Best Ideas To Grow Your Business for Free.
Today I’m going to share some ideas to grow your business for free. Yes. These are real=life ideas that I have ‘stolen’ from successful businesses and put together to benefit small business owners. Here are some action steps for you to pick and take right away. No research required, no need to test them! Just implement them without having to spend a penny.
Once you have read them, pick any three that sound appealing to you, and don’t hesitate to contact us if you want more information or help implementing them. Working together is the key these days.
Simplify Your Work
Remove the products that are hard to sell. Let the difficult customers go. The world is full of products and buyers. Don’t let yourself be the one to handle the difficult set of both.
Simplify Your Marketing Strategies
Get a website for your company and list all your products there. Get your business and your web site listed in relevant directories. Keep a constant check on your website and be responsive. Let the customers find you online and get in touch with you at the click of a button.
Bill Faster
Constant cash flow makes you feeling and doing better. Your receivables can count for 40 – 50% of your actual assets. Don’t delay your billing process. Send quick bills to receive quick payments. Don’t wait to batch invoices. Bill as soon as you can. The next invoice can follow, even if it is within a week.
Learn to Delegate
Figure out what you do that turns dollars. Then delegate the rest. You cannot handle everything yourself. Even if you can, why bother? The time you save after delegating the useless work, you can spend on earning more. After all, an hour of cleaning the office can never earn you as much as an hour of responding to email. And there are only 24 hours in a day!
Encourage Employees
Let your employees explore more efficient approaches to their tasks. Give them the freedom to try new ways or work in their own way, instead of relying on the standard way of doing things or waiting for you to guide them how to do it. An opinion, advice, or sharing of best practices is always fine. But beyond that, let them decide how to get their work done, as long as it is ethical and the target is achieved.
Remember Your Suppliers
You suppliers have the capability to do a lot of things for you for no charge. They are not your employers and do not get a salary from you, yet, if you care of them and are nice to them, they can solve some problems that none of your employees can. Keep them happy.
Work Faster
Set higher goals and try to achieve them. If you cut off a month from three quarterly jobs, you can do four jobs every year. Now that’s some achievement!
Rewards
This is one thing that you will be really generous about if you are smart. A 5% bonus to an existing employee is cheaper than a 20% increase that you offer to a new joiner. Just give away that 5% bonus to save the 15% every year per employee. Reward your team for meeting budgets and time lines. Cut down on the headcount by automating the non-producing items like ordering and record keeping, accounting, sales reporting, customer care and voice mail.
Be Visible
Let the town know that you exist. Circulate flyers, do road shows and give out freebies. 10% of the budget spent on advertising is better than remaining unknown to the world and not earning the extra 10%. Contact HyperEffects to chart out a tailor-made business marketing strategy for your company and see your business show up on television ads, press releases and on major channel partners. Highlight offers, features, promotions and news in your email footers, invoices and letter signatures. Start social accounts with Twitter.com, Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com and post articles. Go where your audience is on the web. If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then post to those forums. Become a trusted advisor. Get your supporters to refer you.
Media
Offer to be a spokesperson on your specialty when your local media need an expert opinion. Send them a relevant press release every month.
Freebies
Give something valuable away on your web site; at your front counter; when you send out your invoices; when you deliver goods. This should be free to you, but valuable to the recipient, for example, coupons.
