Looking for scalable business ideas? Many businesses are limited by their structure, not because they aren’t scalable but because they are awkward to scale. Take a physical store, for example. Staff, checkout tills and the physical size of the store are all limiting factors which can limit its growth. An online business, on the other hand, can scale up much more quickly. Automation is the best factor in a scalable business. Once automation is in place, you can scale up much more easily.
Scalable Business Ideas
Why is an online business the best model for scalable business ideas? An online business can be scaled quickly and easily due to automation. This is especially true of digital products. Digital products are available online and are either downloaded over the internet or accessed through a website. This means the whole process of buying a product and delivering it is completely automated. Advertising too, can be automated. Online advertising can be scaled up once a profitable model is found. What’s good too is that you can start from a tiny budget with an online advertising program.
Digital Products
Digital products are good but what if you don’t have any? Do you need your own digital products or can you use someone else’s? Affiliate marketing is a business model which let’s you benefit from the sale of other people’s products. The are thousands of digital products available to sell over the internet. You can also sell physical products too, without having to personally own them or deal with any customers.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best tools available to online marketers. It lets you quickly scale your business by collecting thousands of email addresses and delivering digital products directly to people via email. By building a list of subscribers and delivering the right products to them, you can scale up your business very quickly. As your email list grows so does your profit. Scaling up your list is a matter of increasing your advertising budget after first testing and measuring it to achieve a profitable outcome.
Scalable Small Business Ideas
A completely online business can be easily scaled because all the components within it are totally automated. A traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business has a few limitations which hold it behind a fully automated online business:
- It’s physical location – There is a limited number of potential customers willing to travel to the store
- The size of the building – Can only hold a certain amount of customers at any one time
- The process of payment – Is limited by the speed of the checkout process and number of checkouts
- The number of staff – More staff equals more costs too
An online business doesn’t have these kinds of limitations because:
- Products are available globally – Digital products can be downloaded from anywhere in the world
- There’s no need for business premises – Everything is online and you only need access to the internet
- Payment is all online – Website sales systems accept multiple processes at once from anywhere
- You don’t need any staff – Systems and software allow you to automate everything without the need for employees
Scalable Advertising
Landing pages allow you to take information and keep contact with your potential customers. Once in the sales funnel, products can be delivered directly over the internet. Building a list of subscribers is  a major key to many scalable business ideas. Sending more people to the landing page, where the information is collected is the first step. This can be done with online advertising.
Online advertising is also called direct response advertising and it works very well. By starting with a small budget you can test and measure every element of your advertising campaign. Once a profitable campaign is running, you can scale up by turning up your daily spend. Add multiple methods of online advertising by repeating the same process with another advertising platform.
Scalable Business Ideas – Back End Products
Once you have sold a digital product through your sales funnel that’s not the ‘end’ of the process. By having the right products you can earn again and again from one single sale. By choosing digital products which also have subscriptions, high ticket commissions, back end sales and multi-tier sales, you have much greater ‘leverage’ and ability to scale your business. Of course you can sell the same front end product again and again to new customers. But having the back end of your sales system ‘geared’ like this gives you more opportunity to generate more income.
Building a system like this of your own is very difficult. Fortunately you can use a pre-existing system just like this one. Learn how here.
Advertising On The Internet
Online advertising deserves another mention here because it is the crux of many scalable business ideas. Online advertising is now very sophisticated and anyone can learn how to use it. Adwords (Google’s search driven advertising platform) lets you target specific keywords which people search for every day. Find customers immediately and send them to your website by setting up a campaign. Facebook has great advertising platform which lets you ‘laser’ target your potential customers down to their likes, interests, age and various other demographics.
The Power Of Direct Response Marketing
Direct response marketing is what many online businesses use to scale up their business. Starting with a tiny budget and a small daily spend, marketers can test adverts by sending people to landing pages and sales funnel. By measuring the results they can determine whether an advert is profitable or not.
Split Testing
Split testing two adverts against each other is a superb method of finding the ‘winning’ advert. By choosing two very similar adverts and running them together with only a minor difference, advertisers can observe the difference in outcome. If one advert performs better than another, the poor performing advert is dropped and the ‘winner’ is split tested again.
By using this tactic again and again, online marketers eventually ‘tune’ in to profitable campaigns which cost the least and make the most profit. Once this is achieved they scale up by increasing their budget. Online marketers have been known to spend thousands per day on advertising, knowing their profit is guaranteed and after a lot of split testing.Â
Small changes in the adverts might be things like:
- Header of the advert
- Images
- Keywords used
- Description of the advert
- Landing pages
- Sales pages
- Target audience for the advert, etc.
Learn more about online advertising in my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing. Or get 10 pages free by signing up to my email series.