Making money from your online business is one of the best feelings ever, but what most people want to know more about is how to scale their online business to make a full-time income. 

After all, preparing your small business for the future isn’t easy to do if you don’t know how to scale. It can not only damage your long-term service quality but stagger your performance in the long run. 

Therefore, in this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about the 10 ways you can scale your online business.

Plan ahead 

As you’re going to build your business, you’ve probably heard the word “plan” endless amounts of times. There’s a reason it’s mentioned so often, no matter which stage your business is, you can’t be successful if you don’t plan ahead. 

In order to plan ahead, you need to set realistic goals for your business growth. These can be monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals. It not only gives you time to prepare for what’s coming, it helps you find the necessary resources to succeed in your next growth stages. 

The most popular planning method includes the SMART approach, which stands for: 

1. Specific: What needs to be accomplished? Who is responsible for accomplishing these goals? What steps need to be taken to achieve your goals? 
2. Measurable: Being able to measure your goals allows you to track your progress and know when you’ve reached your final destination. 
3. Achievable: Your goals should be realistic. Can your team accomplish the set goals you have? 
4. Relevant: You need to know why you are setting goals and if they are realistic. 
5. Time-bound: In order to measure your success, it’s important that you have a time horizon. When will the team create and implement the tasks you’ve identified? When can they finish the set tasks? 

The SMART framework can help you attain and set your goals, regardless if they are large or small. 

Create a sales strategy 

Increasing your sales should be your priority when it comes to scaling your online business. This means to either increase your number of customers or increase your revenue from your current customers. 

While both options will increase results, deepening your relationship with current customers is always a better strategy to go with. Studies show that customer retention can increase business profits by up to 75%. 

Some great practices you can use to increase your sales are: 

1. Focus on a target market
2. Understand customer behavior on a deeper level
3. Address customer feedback
4. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
5. Create a team of qualified sales representatives 

All of these practices help to continue your excellence in providing high-quality customer services as your business grows. 

Closely monitor your analytics

Monitoring business performance gives you insights into how quickly your business is growing. Sales performance is one of the first metrics you’ll want to analyze and look to scale. How fast are your sales growing and what is making them grow faster? 

Important growth metrics to measure include: 

1. Conversion rates: Where do most of your visitors come from? Where are they spending their money the most when purchasing from your website? 
2. Product performance: Which of your products sell the most? Is there any chance to expand your product line? 
3. Lifetime value: Cost Per Acquisition (LTV: CAC): Understand your marketing influence and if the cost of acquiring customers is worth it. 

Analytics provide you with a much stronger pitch for your investors and give you much more confidence about where you are spending your business budget. 

Automate repetitive tasks 

As your business keeps on growing, it’s important to focus on areas that help your business grow and don’t allow you to waste too much time on repetitive tasks. Thanks to technology evolving over time, there are plenty of tools that can help automate repetitive tasks. 

There are different types of automation:

1. Marketing automation: Includes automating tasks like email campaigns, social media posting, and lead generation. 
2. Sales and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) automation: Automated workflows, and automatically generating reports for sales performance, customer interactions, and revenue metrics that allow you to make data-driven decisions. 
3. Customer support automation: Chatbots that are available 24/7, and automated ticket assignments. 
4. Accounting and finance automation: Automated expense tracking, tax preparation, invoice automation, payment reminders, and financial reporting. 
5. Inventory and order management automation: Order processing automation, inventory management, and automatic inventory updates. 
6. HR and payroll automation: Automating the onboarding process, payroll calculations, tax filing, and direct deposits. 
7. Task and project management automation: Managing team workflows, recurring task automation, reminders, and task assignment automation. 

Depending on which category you are part of, it’s important to find the right tools in your industry and automate repetitive tasks that are taking too much of your time. 

After all, time is the most important thing you can have, so using it wisely is important when running a business. 

Upsell or cross-sell your product and service 

When trying to increase your revenue, a simple way to scale your profits is by using the upsell and cross-sell methods. Upselling encourages customers to purchase more expensive items, while cross-selling involves promoting similar products to your customers. 

For example, if you buy a mobile phone, upselling is when you get upsold to buy a more expensive version of that mobile phone brand with more features. A good example of cross-selling, on the other hand, would include if you sold a mobile phone case along with the mobile phone purchased. 

55% of sales professionals claim that up-selling and cross-selling are great opportunities for business growth. Therefore, take advantage of your opportunities and use them to scale your business. 

Create a booking page 

One of the easiest ways to scale your online business is to make sure you increase your conversion ratio. This means increasing the ratio of visitors to your website vs the amount of paying customers who purchase your product or service. 

Even if you have many visitors on your website, if your booking page isn’t solid, this won’t mean anything. Luckily enough, you don’t need to be a tech specialist to create a high-quality booking page. There are plenty of tools that allow you to do so, but you always want to make sure that your booking page allows the following:  

1. Scheduling video calls 
2. Hosting online classes 
3. Booking online coaching sessions
4. Scheduling appointments and group meetings
5. Booking conference rooms 

Integrating online booking into your online business will make you look more professional and save you time from manually booking clients. 

Optimize your financial planning 

Your financial statements are important for scaling your online business. Balance sheets provide an overview of your assets and liabilities. Income statements will show how profitable your business is over time, and cash flow statements show your liquidity. 

If you are just getting started, and are on a tight budget, you can always seek funding options: 

1. Crowdfunding: Completed through online platforms and includes borrowing money from backers, which you can repay with interest. 
2. Angel investors: Wealthy individuals who will fund your business if they see potential in it. 
3. Friends and family: If you have wealthy family members, it’s always a good idea to reach out and see how they can help you in your entrepreneurship journey. 
4. Venture capitalists (VCs): VCs can provide you with large funds, but only if they see that your business has large growth potential. 
5. Governmental grants: Not applicable to everyone, but you’ll need to see if your local government has any grants they offer for startups. 

The tricky part many entrepreneurs struggle with is trying to convince investors to fund them. Your goal here is to create a pitch deck that includes: 

1. Your value proposition
2. Marketing opportunities and target audience
3. Business model and revenue streams 
4. Team achievements and qualifications 

Planning out your future expenses is important for scaling and managing to get the necessary funding from the available options provided. 

Perform a risk assessment analysis 

Risk assessments are great when you want to scale your business because they tell you what to look out for. To conduct an effective risk analysis, it’s important you follow these rules: 

1. Identify potential risks: This includes financial, operational, strategic, and compliance risks. 
2. Conduct a SWOT analysis: Include your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  
3. Create a risk mitigation strategy: Your risk mitigation strategy can be successful based on four factors: risk reduction, avoidance, transfer, and acceptance. You can reduce risk by changing your plans, implementing different practices to minimize the likelihood of it, sharing risk through partnerships, and monitoring low-impact risks. 
4. Create contingency plans: Develop step-by-step procedures for addressing high-priority risks. You can then establish communication protocols and assign responsibilities. 
5. Implement a risk monitoring system: Always update and regularly review your risk assessment. You can establish key risk indicators (KRIs) to track potential issues. 

Following risk assessment strategies helps you minimize potential threat impacts and allows you to scale your business. 

Create online memberships 

Only some businesses will consider this option, but creating memberships is a popular way of scaling your online business. Online memberships are where hosts create content that only members can access. 

Memberships allow members to communicate with each other and have specific access to the host. They are great for providing recurring revenue and are an excellent way to build a strong community, cross-promote, and sell other services. 

Reach global markets

While many business owners are only reaching local audiences, going past these boundaries is what helps your business become popular on an international scale, especially if you are in the e-commerce industry, this is even more important. 

For instance, popular ecommerce platforms like Produkto will offer you cross-border tools so you can sell your product and service to a larger audience by creating localized stores in other countries. 

Depending on the business you are running, you can miss out on huge opportunities to reach a larger audience when you don’t go global. Smaller competitors will always ignore the broader market, so this is an advantage you already have. 

You are now ready to scale your online business

Combining the right strategies and being consistent will have a positive impact on your business. Before you implement these strategies, It’s always important to first ask yourself what audience you are trying to reach, your sales goals, which tasks you are wasting the most time on, and what kind of risk your business is involved in.  

After you answer those questions, you’ll not only be able to create a more positive customer experience but have more time to focus on important tasks. Now that you’ve already learned the tactics required to do so, it’s time to make it happen!