How To Grow Your Business And Why: 8 Tips For Online Store Owners

Are you one of those entrepreneurs who were able to launch a dropshipping business and start making money? Congratulations! But what are the best things to do next? Here are several tips on how to grow your business further.

Why you should aim at growing your business

Launching your own independent business is an exciting yet challenging venture. And when you have achieved some long anticipated milestone, resting on your laurels isn’t a good idea for two reasons:

• Obviously, the first reason to expand your enterprise is to earn more money. With more resources to invest, you can expect larger profits.
• Another reason to grow your business is to make it more steady. Everyone knows that even successful companies’ performance can fluctuate a lot if they are dependent on unstable market niches. But large and diversified companies show more consistency and predictability

But how do you grow your business if you’re a dropshipper? In this article, you will find a few tips that can be applied to ecommerce in general and dropshipping in particular.

1. Set clear goals

Before moving on to more precise tips, I’d like to emphasize the importance of setting clear goals. Of course, any successful business owners want to expand their operations and increase the profits they get. But you can’t grow your business in all directions at once.

What you need here is to understand what pain points your online store has, what you do right and what you do wrong. One should also take into account their capabilities and resources to understand what can be fixed or improved.

Clear goals also let you know when you achieve them. For example, if you aim at increasing your organic traffic to 1,000 unique users a day, it’s a clear milestone. In contrast, if you aim at simply making more sales, you don’t know how many sales should be enough or what channels you should use.

So, it’s a good idea to set small and clear objectives and complete them one by one in order to grow your business. If you’re not sure what you can do to improve the business, try looking for ideas among customers’ reviews.

2. Gather analytics

Since you can’t act blindly, you will need clear data on how your dropshipping store performs. Various analytics show traffic sources, buyers’ behavior, the site’s conversion and bounce rate, what pages users visit, etc. Knowing all this, you can decide on what aspects you should concentrate your efforts on.

To analyze your dropshipping website, use Google Analytics. There are also various tools for social media.

Download AliDropship’s free Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce add-on to collect more data on how users behave on your dropshipping website.

3. Stay focused on strong points

While seeking new opportunities for growth is a necessity, it would be a huge mistake to lose sight of your previous achievements. If there’s something that works well for the business, don’t you dare change it – at least not before a careful testing.

For example, if video ads on Facebook bring you a good number of sales, it’s Ok to test new ad formats as well. But giving up on video ads completely would be simply unreasonable. So, when analyzing how your business performs, make sure you understand not only your pain points but strengths as well.

4. Attract new customers

Another obvious way to grow your business is to convince more customers to buy your products.

Even companies that have a stable customer base always seek to expand it as much as possible. To do that, one can either attract more clients from existing sources or try attracting new target audiences.

Dropshipping embraces dozens of niches. Often it’s not a big deal to define your potential customers. For example, if you want to dropship toys, it’s clear that you should focus on children’s parents and other older relatives.

However, AliDropship’s experience with our self-owned stores has shown that sometimes the real audience can be a bit different from what you expect. In other words, even when you do have an audience that actively buys from your store, there still may be other people interested in your products about whom you had no idea.

5. Offer more products

Extending the offer is another efficient business strategy often used for business growth. On the one hand, this move actually carries certain risks. Even after a thorough research, there’s no guarantee new product lines will become popular among new and existing customers. On the other hand, the dropshipping model is less vulnerable to this factor.

After finding a new product, dropshipping business owners don’t have to purchase hundreds of goods in bulk. Instead, they can test the offer which costs much less and either move on with the new product or give up this plan if things don’t go smoothly. In the worst case scenario, you will have to turn off new advertising campaigns as soon as you see they’re not working.

If you don’t want to spend time and money on testing new products, try AliDropship’s Premium Products. After subscribing to this service, you will automatically get a new bestseller imported to your store every week.

In order to grow your business, you can not only add stand-alone products from AliExpress but also change the store’s niche by broadening the offer or going beyond it.

6. Start a blog

Starting a blog or a YouTube channel is a good way to grow your business if you work in a more or less narrow niche. In this case, one can make use of strategies based on content marketing.

You can promote your business by offering potential buyers useful information on a given niche. And it works great in ecommerce since there are many channels to use.

For example, entrepreneurs who sell products for pets can create a blog to tell pet owners how to take care of different animals, how to choose healthy food for them, how to school a dog, etc. Such a blog can not only attract potential customers from Google search but also build a trusting relationship with them, thus promoting your brand.

There are other benefits of using a blog for business as well.

7. Hire a team

Don’t forget about the simplest way to extend your current business, i.e. by hiring people. Simply speaking, even a team of two people can do more than the owner alone. So, paying someone else to do routine tasks can be very beneficial.

One can also employ professionals specializing in different digital marketing jobs such as social media marketing, design, email marketing, SEO, etc. But be careful here.

A skillful professional isn’t cheap. In addition, hiring one doesn’t guarantee success, so this step carries certain risks. Besides, there’s always a chance to employ an incompetent guy who just knows how to throw dust into eyes.

8. Launch more dropshipping stores

Finally, if you have succeeded with one dropshipping store and have gained valuable experience, consider launching another one. Some AliDropship’s customers have several websites in different niches. Some entrepreneurs make their living by building and selling ready businesses.

Just like companies get bigger by opening subsidiary enterprises, you can grow your business by launching new dropshipping websites.

To do that, you can either purchase the AliDropship plugin and build a new store on your own or get a ready store that suits your preferences best.

How to grow your business: Bottom line

Expanding your business is always risky and requires investments. On the other hand, being able to expand means you have already built a business that generates stable income, which means you can afford it. All you need to do is be careful and consistent. Don’t tumble over yourself and don’t abandon strategies that already work for your business.

Here were the most important tips on how to grow your business. But one can also improve the performance of a dropshipping website by using AliDropship’s add-ons, various tools designed to enhance different aspects of your business.