how to GROW your small business & MAKE SALES in 2024 💌🌷 the ULTIMATE guide, what i've learned so far

[Music] growing and making sales for your small business so you started your small business in hopes of getting hundreds of orders like you've seen in all of the pack orders with me videos on YouTube but we're hit with the sad reality of slow sales constantly falling short of your expectations instead well that was exactly how I was feeling after I opened my online stationary shop ever so softly when I was hoping LLY trying to grow my following and make sales posting Instagram real after real and just feeling tired of the slow progress by the end sometimes watching all of these huge pack orders with me videos I couldn't help but wonder where all of these sales were coming from you might be struggling to make sales in your business right now you might be thriving but just wanting to level up your small business whatever it might be I want to share with you guys some tips that I've learned on how to grow your small business that have truly changed the game for me because I went from making $500 per shop update to making a few thousand every update and I truly believe that it is these tips that have helped me and my small business to thrive so the first thing I want to touch on is that creating your dream small business gets to be easy I want to touch on this because there's so much content out there that makes it seem like it's complicated and difficult to get started or make sales in your business but the truth is that creating and making sales for your business gets to be really easy and this has got to be one of the greatest things that I've learned after taking a course from one of my favorite YouTubers Alexis and it has truly helped everything fall into place for me so before we get started I really want you to fully let go of that misconception that making sales is difficult complicated and for whatever reason not available for you in particular because when I got started selling my sticker sheets I had a limiting belief that only a small number of people would be interested in my designs my designs were too cute too simple to anything our mind will make up reasons as to why our business will not succeed and sometimes your product truly might not be of good quality and we have to assess where we can improve them but other times if you're excited about your product but still feel this self-doubt it's our own limited perception getting in the way because even if there was a limited demographic of people who appreciated your products there are billions of people around the world so there's no reason as to why your product will not be loved by thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of them and once I started thinking this way I started to see the effects of this I now get multiple $100 sticker orders and I never thought that people would love stickers this much but this was my own limited perspective because my experience has shown me that clearly there are so many people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a collection of cute stickers that will make them happy it might not be you but that doesn't mean people out there like that do not exist I really learned to be open and allow myself to be proven wrong because I really was also I really want to touch on this because I know that a lot of small business owners and artists in particular have some degree of hesitation towards pricing their products in a way that's fair to them but remember that you physically cannot force anyone to buy your products because people can evaluate for themselves if it's a worthy exchange of their money and if it's not for them that's okay be firm in pricing things fairly because by increasing your price point you're filtering your customer base to those who truly see the value in your work as a personal example when I started I sold my sticker sheets for $2 to $2.50 each it wasn't until I sold at a school convention and saw people selling their sticker sheets for $8 that I realized wow people are willing to pay $8 for a single sticker sheet what am I doing afraid to price my sticker sheets at $3.50 I increased the pricing that day at $2.50 you could say I was barely making a profit if not losing money based on materials and my time packing that order but when I increased the prices to $350 not only did I start making more sales I was making more money per sale a $1 difference might not seem like a lot but one it is per sticker sheet this really adds up because on average my customers are buying many stick sheets per order this changed my business because it not only made me more excited to work on my business because it was more profitable more rewarding but because it showed to me that people actually value my work even I failed to see the value of my work when I priced it so low but as soon as I realized the value and raised the prices people started to match that and it was reflected to me in more sales often times even people are very supportive and for me and my following I'm so grateful that no one has ever told told me that my products are overpriced or not worth it I think people are very understanding so there's really nothing to worry about in the first place and often times it's just in our heads now with all of those topics cleared up I want to Dive Right into a key Insight on running a small business that I picked up a few months ago I recently started a book called The emth Revisited and learned that there are three distinct individuals within you when it comes to running a business there's the entrepreneur the manager and the technician and all three of these people have a distinct role in the business where an imbalance between these three will result in an unsuccessful business so what exactly do these three people do the entrepreneur dreams big envisions the future of the business the direction it wants to go in the long run the manager grounds the business taking care of all things admin related such as the taxes inventory keeping and planning for consistent uploads and the technician goes all into the craft the skillful work behind running the small business business whether that's designing the sticker sheets crocheting a plushy sculpting a keychain editing a video editing an Instagram reel whatever makes the small business unique so when one of these individuals within you is taking over the entire show the other two are often neglected preventing your small business from reaching its full potential and for most individuals including myself you're going to realize that most of your time spent working on your small business is taken over by the work of the technician burying your head into the sand enjoying your Splendid time perfecting each product video or order you send out you ignore the bigger picture changes you need to make to the business you ignore your anxieties towards how you should be taking care of your business taxes and yet you wonder why your small business is not growing yes your products need to be good in order for them to sell in the first place but the product themselves are not the full picture when it comes to making sales just realizing that spending all of my time as the technician has not been and will not be the solution to making the amount of Sal sales I wanted to be making was the first mindset shift that I started to embody and directly as a result of this one day I took the time to sit down to think of the bigger picture and let the so-called entrepreneur within me start thinking instead of ignoring the problem by just mindlessly jumping into packing orders again and it really made me think can I see myself posting a real on Instagram every single day for as long as I want to keep my small business alive and the answer to that was an easy no so I started thinking about where I wanted to be where I wanted my small business to be after I graduated University and the answer to that was clear ideally I wouldn't need to spend so much time on marketing my products but still make sales and this led me to YouTube I saw so many successful small business owners on YouTube and I always thought that they were on YouTube because they were successful but I'm here to tell you that it's the other way around because a large part of why these small businesses are so successful is because they are on YouTube I decided to start this Channel and honestly I am so grateful for my past self for taking the actions because now I've uploaded five videos so far am at over 20,000 followers and one video has reached over a million views and to me now this really makes sense because I feel much more aligned to my YouTube channel than my Instagram account it's so clear to me that without that one day to really sit down to consider which direction I wanted to take my shop I probably still would be feeling bad about not posting on in stagram consistently I'm not really sure how many of you guys will resonate with this but for me another mindset shift that has really reframed my thinking was that the universe or whatever you believe in only gives you what it thinks you can handle this really helped me to shift my mindset from thinking that I was doing everything I should be doing and still not getting orders to really reflecting on what I wasn't doing sure I wanted to be receiving hundreds of orders every month but if I did would I be able to handle it with my current lifestyle and systems I have in place where I was a couple months ago definitely not my packaging system was incredibly inefficient it took me forever to make my products it already took me so long to ship out the small number of orders I was getting every week and I barely had the time to edit my YouTube videos consistently while keeping up with my University assignments and exams so if a huge influx of orders were to suddenly hit my shop at that point in time there's no way that I would have been able to balance everything realizing that I've been working to make changes to my lifestyle little by little until I get to that point where I'm living the lifestyle of someone who already makes hundreds of sales and balances that with their lives so for me I decided to simplify my packaging get my stickers and keychains manufactured instead of making them myself work more efficiently through my schoolwork so I would have the time to work on YouTube and my shop and I actually have cut out YouTube shorts from my life for many months now and I instead do things that energize and INSP inspire me on the other hand I want to add that you should be reflecting on whether or not your business feels truly aligned to you if you don't feel truly passionate and aligned with your business and you're not getting sales could this door be closing because you're guided to another door maybe if you started getting orders now this would cause you to hesitate and Linger on working on this business for longer even if it isn't aligned with you so the real question then in this case would be how long will it take you to step through this new door that is opening really wide for you now the last piece of mindset advice I have before I move on to the more practical tips is that I really recommend implementing the 12 week year for your goals so essentially instead of setting yearly or quarterly goals set your year-long goals with the deadline of 12 weeks instead of 12 months treating each week like 1 month you'll realize how little time you have to waste in each day and you can really start making a bigger effort towards your goals instead of pushing off the draining tasks all the time I say this because after I started thinking like this I have accomplished so many more things like this YouTube channel where I set a goal of getting monetized in my first 12we year meaning I wanted 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours but halfway into my 12we year I was at 10,000 subscribers and 20,000 watch hours and I think that this is a case where I did get very lucky but I also think that this really just goes to show how much more you can accomplish in a short period of time then you might think if you put your mind to it of course I'm definitely not trying to promote hustling all the time without taking a break so make sure you're still taking care of yourself but if you're feeling anything like how I was feeling wasting a lot of time on my phone all day setting a 12we year goal can be really motivating and help you to make progress on actually sitting down to work on your shop also like I said earlier this gets to be easy so working on your small business should be fun and easy when I feel the resistance towards working on my shop I try to remember how excited I used to feel by it at the very start when I couldn't focus on anything but my shop when I would look forward to finishing all of my homework so that I could get back to designing a sticker sheet for me throughout the years of running my small business a huge block was that I felt that posting on social media had to be really difficult but this was because I made it difficult I got in my own way a lot in the way that I would obsess over the potential performance of a post or the way that I almost punished Myself by editing a real for hours until it was good enough for me to post with this approach I felt so suffocated and didn't enjoy the process of creating content for my shop whatsoever what shifted when I decided that creating gets to be easy was that I realized as long as I share what's on my heart to share I don't need to obsess about the algorithm because the algorithm is my audience and if I share what I truly want to share enjoy sharing it continue sharing it inevitably I'll grow an audience that loves to hear what I love to share and just enjoying the process letting it flow and be easy will allow me to show up consistently time and time again and will be much more effective than me trying to manufacture my content for the algorithm out of an obsession with a post's performance this has got to be one of the biggest blocks that I've worked through recently after disappearing for months on this channel but as you can see I'm back and better than ever on to some more practical tips for growing your shop and making sales the number one tip that the past me would have given from my experience would have been to Simply host more frequent shop updates with new products in the past I thought that this was probably the only way that I was going to increase the number of sales that I was making because for me holding a shop update was really effective in boosting the number of orders I got in the following weeks I would wonder how amazing my sh shop would be doing if I were able to host a shop update every month of the year of course then the problem is that hosting a shop update is a lot of work most of the time coming up with the product ideas designing the products potentially Outsourcing the manufacturing of the products promoting the products on social media packing the orders following the update and then repeating the cycle doing this every month by yourself is probably possible but will likely lead to burnout on such a tight schedule especially if you're not doing this full-time so while this might bring in more sales it's definitely not the most sustainable way to be bringing in sales what I would now recommend instead is to focus on building your audience and getting more eyeballs on your shop instead of focusing on the number of sales you're getting because in my experience as long as your products look like they're of good quality and you have a not sketchy looking website more eyeballs on your shop naturally converts to more sales of course still hosting a sustainable number of shop updates every year would 100% help in keeping your business looking active and bringing in more sales but I wouldn't focus on holding a shop update so frequently that it hinders your consistency on social media so getting more eyeballs on your shop there are probably so many different options to take here but for me YouTube has been going really well I used to feel that YouTube was more professional than Instagram so I was more intimidated to upload a video than to post on Instagram I also o felt that there would be more judgment that would follow if I started a YouTube channel versus if I opened up an Instagram account and I think that's how a lot of other people feel as well but if anything I feel that this is an even bigger reason as to why YouTube might be a good choice because from what I see not every small business owner is on YouTube but it seems like almost every small business owner is on Instagram if you have even the slightest interest in starting a YouTube channel if you can get over whatever is keeping you from uploading it can become a really great tool for you not only for building a community but also as another source of income or even a platform about you rather than solely your shop because the personality or story behind a shop could be just as influential in bringing in sales than the product or content itself I feel that if you can incorporate parts of your personality to your shop and make your content bingeable in whatever platform you're on this could be one of the biggest factors that bring in sales for your business business because in the end I think that we're investing into people's energy more so than their products if I place an order with a small business I've been following I'm usually more excited about the fact that I get to support them and that they will be packing my order than the actual product sometimes anyways let's say that now you're in a position where you're getting more eyeballs on your shop but still not getting as many orders as you'd like to be getting first don't be discouraged because someone seeing your products might not not like what they see and out of the percentage of people who like what they see fewer of them will visit your shop site and add things to their cart and an even smaller percentage of them will fill in the shipping and billing information to actually hit checkout I know this because even I hesitate to buy things I really like a lot online when I see that I need to enter my email address to proceed to check out most of the times I end up reconsidering my decisions and I don't even know why I do that myself but that's all to say that you shouldn't be too disappointed about eyeballs not necessarily converting to sales because being online helps you to reach such a vast audience that even a small percentage of people proceeding to check out adds up to be really significant when you have such a large reach but I do think that there is a good point when you actually need to step back and take a look to see if what you're offering is of good quality because sometimes low conversion rates might actually be a sign that your products aren't the best that they could be or they're not showcased in the best way that they could be because for example these are two photos of the same sticker sheet yet one of them makes it look so much more desirable and I'm sure that there are a lot of improvements that I could also be making but in general I think it's really important that you're aware of how you're presenting your products and that you know your branding and how to highlight the special parts of your small business because it really does make a difference in the sales that you're getting adding to that it's also really helpful to make sure that your site looks like it's active I am definitely guilty of this because I've disappeared so many times on Instagram to focus more on University and I would receive so many DMS asking me if my shop was still open even though the site was up I would really try to make it very very clear that your shop is active whether that's through a banner at the top of your site or an active social media account and have answers to potential questions that your customers might have very clear on your website personally I have an FAQ section on my site that answers a lot of these questions and it's really helped in making things clear to potential customers so no one has an extra block that keeps them from placing an order the next thing I want to touch on for growing your small business is wholesale I actually don't have any real experience with wholesale but I have had some people reach out to me about wholesale and I have some strs about it so when my shop was starting out I got an inquiry about a wholesale order and I remember turning it down the reason that I turned it down back then was because I wanted full control over how my products were presented and I was afraid that if I shipped them off in bulk I wouldn't know how they were being sold elsewhere and on top of that I was already underpricing my work so I didn't really know how I could offer cheaper options for wholesale orders now though I really understand that if you want to scale your business you really have to let go of some of that control and that doesn't necessarily just apply to wholesale because I think that those minor differences in how you do things versus how other people might do things follows the principle of diminishing returns where your unique mind and skills created your small business and brought it to where it is today but at a certain point that perfectionism and specificity to you doesn't help the business it actually holds you back if you think that you're the only one that can do things for your business right if you want to grow and scale your small business you're going to have to take some time in finding people that can help you on your journey whether that's finding someone to help you make your products finding someone to help you make content edit content finding someone to help you pack your orders in this case for wholesale finding someone who will resell your products instead of staying so closed off to potential help because you need everything to be a certain way and when I say that I wanted to control every little detail of my products and packaging and anything related to my shop I really mean it because I was scared to let go of control of even the smallest things like my mom offering to help to cut my art prints because I was worried that they would be crooked I was worried she would put the stickers in the wrong order I would get worried over the smallest things and the smallest details but I just realized this past year that you have to let go of that perfectionism that ties your business to you sometimes and I know that it can be hard because your small business can feel like your precious baby but it's something that I really had to learn the hard way because it turned out I was worried for nothing my mom was more than able to help cut my art prints super nicely probably better than me and packaged things super neatly so I realized that I had been rejecting help for no reason please please keep in mind that I'm talking about growing your small business here so if you're just starting out you don't need to feel pressured to make things efficient and scale just yet make the best of what you currently can do and work smarter not harder so tying it back to wholesale now I think that wholesale would really be a great option it would be so cool to see my products in a physical store and I think that the drawbacks of selling your products for a cheaper unit price makes up for itself in that packing the items in B saves you a lot of time compared to if you were to package each item as an individual order so if I had the opportunity again and the terms were good I would also love to explore wholesale as an option lastly one thing that I myself have started doing to bring in more sales is starting to collect an email list for my shop it's so important to do this from what I've heard and I myself only just started collecting an email list for my newsletter because I learned how powerful having a mailing list can be because back to the point that people can tend to be hesitant about giving out their emails if someone willingly signs up for an email newsletter from you you can know that they really do want to hear from your business and are more invested in your content than your typical follower so not only can you reach more people directly you're reaching an audience that is more closely invested in your work so I can only assume that this would be very effective in bringing in sales but I've yet to hold a shop update after creating my own mailing list so so I guess we shall see how effective it is in this new year I don't want this video to get too long so I will end this here but I really really hope all of these tips can help you to reframe your thinking about your shop and realize that growing your shop is so possible even if prior to this video it might have seemed hopeless I really believe in you I really believe in us so let's just keep working towards what we're called to work on our consistency ourselves and the results will only have to follow so again thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next time [Music] bye

Channel: Johanna Park

Views: 184,762

Keywords: how to grow your online store, grow your online business fast, how to make money as a teen, ways to make money online 2024, make money online in 2024, small business guide, how to make sales for your small business, how i grew my small business, pack orders with me, starting my own small business, packing orders asmr, small business growth

Id: 7E9-0-0tpvY

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024