A few months ago I was sitting around a boardroom table with a bunch of entrepreneurs. All that own e-commerce sites. And they the topic for the day was how we going to 10x our website and our business, we really want to grow our business exponentially in the next 12 months. The whole theme was around this 10x thing. And we see it online… get 5,000 more visitors… get 40,000 more visitors… find untapped traffic… all of that crap you see around the around the web in advertising. Does it actually work? Well in our experience we’ve only seen exponential growth on at a really large scale and a few times, and we’ve been in this game for a very very long time… so what are the ingredients that go together to really try and achieve that 10x. It is possible! But you’ve got to have a bit of luck you have been in the right industry and have a few different things bubbling along to make it work. What are some of those elements?
I’ll outline what those elements are… so the first one is the crack cocaine of the web and the advertising industry, and that’s pouring money into paid advertising, paid advertising on Google and Facebook… they just love it.. Google loves it… Facebook loves it. The key to it is you’ve got to convert the traffic, so you can spend a lot of money but I only convert a very small number so how does that work in our conversion game are you going to get 10x growth perhaps you can but your products value versus your conversion versus your acquisition cost need to work to make that work together.
What’s the next thing that builds into that process, well, you need to really focus on your UX, your User Experience. Can you really ‘convert’ all those people on your website? You need to look at your website, how are you converting those people, how are you getting them to buy your product… so we call that UX, User Experience and conversion optimization is worth looking at as well. The third one we’re going to work through these pretty quickly because the seventh one is the secret.
The third one is SEO. Not only if you don’t want to pay for ads you want to get to the top of search rankings you know that page one of Google you want to be visible for the particular topic or search key terms for your product and website you need to focus on SEO on-page and off-page building those backlinks as well as making sure the content on your page is really focused. You can spend a crap ton of time on SEO will it get you 10x potentially gets you two or three times growth depending on your niche and how competitive your industry is very very hard, but very much worth the effort.
The fourth one and how do you work on this SEO is really with content. Content is king still, so let’s really think about what content are you doing videos are you doing written content how engaging are you doing that and making that to attract more eyeballs to your site.
Never forget connecting all this content into the fifth one which is “social”… and I’m also going to combine email traffic in this as well so social is huge! Get the right channel with the right audience, you can absolutely explode the numbers of people viewing your site or your product. The key to it is is finding that channel. You know, is it going to work for a lot of b2b it doesn’t work, for consumer based products you can get some great leverage inside those social channels.
We should never forget about offline as well… so TV and radio for example we’ve seen a lot of clients who do delve into area get some big numbers of traffic and some really good conversions out of that.
The biggest secret, the biggest explosion in your growth your 10x growth if you’re chasing that and I think we all should, is your relationships. I’m going to call it relationship traffic. What is relationship traffic? It is all of those other sites that you can link to, and appear on that already have thousands of visitors. If you have a store on your website you might also leverage an Amazon store or an eBay store or a ads on gumtree or whatever those channels are to where your buyers live. Leveraging other people’s traffic is huge… it’s worth the effort to actually try and find out, and you can do it in services game as well, it doesn’t have to be all product, you can build those key partnerships with other web sites that already have all that traffic and you can just soak it up and get those clicks and offer those complementary services through that.
Now… All that is really good but what is the key ingredient on all of this? In our round-table with entrepreneurs the key ingredient was have a killer product! If you don’t have the product, then you’re not going to attract anyone and convert them in the right way, so focus on really working together with your team, getting a great product together. Create a great value offering: a product or service that people are going to want. It can be very challenging to do that but once you can once you’ve got that product and you’re confident in the value, then you can explore all these and be confident you’re going to convert and make some coin.
