Do you know how you can grow your online business? Many marketers focus so much on getting new customers as if this is the only way of growing their businesses. Little do they know that it’s actually the most costly and time-consuming method of growing their businesses. Focusing on existing customers to build your business by coming up with various ways for them to buy more and more often is actually the quickest and cheapest way to grow your online business and to increase your income.

That said, I would like to draw your attention on 3 proven ways of growing your online business, which include getting new customers, selling more to existing customers and selling more often to existing customers. Do you do that? Well let’s focus on one by one to throw more light on the importance of learning to grow your online business with the three methods.

1. Getting new customers.

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As already pointed out, getting new customers to grow your online business is the hardest and time-consuming method. Persuading new customers to buy from you requires you to do a lot in terms of marketing and advertising.

People do not easily buy from strangers. For you to convince them, it really takes time. You need to build your online credibility and believability through applying proven ways of presenting yourself as an expert in your field of specialization, to outcompete your competitors. This is time-consuming and is one reason why new marketers find it difficult to break through. Focusing on getting new customers without having a clear plan to maintain old ones is another reason why some marketers fail to grow their online businesses.

While getting new customers is very important to grow your online business, you need also to focus on maintaining them so as not to waste the resources you invested in getting them. Learn techniques of getting new customers and maintaining them to grow your online business.

2. Selling more to existing customers.

It’s very easier to grow your online business with existing customers than getting new ones. This is because they already know you and know your products. Because they have already used your products, even when you introduce new products it’s easy to convince them to buy.

Your responsibility now is to create various ways for them to buy more and more from you. You can do this through introducing various promotional programs that will persuade them to buy as they see the benefit of buying again from you.

For instance, if you have 4 customers, who buy products equivalent to $50 each per month, you earn $2,400 from them in a year. If you work hard to get 4 extra customers within the same year, who can also spend on average $50 per month, you will earn $ 4,800 from your 8 customers (4 old & 4 new customers). But if you get 4 new customers and encourage the four old customers to spend 50% more, your revenue will jump from $ 4,800 to $ 6,000 in a year. Do you see how fast you will have grown your business by directing your energy on both old and new customers?

In the example above, what you have done is to increase what your old customers buy from you by 50% and this is what is known as the TRANSACTION VALUE. Always focus on your old customers by coming up with ways of increasing their transaction value to grow your online business. Will you do that?

3. Selling more often to existing customers.

Growing your online business will largely depend on how often each of your customers buys from you. This is very important. You need to come up with ways to keep them coming back to buy from you.

Let me illustrate this by building on the same example above. If each of the 4 old customers you have spent $50 per month, you would earn $2,400 in 12 months. But if you worked harder to encourage them to increase their transaction value by 50%, each customer would spend $75 per month and you would earn $3,600 within one year. If the 4 customers increase the number of times they purchase from you to 3 times per annum, through your promotional efforts, they would spend a total of $10,800. Can you imagine your revenue jumping from $6,000 to $10,800 as a result of focusing on the frequency each customer buys from you?

In the example above, your assumed revenue has increased from $6,000 to $10,800 due to the number of times each of the 4 customers returned to buy from you. You have not got new customers but your revenue is increasing. That’s what is known as THE FREQUENCY OF PURCHASE. Grow your online business by focusing on the number of times each customer buys from you!

As you work hard to grow your business, ask yourself the following questions and make sure you find the answers.

i. How many customers do I have currently?

ii. How much do they spend on average in one transaction?

iii. How many times do they spend in a month or in a year?

iv. What would happen if I increased their transaction value by 5% to 50% or even more?

v. What can I do to increase their transaction value?

vi. What can I do to increase their frequency of purchase?

When you successfully find answers to the above questions, you will obviously find no obstacle in building a successful business. You will have known how to grow your online business. Will that help you?

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Charles Kiyimba owns http://www.CashWithGoleza.com and http://www.golezadesigners.com where popular home business ideas and opportunities are tested rigorously to find out what works and what doesn’t. Visit today to discover the secrets behind building a successful home business.

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Many people set up a subscription website on a niche of their choice and then sit back waiting for all the members to queue up and join. In the words of Neil Diamond, “They will wait that way forever ,” because without researching the niche you might get no takers for your member site.

Researching your subscriptions website is just as important as doing the market research on any other product you might want to sell online. People are not queuing up to join – even if they want to make money using your membership site, they will be joining your competitors’ membership sites that are offering what people are looking for while you sit and wait.

Even if they have made the decision to join a membership site, why should they join yours? What are they looking for, and can you provide that? Do not make the mistake of trying to provide everything, because you can’t, and you should carry out some market research before designing your subscriptions website.

What if you were an inventive genius and you decided to invent a machine that could make garlic-flavored ice cream from butter. Would you spend time and money inventing and manufacturing the machine, and then try to persuade the public that they should convert all their butter into an equal volume of garlic-flavored ice cream? Imaging how many machines you would sell!

Would it not be better to do some market research first? You might then have found that butter is more expensive than ice cream, and that people would rather convert cheap ice cream into expensive butter. You might then have found out that they would have preferred strawberry ice cream, or pistachio, but certainly not garlic – so your invention was a no-no from the start!

Guess what! The same is true of membership websites. Before designing your subscriptions website you should first carry out some market research and find out what people would want to see on the site. Maybe your idea of a membership site on the topic of ‘fly tying’ wouldn’t work, but a site on ‘fly fishing’ in general likely would. You don’t want it to be too broadly based, but nor should it be too specific.

Take dogs, for example. A membership site on just ‘dogs’ would be impossible to maintain, because each member would be looking for something different – some may be interested in training dogs, others in showing them, and yet others in their health. You could never keep your members happy. On the other hand, a subscriptions website covering the topic of dog collars would be too specific.

It is important that you research your market, and there are several ways to do that. If you already have a dog site, you could put a survey on your home page: “If I were to start a membership site what topics would you like to see covered?” The information you get back would then give you a rough idea what people are looking for.

You could carry out a search online using ‘dog membership site’ – you might find some people looking for a membership site in a dog niche not yet catered for. You may take a note of the dog niches where a subscriptions website already exists, check it out and decide if you think you can beat what it offers. Maybe you will spot a gap, and then check using the Google keyword tool to find out if anybody is using keywords relating to that gap.

Basically, what this is saying is that you should carry out some market research before choosing your niche. Pitch your membership site at a part of your niche where you think you should get plenty interest, but not so broad as to make it a full time job just to create enough content to keep everybody happy. In the dog niche, for example, ‘dog training’, ‘dog breeds and shows’ and ‘dog health’ might all be realistic topics for a subscription site.

The same holds true for any other niche: be neither too broad (too many interests) nor too specific (too few potential members). Choose a topic you can write about and also that you believe you can make money from. You need a subscriptions website to be sufficiently popular to get a reasonable number of members and also with products you are able to sell online.

Don’t trust only to your membership fees for your income – use the site to give you a number of income streams. Examples, in addition to your membership fees, are product sales, report sales (short $5 reports), advertising space and perhaps even Adsense. Be sensible, carry out market research first and then make sure the niche can be monetized. Then go for it, choosing good subscriptions website software to run the site.

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When choosing a subscription website package it is important to select software that you customize to make the membership site your own. Member Desk is online at http://www.memberdesk.com and offers such as software package that you can run with an unlimited number of domains for multiple member sites.

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Have you seen an increase in the amount of business owners that have been trying to earn residual income online and you are not sure why this is happening? There are a variety of reasons that so many business owners are trying to make residual income with their business.

You need to learn what these reasons are so you can finally understand why so many business owners are trying to achieve this goal. You will also start to see why you should also be trying to earn residual income for your business.

Below are the numerous reasons that business owners all over are reaching for residual income for their own business.

1. Make money consistently on a monthly basis – With residual income, you will be earning money every month that a customer pays for the product or service you are promoting. This means that you can be sure you will make money each month.

2. Easiest method to make money each month – There are many ways you can use to earn money with your business online, but residual income is the easiest way to make sure you get paid every month. You see, when you have a customer buy the product you are promoting,  you will get paid each month that they stay a customer.

With other ways, you will have to get new customers consistently if you want to keep making money every month and you will not be able to guarantee the amount of money you can make.

3. Grow your income quickly – Many business owners use residual income for growing their income fast since they know that the more customers they get that buy from them, the more income they are going to earn.

Getting new customers is always going to be important because this will grow your income, but once you have them, it will be much easier to keep them paying every month and this is going to easily allow you to grow your income in a short time frame, if you market and get new customers each month.

4. Prevents a complete loss of income – There are many ways to make money and if you are using only one, then you may someday end up with a complete loss of income. By using residual income you can prevent this from happening because you will be able to keep customers easier.

Plus, you can be sure that not every customer is going to stop paying at the same time, which will prevent you from losing all of your income at once. If you do lose a customer, you will have a chance to replace them with a new one before you lose your entire income.

These are the main reasons why you are seeing so many business owners doing their best to earn residual income online. Now that you know these reasons, you need to choose if this is wise for you to earn money or if you will keep doing what you have been and hope that things will get better over time.

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Getting older makes it easy to forget things like where your insurance policy is. So if an insured dies, what can a beneficiary – if he knows he’s a beneficiary of a lost policy – do, and what happens to the insurance policy in the mean time? This article answers these questions.

To collect as a beneficiary, you’ll need to notify the insurance company and deliver the policy owner’s death certificate to them. So when the insured dies, relatives, aware that they’re beneficiaries, may have to search a bit to find the policy. If you, as a beneficiary, don’t know who the insurance company is, what approaches can you use?

* Speak with anyone aware of the deceased’s affairs and finances; and that includes his lawyer, banker, accountant and insurance agent. Of course, if he had all these, you’d probably have policy.

* Contact his past employers in case he had some group life insurance or supplemental life insurance through work.

* Check all his cancelled checks that he made out to an insurance company. You can contact his bank for copies of his old checks.

* Check any of his past mail -you’re looking for insurance premium bills and policy-status notices. They’re sent out by insurance companies annually, and when payments are due.

* Examine his tax returns; – you’re looking for interest income (schedule B) from policies or expenses paid to life insurance companies.

* Contact the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) in case the deceased had recently tried to buy life insurance. It maintains a database about requests on medical information within the past seven years. Do a search on the MIB Policy Locator Service.

What happens to the policy in the mean time?

If the insured dies and the insurance company isn’t notified the company will take steps to find out why a policyholder stopped making payments. To do so, it’ll send out letters to the insured informing him the policy may lapse as a result of unpaid premiums. If the letters go unanswered, the company might initiate a search to find the insured. If this fails, the company will then lapse the policy.

It’s the type of policy that determines what how lapsing will occur. In the case of a Term Life policy, you, as the beneficiary, will be able to collect if you can prove that the owner died before the end of the term and he had paid all his premiums. If he died after that term expired then there’s nothing to collect.

In the case of a Permanent Life policy, you’ll receive the money (with interest since date of death) if the death occurred while all premium payments were made up until the time of death.

But, if the insured stopped making premium payments before he died and therefore ‘lapsed’ the policy, then there’s a chance you might get nothing if too much time passes until notified. That’s because when a permanent life insurance policy lapses, most insurance companies switch its status from permanent insurance to either of these two options:

* extended term where the company uses the cash value of the policy to buy a term life insurance policy for the same death benefit using the cash value of the policy. The death benefit will continue for the longest period the cash value will purchase. Then there’s no benefit beyond this term.

* reduced paid up where the company will keep the policy in force permanently, but will reduce the death benefit.

An insurance policy owner should not only maintain a good record of his policy and where it’s located, but he should give its beneficiaries information, too, including the name and address of the insurance company that wrote the policy. Tracking down an ‘unknown’ insurance policy can be difficult if not impossible.

Insurance company can’t find or be found by the beneficiary of its policy. If a company knows an insured died and it cannot find the beneficiary, it must turn the full death benefit over to the state (where the policy was bought) comptroller’s department within three to five years of the insured’s death.

The money is considered “unclaimed property” and gets lumped in with dormant bank accounts and uncollected rent deposits. The comptroller’s department maintains a database that lists the names and addresses of lost beneficiaries. And that’s another place for beneficiaries to look.

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