1. Get more customers and clients.
2. Get your customers/clients to buy more frequently.
3. Get your customers/clients to spend more money per transaction.
4. Keep your customers longer.

While there are only four primary strategies for growing a business, there are literally dozens of different techniques you can use to implement these four strategies.

Strategies are important because they give us something concrete. They endure while techniques may come and go.

But the techniques are equally important. Strategies tell us WHAT to do; techniques tell us HOW to do it.

Strategy #1: Get more customers and clients.

When we talk about growing a business, this is by far the most common approach: get more customers and clients.

And while this is certainly an important step (you MUST start here if you have no customers or clients yet), it is also the most expensive way to grow a business. And it takes the most effort, too.

Here are 9 ways to get more customers and clients:

• Drive more traffic to your web site.

• Improve the effectiveness of your ads and sales letters.

• Find new / better places to advertise (newspaper, TV, Adwords, ezine ads, social media, etc).

• Create stronger offers that appeal to more people in your target market.

• Enlist the help of affiliates to reach more people.

• Ask for referrals.

• Down-sell prospects who reject your initial offer.

• Craft irresistible guarantees so your customers have little or no risk when they buy.

• Host a free teleseminar where you can demonstrate your expertise and ask for the sale.

Most entrepreneurs and business owners focus on getting the first sale, and then neglect to ever get a second. This is unfortunate because you make much more profit on sales two, three, four, and so forth.

Here are 6 ways to get your customers and clients to buy from you more frequently:

• Create a customer mailing list; send them customers-only offers on a weekly or monthly basis.
• Send out promotional emails to your house list on a more frequent basis.
• Run time-limited or quantity-limited promotions and use scarcity to get customers to act now instead of later.
• Design a product funnel that automatically moves your clients from one purchase to the next.
• Start a monthly continuity program that automatically bills customers every month. (Print newsletter, membership site, etc.)
• Use auto responder email sequences to automatically introduce your prospects to all of your products.

Strategy #3: Get your customers/clients to spend more money per transaction.

This is probably the simplest and easiest way to grow a business. But for some reason, many entrepreneurs avoid this strategy because they fear how their customers will react. They fear their customers don’t have more money to spend.

Here’s a suggestion: Get over your fear.

By implementing these techniques, you can easily grow your business 5% or more within the next few months. A word of caution though… raising prices is not something you do willy-nilly. It helps to have a good reason for raising prices; it also helps to add more value to a product/service.

Here are 7 ways to get your customers and clients to spend more money per transaction:

• Increase your fees and prices.
• Add more value to your products and services.
• After a person buys one product, up-sell or cross-sell them another related product.
• Offer payment plans on your expensive products and services.
• Charge for shipping separately.
• Use phone sales to help close large ticket purchases.
• Do a product launch.