Six Ways to Grow a Business

There are plenty of ways to grow a business but they all fall under one of the six major umbrellas...

- Word of Mouth. You've done such a fantastic job that others are talking about your business, your product or service, and raving about it to others.

- Outbound. You're doing cold outreach to pitch to others. Whether that's doing door-to-door sales, cold calling, cold emailing, or something else. You're doing the work to get clients, users, or customers.

- Inbound. This is the opposite of outbound. Often this happens because of great content you've put out there, the brand you've built, etc... that you're drawing attention where others are now reaching out to you.

- Paid Marketing. You're essentially doing advertising to bring awareness or bring in new customers. Whether that's TV ads, radio ads, Google or Facebook ads, sponsorships or otherwise.

- Referral or Partnership. Ultimately this comes in a variety of ways but you could be doing referral marketing, affiliate marketing, joint ventures or partnerships, etc.. But the idea here is you have others actively promoting your company or product and services to bring in new customers.

- Growth Hacking. This one is a bit difficult to define as some methodologies here would fall under one of the other five, but there are also creative stunts and things you can do that don't fall neatly under one of the other five well, that would absolutely fall under growth hacking. You can think of growth hacking as uncommon ways to accelerate growth through unconventional means.

No matter how you go about it, even if it doesn't seem like its a perfect fit, likely whatever method you're thinking of to help grow your business will fall under one of these six ways. If you're in the early stages and trying to iterate and validate your business idea or the market you're in, and you haven't exhausted all of these methods (with exception to word of mouth if you're too early), you should consider each avenue.