Improving your Small Business

Tonight we are going to touch on a few ways to improve your small business. We have covered several ways to expand your marketing, some ways to expand your market share, how to inspire people and how to have customer's sell themselves on your products. Even with all those discussions, there are still more ways to improve your small business and hopefully make it more profitable.

As you may have noticed on our website, we have a number of diverse items for sale and we offer several income opportunities. All of this starts on this one website. Even though choice is a wonderful thing there are times when too much choice will prevent a potential customer from making any decision. We have been in situations where, when offered a half a dozen choices of similar products, we opted to do nothing because the quantity of choices was so large. We needed to stop, and analyse each of the options, eliminate some before we could even begin to make a choice to purchase. If you walk into a used car lot without any specific car in mind, didn't you find the choices to be more than a little overwhelming? If you didn't know what car you wanted, and didn't have a firm amount you wanted to pay in your mind, you would look at that sea of cars and think you had an impossible task of picking just one.

The key to having multiple items for sale is to almost have the choices limited to two or three. That way, the customer has choices, but not so many that they can't make a decision. The problem with our website is that all the choices are right there, in front. Some people like this style, others have not been so complimentary. What our plan is for our site, the home page you go to has three options. One choice is for retail product sales, one choice is for business opportunities, and the last choice is for scheduling a vehicle detail. This way, people have choices, but they are not all in their face. After they choose one of the three options, the visitor would then have the opportunity to navigate around into a narrower selection of items more to their interest.

Again, we are providing choices, but these choices are now more tailored to the individual looking at the website. You need to provide options for customers to look at. As we have discussed before, if choice was a bad thing, grocery stores would not have so many different products on their shelves. But even in the grocery store, you don't see row upon row of choices, you have a few choices for the same type of product, then you have a few choices with some different products. If you think about it, grocery stores provide you with two or three competing choices in the same product line. Again, too many choices for the same type of item will almost paralyse customers and they ultimately not purchase anything.

The key is to provide some variety in your business so customers will be inclined to shop and know they are provided choices. They will be more inspired to come by because you offer a selection of items to purchase. This may in itself generate more sales and improve your small business.

Tomorrow we will continue this discussion of improving your business, we will cover some other elements of your business and how to conduct your business a little differently to perhaps generate more traffic.

Until tomorrow...