, be attentive. What do your customers like? Which model do they prefer? Which model is reaping the most returns for you? Your objective is to ensure you make money, get more customers and not repel your present customers in the process.
To achieve I suggest you carry out surveys on your email list to find out what they really want so that you can provide it. I normally use Google Forms to do this because there is no limit to number of responses I can receive. I recommend you use this. But if you want a more robust survey system, then use Survey Monkey. I also use surveys as a medium to ask, “What can I improve to serve you better?” and “What is the one thing you don’t like about my blog?”
Watch your ads stats: What is your average Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Observe the number of email subscribers who eventually buy your products and those who abandon the cart. Then find out from those who abandoned the cart why they did and see if a discount will help in closing that sale.
Another thing you must consider is what you can do to turn your current customers into your ambassadors. Your current customer turns into your ambassador when she shares your posts on her social media accounts and when she recommends your service to her friends and family. This is where embedded social media share buttons, running giveaways or customer reward programs become highly effective.
But first you must satisfy that customer before providing means for her to spread the word about you.
Conclusion:
Setting a milestone for your business is necessary. Depending on your type of business, a milestone of 1000 customers in 12 months is advisable. To achieve this milestone, you should know who your ideal customer is. Then you should have a website too.
One way of getting 1000 customers is to diversify your revenue-generation models. Do not be fixated on one type. Develop a robust but flexible marketing plan as well. Your marketing plan should focus on how to get targeted traffic to your site, then how to convert this traffic to subscribers so that you can have the opportunity to reach out to them and turn them to customers. Then test and try as many revenue-generation models (advertising, affiliate sales, coaching e.t.c) to see which one works perfectly for you.
Whatever you do, do not sideline your customers. They fuel your business so do as much as you can to keep them happy. Also to ensure you hit your milestone sooner, try converting your customers to your brand ambassadors by making it easy for them to share your content or by offering them mouth-watering rewards for every friend they refer.
Over to you. Tell me your greatest challenge in meeting the 1000 customers milestone in the comments below and I will answer right back with actionable tips you can try.
- 6 ways to get 1000 subscribers in 30 days - August 13, 2015
- How to Start a Lucratively Successful Blog - August 7, 2015
- 10 steps you should take to become successful in life - July 7, 2015
Hi Chioma,
Very insightful article! In fact, your ideas and advice are solid.
In my case, I tend to work with U.S. businesses who are offline and market to an audience online. Some are business-to-business and others are business-to-consumer.
Their content has to be exceptional and for those who are able, willing and ready to buy from them. Books, affiliates and things like that are not going to work for them.
Yet, some of the principles you use are still very applicable.
Thanks for giving me a few reasons to keep coming back and digesting your article. There are some things in here to really think about.
Have a great end to your week Chioma!
~ Don Purdum
Don Purdum recently posted…Are You Creating Content for a Target Market Who Will Never Buy from You?
Hi Don,
You do make a solid point there. A lot of my subscribers are SME owners who are interested in building an online presence for their business. Due to this I also get a lot of questions on how to drive traffic to their sites and how to increase their customer base using these online platforms and how to diversify their revenue sources. A few wanted to know what they can start quickly and easily, and yet love doing. With this kind of business-to-customer client in mind, I wrote this article to help solve their common pain points.
I agree that content has to be exceptional. Its the only way to establish yourself as an expert and find customers who are willing to pay, whether its a B2B or B2C. And in cases where its a B2B or in many B2C, services and physical products or SaaS is most likely going to be the revenue-generation model (depending on the business).
Thanks for stopping by Don. Your insights are always refreshing. Hope you have a wonderful day too.
Hey Chioma,
Am I the first one to comment here? Well good for me then because this is an awesome post.
If you’re new and just building a business online you have to be realistic. I tell my clients this all the time too. I think because they’re heard here and there throughout time about how easy it is to make money online that they continue to believe it. Back when I started I will admit it was a lot easier but it’s 20105 and people aren’t as trusting as they use to be. They have to get to know you first and as you mentioned even with the statistics you shared, you’ll have a much better chance with a repeat customer but you have to get them first.
If you have an aggressive marketing plan you can achieve a lot so much quicker but you also have to know a lot of the right people too. It doesn’t happen for everyone but as per your example with Noah Kagan, it can be done in a quicker amount of time.
You do have to be realistic, you do have to have a plan and you do have to be consistent with your action steps. You will continue to get results though over time but it’s a process. To me though it’s the only one that really works because when you make your customers happy, they’ll want to continue buying from you. When you don’t you’ll quickly lose them to your competitor and no one wants that.
Really great share, thanks for all the examples and tips you’ve given us. Can’t wait to share this one with my friends and readers as well.
Have a marvelous end of your week Chioma.
~Adrienne
Adrienne recently posted…What Cruising and Building Relationships Have in Common
Hi Adrienne,
Its really good to have you here. I am glad you enjoyed the post.
You are right about setting realistic projections for a new business. Because this can make or break you. The Internet is awash with many bogus promises that once you start any online business, you will be smiling to the bank in weeks. I have even seen an advert that promises you will be able to make 1000s of dollars in hours if you just buy some ebook. When people hear this, they get the wrong idea about online business, which eventually leads to disappointment and ultimately (in some cases) an abandonment of the online business.
And networking is extremely important like you also mentioned in your post “What Cruising and Building Relationships have in Common”. For any business to produce fast results, you must know the right people. I really enjoyed your last post and I greatly recommend that every serious entrepreneur reads it.
Thanks so much for sharing my post. and thanks for stopping by too. Do have a wonderful weekend, Adrienne.
Hello Chioma, you can’t imagine how happy i am after reading this post, i run this web design service but the problem am having is convincing clients to work with me.
I also run an entertainment blog can, I use same techniques to keep my readers?
Thank you.
Saminu Eedris recently posted…WOW! Bouncing camera that relays pictures to your mobile device
Hi Eedris,
Welcome to my blog. Yes you can use the same techniques for your entertainment blog. I checked out your blog and I believe the most viable methods of income generation for you are Ads (whether google ads or sponsored ads like Linda Ikeji who is paid hefty sums just for an advert slot). To be able to hit it big with this model, you need to drive a massive amount of targeted traffic to your website: here are my suggestions for your entertainment blog:
1. Compile a list of the top 20 entertainment blogs in the Nigeria. These blogs must have social engagement like comments and a sizable amount of shares.
2. Start following these blogs on all their social media platforms.
3. Comment on most of their posts. Make sure your comment stands out and attracts attention. If it is permitted, you can drop your link in your comments.
4. Aim to guestpost for these blogs. Since these blogs are hugely popular, you want their fans to start taking note of you.
5. Insert Facebook retargeting pixels in your blog posts. This is so that anybody that visits your blog from another blog will be captured by this retargeting pixel.
6. Run Facebook ads to only those who have visited your blog. This is where the retargeting pixel becomes so important. When you run ads to people who have visited your blog, they are 70% more likely to visit again. Using this method I have had remarkable results (sometimes as cheap as 1 cent per click). You can start with $1 to see how this works for you.
7. Make sure your blog content stands out. Make it more interesting and yet say it in fewer words and more images (that’s what entertainment audience like.)
8. To keep your readers and make them return often, consider giveaways and quizzes. Also make sure you have a captivating lead magnet. ‘Sign up for free weekly updates’ might not be enough to get their emails.
Using these methods would improve your traffic and hence earning potential from Ads.
For your web design service, I will recommend building a portfolio of projects then getting testimonials from satisfied clients. If you don’t have an impressive portfolio yet, consider freelancing on sites like Elance, Odesk, Guru. Yes its very competitive in those sites and the money might not be the best when you are starting out, but you want to build a portfolio first. Once you have 5 brilliant testimonials on your profile, you can begin to increase your rates or go awesomeweb.com to get better jobs at better rates. Do this for a while, then come back to your homefront or locality and when you approach clients you show them jobs you have done for foreign individuals/firms. This will make it easier for you to convince them. I say this because in my experience in the information technology field, nothing moves clients better than an impressive portfolio.
Hope these tips help you. Do have a wonderful day.
wow. i can’t believe u said all that just like that. u are terrific. i saw u on aha-now.com and followed up immediately. i love what you are doing here. i feel like a newbie, honestly. hope to learn and catch up as much as and as fast as i can. kudos
Hi Toby,
I am thrilled to know you are an Ahaian too. Thanks for your kind words too.
I hope the strategies outlined here help you a lot.I would love to know the results you get. Also if there is any way I can help, you can always reach out to me.
Thanks for stopping by, Toby. Do have a wonderful day.
I loved the work you did here. I headed to Buzzsumo right after this post, since I did not know about this free service one can use to reverse engineer popular and sharable posts.
keep up the good work
Hi Andreea,
Welcome to my blog. I am glad you enjoyed the post. Yes, Buzzsumo is a powerful tool. I use it myself for most of my posts.
Thanks for your kind words and do have a wonderful day.
Hey Chioma,
It’s my first time here and Gosh this article is way too awesome! I came across your name on Enstine Muki’s blog and then few minutes back on Adrienne Smith’s.
I really love the article, very solid and insightful and I must confess that I have gained a brand new knowledge from it.
Looking forward to reading more of your work!
Do have a wonderful evening Chioma 🙂
~Jackson
Jackson Nwachukwu recently posted…It’s My Birthday ~ 20 Things You Might Not Know About Me
Hi Jackson,
I am glad you liked my article and I am honored that you found new insights in it.
We do share some common connection: Enstine’s and Adrienne’s blogs. I visited your blog and loved a lot of the articles you have there. Thanks for stopping by, Jackson. I do hope to see you more often. Do have a splendid evening dear 🙂
First of all what an awesome blog post Chioma!
Your great examples really got my creative marketing juices flowing!
This is my very first visit to your blog.
I discovered while reading the “Magical Monday” post round from
my Coach and Mentor Adrienne Smith’s blog.
I really enjoyed and learned a ton from your very well done and easy to understand,
step by step instructions!You really did a fabulous job working backwards,
making each major goal far more achievable!
Mark recently posted…Increase Sales:Why It Often Doesn’t Cost More Than A Mere 67 Cents Per Lead To Do So!
Hi Mark,
Welcome to my blog. Thanks for your kind words, I am thrilled you enjoyed my post and that it got your creative marketing juices flowing.
I am an ardent follower of Adrienne and I am honored that she featured me on her blog.
I really hope the step-by-step instructions will make a great impact on your marketing efforts. Let me know about the results you get and if there is anyway I can help, you can always reach out to me.
Thanks for stopping by Mark. I look forward to seeing you again. Do have a splendid week 🙂
Hey Chioma,
Wow, I really like this article!
You definitely had my wheels and gears turning as i was reading it. I shared it with one of my friends who happens to have a fashion site and is trying to get his business going.
But I definitely could use some advice on getting more subscribers. My main focus are those people who have a home business but yet don’t have a lot of time on their hands, and yet they use the strategy of blogging to grow their businesses. They are people who are like me.
So I like to up the ante of subscribers and traffic. Right now I feel like I’m moving at a snail’s pace LOL although each week I’m getting better results. I have a couple of ideas in mind, and you gave some nice ones as well. But I’m always open for other solutions.
Thanks for sharing Chioma! I hope you’re enjoying your week!
Sherman Smith recently posted…7 Ways You Can Benefit From Your Competition
Hi Sherman,
Its a joy to have you on my blog again. I am glad you enjoyed my article and thanks for sharing it with your friend too.
I am glad to hear you are getting better results each week. I just checked out your blog contents and here are a few suggestions I think will speed your growth:
1. GuestPosting: I know you have guest-posted for other blogs but I am thinking you should up your ante and go for bigger blogs like Boost Blog Traffic, SmartPassiveIncome, SocialTriggers and for more generic websites like Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, Huffington Post. My reason for this recommendation is because a lot of your target audience hang out there.
2. Use more videos on your posts: Your audience are people that don’t have a lot of time on their hands, hence they are likely to love videos and infographs. Jeff Walker of jeffwalker.com does videos a lot and this resonates with his audience who are mostly SME owners. (Hint hint: Getting featured on his blog will boost your traffic immensely, too.)
3. Maximise the traffic you get: There is a lot that goes into this and Ramsay does an excellent job of showing you how to do this in this post: http://www.blogtyrant.com/blogging-strategy/
4. Do more case studies: Nothing moves your target audience more than case studies. Bear in mind that your target audience is sieged by countless internet marketers who all claim to know how to generate a side income online. Hence this audience has now acclimated to seeing proofs. And proofs are case studies. Ramsey of blogtyrant.com does case studies too and this boosts his subscriber base. Consider adding case studies of past clients who benefited from you or how a certain company benefited from a similar service you offer.
5. Advertise: I added this last because not everyone loves spending money when they are not yet sure of the results they will get. But advertising does work well when you do it strategically. Consider advertising on sites that your target audience hangs out on. I do this and it does bring in nice results.
Hope my tips help you Sherman. Wish you the best on getting more traffic and subscribers. And oh yes, I am enjoying my week 🙂
Do have a splendid week too.
Hi Chioma,
Good to be over on your blog and I’m impressed with your posts. 🙂
Although I’m on a blogging break, but as you are an Ahaian now, I thought I must visit your blog. Coming to your post, I was never into business but have lately started making efforts to start one and what you mention in the post makes sense.
It is definitely important to understand your business, your customers, and then have a practical solid plan with realistic expectations. You need to plan and build a sales funnel and at the same time maintain your best intention to help everybody.
As you mentioned, to reach your 1000 customers milestone, the efforts you make into building relationship is very important. Customer focus is really very important. Once you have that strong a base, you’re good to go.
Thank you Chioma for this detailed and in-depth post on building your business quickly. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Harleena Singh recently posted…Blogging Basics: CRUX of Blogging Tips for New Bloggers
Hi Harleena,
I am really excited to see you on my blog. It means so much that you can spare a moment despite your blogging break and the plethora of tasks you have :). Thanks for your kind words too. They really are encouraging and boosts my zeal to write more unique content.
I believe business should be centered on customers because customers determine whether your business grows or fails. And I am glad you agree too. A lot of new entrepreneurs start their businesses with enthusiasm fueled from unrealistic expectations. While its important to be enthusiastic, it is equally necessary to be realistic or you might be frustrated out of business.
Relationship building is extremely important in business and blogging, because customers only come back to you based on sentimental and emotional attachment to your brand, not because they can’t get what you offer elsewhere. I agree with you that having a strong base built on relationships is a springboard for any business.
Thanks for stopping by and adding value by dropping a wonderful comment. Do have a splendid week too 🙂
Hi Chioma,
You provide some great tips and advise. A real wake up call for some people.
It seems when a lot of people think about going into business for themselves they only think about themselves. Like how it would benefit them. But as you said you have to keep your customers happy, they’re the lifeline to your business.
I’m interested to hear your take on converting people to customers.
~Lea
Lea Bullen recently posted…Why You Have to Stop Judging Others to Make a Breakthrough
Hi Lea,
Welcome to my blog. I do agree there is a big misconception about business; most people go into business thinking only of what they will benefit but it never works that way. Think first of how you can serve a customer and every other part will be easier.
Converting people to customers can be tricky but it is based on one principle: Get their trust!
When Bryan Harris launched his product “Get 10,000 subscribers”, a lot of people were a bit apprehensive about the membership course. Top on everyone’s mind was “will he be able to deliver on what he promises?”
He shattered all these doubts, sold the 262 memberships and made $220,750. How? He wrote all about it in this post: http://blog.videofruit.com/online-course-sell
One thing you will notice is that when his course was open for enrollment, he ran an experiment that implemented some of the strategies in his course. And the experiment got results! This convinced a lot of people that his course works, created trust and led to many sales even though his course was high-priced.
To convert people to customers, especially if you are a coach, show them that your course works! Do you have past clients who implemented your strategies and got stellar results? Get a testimonial from them (especially in video format as video converts the highest). However, this strategy only works when you have shown your authority or expertise in a niche.
Hope this tip works for you. Let me know the results you get.
Hi Chioma
Very interesting post and I must say that your tips are spot on.
I enjoyed the post and learned a lot of techniques.
Thanks for sharing. Have a lovely week.
ikechi recently posted…Be An Inspiration: A Cartoonist Turns 609 Rejections into A Success Story
Hi Ikechi,
Its such a pleasure to have you on my blog. Glad you enjoyed my post. Your words give me encouragement to crank out more posts.
Thanks for stopping by. Do have a splendid week too.
Hi Chloma.
I came over to your site from Adrienne’s blog post for Magical Monday.
What an amazing blog post you have here walking us through How To Get Your First 1,000 Customers. I even took notes.
I think It’s all about attracting the right people to us using your methods. How to build a customer base takes a lot of time that I need to do all the footwork to achieve this. I have to set realistic goals so I don’t set myself up for failure. What you have done here is failure proof. I can’t fail if I take your advise. We do need to set goals that are challenging. I have to learn how to promote myself and go out and hunt my customers down. It’s sound advise to stick with one goal at a time and it’s so true the customer comes first.
Thank you and you have a wonderful holiday,
Linda
Linda Schrier recently posted…Three Ways To Get Yourself Back On Track
Hi Linda,
Welcome to my blog. I am glad to hear you came over from Adrienne’s blog. Adrienne is an expert I have high regard for. I have learnt a lot from her and I am honored that she featured me in her roundup.
You are right, Linda. Its all about attracting people using the right strategies which, more often than not, involves a lot of work. To ensure you don’t get frustrated during the process, it is important to get realistic goals (not too easy, not almost impossible but challenging nonetheless). Promoting yourself is crucial to finding your customers but to achieve this well, you must build relationships with the right people.Adrienne is a master at relationship-building (and in my experience I have found relationships bring in the best results)
I would love to know the results you get from implementing these strategies. Also if you need help you can always reach out to me.
Thanks for stopping by, Linda. Do have a splendid day 🙂
I followed you from Enstine’s blog.
I must say you’ve worked quite hard for building this blog. Awesome content and loyal reader base.
This article is wonderful as well.
I’ll be visiting this blog on a regular basis now.
Rachit recently posted…The 10 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
Hi Rachit,
Welcome to my blog. Thanks for your kind words. I do put in a lot of effort to develop content that will genuinely help my readers and I am glad you enjoyed this article. I look forward to seeing you often.
Hi Chioma, what a great post! Thank you for taking the time to put it together. I find a lot of bloggers struggle to make money because of point one, they have no idea what their product is in order to create content that will generate interest in it! I love your example for fashion bloggers, and I’ll reference your post in my upcoming Fashion and Beauty blogging challenge.
Sarah Arrow recently posted…How to use buying guides to make money from your blog
Hi Sarah,
Welcome to my blog. You are right about a lot of bloggers being confused about what they will sell on their blogs or how they will monetize their blogs. This confusion shows in the type of content they produce, like you mentioned. I always advise new bloggers, who are confused about this to figure out their ideal reader persona, then focus on building relationships with influencers and their blog readers first. As their traffic picks up, they can run surveys or ask their readers directly what problems they have or even observe which bog posts outperform the rest. This can help in determining the monetization model to use that won’t backfire in the end.
Thanks for stopping by, Sarah. Feel free to reference my blog post (I am honored that you will 🙂 ). Do have a splendid day too.
Hello Chioma Anozie,
It’s is the dream of every business owner to complete the target of 1000 customers as early as possible. The tips you provided here are awesome especially i inspired by your point that Writing and selling a fashion ebook. This would help a lot who are dealing in fashion industry.
Regards,
Ovais Mirza
Ovais Mirza recently posted…WhatsApp Plus and How to Install it Without Getting Banned
Hi Ovais,
Welcome to my blog. Yes, it is the dream of every business owner to get to the 1000 customers milestone. To achieve this, though, can be tricky and requires the right strategy. Ebooks are an awesome way to monetise certain blogs (not all though). It can be really helpful for those in the fashion industry.
Thanks for stopping by. Look forward to seeing you again.
✿ Hi, Chioma,
This is my first visit to your blog, and I’m glad I came.
Your post is excellent, and I enjoyed reading it.
Most definitely! I’ve seen the mentality of folks just starting out who think that as long as they’re willing to open their wallet and invest in a course, program or product, that the money will automatically start flying into their bank account. So sad! That investment is the very beginning, as we all know…
Things have changed a lot over the years I’ve spent online, and I try to warn and educate folks to the best of my ability. Folks are so discouraged that they often quit before ever really giving it a good try.
Boy, do I agree with your ‘Customers come first’ point – and how! We’ve been entrepreneurs/business owners for 30+ years, so we live, eat and breathe that mantra!
Love Buzzsumo – use it every week. Great share overall, Chioma, and I’ll be spreading the word! Thanks so much.
Have a great afternoon.
Carol Amato
P.S. Love the visuals, great site!
Carol Amato recently posted…10 Best (and Legitimate) Work-at-Home Jobs
Hi Carol,
I am so glad to see you here. I have read many of your articles and your experience overflows from them.
You are right about people expecting money to fly into their bank account a few days after opening a blog, simply because they bought a course, program or product. Unfortunately, that never happens. This is because operating a blog (or any other business) takes time, good ol’ effort, dedication and patience. Many entrepreneurs abandon their businesses less than a year after starting it up due to the unrealistic expectations they set.
I am glad you agree with “Customers come first”. Its my byline in every interaction or business I conduct. I have seen a lot of new entrepreneurs that get this wrong. They believe a good product sells itself so even if they don’t treat their customers right, the customers will still come right back because of the ‘good product’ they sell. I try to let them know that unless they are the only ones selling that stuff on planet earth, that belief is wrong. Most times, in my experience, I have found that customers come back to you, not because you are the only one selling a product or because your product is the best in the market. No. They come back because they enjoyed doing business with you. They come back because of the relationship they have with you.
I love Buzzsumo too. It takes a lot of guessing out of the work of blogging.
Thanks for the kind words about my site :). Do have a wonderful day too, Carol.
First time over here Chioma! Hi!
Love how you explained things and i appreciate the effort it took to finish a post like this complete with images and all.
I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs lately that just think of buying a domain name, creating a site and cash will roll in by itself.
They dont think about how they get those eyeballs/traffic in. It’s crazy 😀
Customer Service is definitely key. That’s something I have honed over the past years. When something goes wrong, great customer service can settle things pretty quickly.
A bit late but I found you on Adrienne and Enstine’s blogs so I HAD to drop by! 🙂
Dennis Seymour recently posted…Google Penalty Recovery: Identify Your Penalty and Recover from Panda, Penguin and Manual Penalties
Hi Dennis,
Its a pleasure to have you here 🙂
You are right about the time it took to write this post. It took an awful lot, because I had to sandwich my writing time with other tasks I have lined up daily. It took 3 days, if you add the research time. But I believe in creating quality posts or not bothering at all (maybe that’s the reason I don’t have a millions articles on my blog yet. lol 😀 )
I do have interactions with entrepreneurs regularly and I have come to realise too, that many of them think if you build a website, the traffic will come and the cash will roll in (just like you said). This couldn’t be further from the truth. One of them once told me, “Blogging is easy. What is difficult about writing some articles that people like? Just a couple of minutes work!”
My jaw literally dropped at that point!
Customer Service is a strong factor in determining if your customer base grows. If you are displeasing your current customers, there is no way they are recommending you to anybody. You are right, great customer service can fix things pretty quickly.
Thanks for dropping by. I did enjoy your visit too 😉
hello; you did an awesome job on this post about growing your customers. I thought maybe it might overwhelm the new bloggers and that there was so much information in it that it could have easily been a multi part post. Lots of good stuff in there. thanks for sharing max
maxwell ivey recently posted…First Monday Finds Kirsty Major
Thanks for your kind words Maxwell. It is a pleasure to see you on my blog.
The information in this post might be so much but I one of the reasons I wrote it is so it can serve as a guide. I would encourage any new blogger to bookmark it and come back to it whenever they need some guidance/answers.
Thanks for stopping by Max. Really enjoyed your visit. Do have a splendid day too.
Hi Chioma,
Classic!
This is kind of post one needs to bookmark for feature reading and for reference purposes. Lots of practical useful advices that are applicable in the real world.
Setting goals and having an end dates for their achievement is a step in the right path. Like you rightly said, we should set goals that are realistic and attainable base on our current status, this I think many who set goals fails to understand.
Some go about setting goals that is too far fecth for them to achieve, therefore they ended up frustrated.
Thanks for sharing, and I commend the efforts you put into publishing this post.
Shamsudeen recently posted…10 Effective Guest Blogging Tips I Learned on 8 Different Blogs In 2014
Hi Shamsudeen,
Welcome to my blog. Thanks for your kind words. I do agree with you that setting goals is crucial to any business and those goals must be realistic or the entrepreneur will be frustrated. I always encourage people to set realistic goals and measure their results.
Thanks for your encouragement too :). Do have a fantastic Thursday.
Hi Chioma.
Thanks for the informative post. I believe this is my second time
reading this one. I thought I had left a comment, but it looks like I didn’t.
What this post has done is made me realize that I still have work to do as far as
setting business goals like the amount of visitors, subscribers and customers per month,
and creating the appropriate marketing plan to reach them.
I will be adding this post to my list of favorites and I will be sharing it.
Thanks again for the great post.
Have a great weekend…….Chris
Chris DeeWaard recently posted…A Simple Flute Lesson For Internet Marketers
Hi Chris,
Nice to meet you here. I am glad you picked a few lessons from the post. I agree with you that it is very important you set business goals for your website/blog. And a marketing plan will help you achieve your goals by helping you see the targets you are meeting and the areas you are falling short of that need more effort. In the end, a business is meant to generate revenue and the easiest way to make sure it does that is to be able to measure the results you get with the efforts you put in.
Thanks for sharing. I am glad you stopped by. Do have a splendid weekend too.
Hi
Nice sharing
One way to get 1000 customers is to diversify your traffic generation tactics.
Don`t stick with one or two. Always keep in mind that you should look for some new marketing methods for bringing targeted costumers to your business.
Thanks a lot
Best Wishes
Omar
Omar Saady recently posted…Empower Yourself by Starting a Home Business Part-Time
Hi Omar,
I do agree with you, that diversifying sources of traffic generation increases the possibility of getting 1000 customers. But even when diversifying your traffic source, you must be sure that you are still promoting your brand/product on mediums where your target audience hangs out. For instance, it wouldn’t make sense to promote beef sausages in a vegan community. As you mentioned, new marketing methods must always focus on bringing in targeted customers.
Thanks for visiting, Omar. I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts and look forward to hearing them again.
But
Chioma Anozie recently posted…10 steps you should take to become successful in life
Hi Chioma, I must confess this is a great post and I love the way you use the buzzsumo app, Very clever. I also make use of the app to find ideas but in a very different way if you wont mind I shared my strategy in this post “The Secret of Viral Blog Post for Unlimited Traffic” I hope you find it interesting too.
Found out about your blog on my friend Sherman Smith blog “My Top 6 Posts For The Months Of July And August” Nice blog you have here and I think I will visit more often now.
Adegoke Ajayi recently posted…9 Keys To Blog Business Success
Hi Adegoke,
Thanks for your kind words. I use Buzzsumo and Ahrefs, but mostly buzzsumo. I use these tools to find out popular blog topics and also use them to discover who I can approach to share my blog posts. So it a must-have tool for any serious blogger (can’t recommend it enough). For this article though I was targeting fashion bloggers who probably have an online store, that’s why I left the influencer sharing out.
Sherman is a good coach and a true inspiration. Glad to know you read his blog too. I would be happy to see you here more often. And I will be checking out your blog soon. Do have a wonderful week.