At What Point Should You Take Your Small Business to the Next Level?

You launched your digital project some time ago and after ups and downs and a lot of doubts, you have managed to reach a point where you feel that the time has come: that’s the time to move to the next step.

But how do you take your small business to the next level?

If you made this question recently, you are already in a position where you need to start planning on your next steps.
Here my 5 steps to take to move your small business to the next level.

1. Grow your audience

2. Monetize

3. Set goals

4. Grow your audience with Podcasts

5. Learn new skills

1. Grow your audience

Rely on a Social Media Manager!

Maybe it's time to hire some social media expert so you can better focus on what you do best: your job! Consider the possibility of relying on small agencies that take care of the social media part (Phobe by Buro 155 is the best).

2. Make some money!

Made it this far? Great! Now let’s talk about how to start getting some returns:

Affiliates

Getting paid a commission for the sales made using affiliate links is a fantastic way to start earning money from recommendations. You can start making a list of brands/businesses that you could set up affiliate partnerships with. For example, use Amazon Affiliates if you recommend physical products and consider looking for an affiliate program should you recommend a platform or services (sometimes, you simply need to type [name of the service] + [Affiliate] to find affiliate programs and then simply fill in your request.

Sponsored Content

If you’ve reached the point where you have an audience that follows you and is genuinely interested in reading your updates and referring to your expertise, you might want to consider starting to sell space on your website to other brands that might be interested in your audience. Make sure these brands are in line with you and your branding and are brands your audience might also be interested in as it’s vital to establish an authentic trust relationship with your audience.

Shop

Another great way to make some money is by creating and selling merchandise once you have a solid fanbase. On-Demand Warehousing and Fulfillment service is the perfect way to test your products’ demand without spending money. Printful is another great option.

3. Set goals:

Think about it, there was a moment when your entire project was only in your mind, there was no website, social media, or money from it. And look at you now.

Do you start getting what we are capable of if we just want to? 

Now try to really imagine where you would like to be in one year from now.
Write a list of goals as tangible as possible regarding the number of people who you want to interact with on social media, the % of income increase, how many new customers you would like to have, how many articles you’d like to write, or how many partnerships to close in 6 months.

Be concrete and start from macro-areas - once you have clarified your goals (financial and business growth), try to decline them one at a time and then list everything you can do to reach them.

Making lists is also a splendid way to manifest things, it helps us to visualize, to fully live something that doesn’t exist yet (remember what we discuss above? The moment when this project was only in our dreams?)

4. Grow your audience with podcasts:

A great way to spread around our brand and our projects is to talk about us around and create connections - so why not considering Podcasts?

But how can we get invited as guests to talk about our business? I'll tell you a secret: small podcasts can't wait to be able to schedule interviews in advance and moreover there are matchmaker-like platforms or agencies that take care of everything.

All you have to do is sit down and tell their audience about your business.

5. Learning 

Every time we feel that there is a further step to take or a change that we sniff in the air, it means that the current situation we’re living in has become our routine and in one way or another we must evolve, move on to the next step.

(Whenever this happens to me I always picture this as the next level of a video game - would you stay in the same video game level if you’ve found all the coins and unlocked all the doors?)

Therefore, when we feel this need to move over, the next level that will follow will certainly be more difficult and tedious and we must be prepared.

Learn something new that will serve you at the next level, find a course that can help you or can help your clients.

Now you have a minimum of visibility on what is always requested by your customers, try to invest in that knowledge, in that specific skills.
You don't necessarily have to immerse yourself in an intensive 9-week Bootcamp, it's also okay to simply buy a book and learn more about a specific topic, the important thing is that when your small business faces more important challenges, you are ready to level up.