Go Viral to Grow?! 🥳
It seems like there are a million ways to grow your business, doesn't it?
At first, that seems like a good thing. So many choices! But rather than be helpful, it's overwhelming.
How should you spend your limited time, energy, and resources to grow your business?
Should you post dance videos on TikTok? Run a paid ad campaign on Facebook? Pay an Instagram influencer to show off your product? Stuff your website with keywords so you're the #1 result on Google?
Or... all of the above and everything else?
There are only five growth models you can use to grow your business, and you only need one to work for your business to thrive. Learn about each growth model over the next five articles, so you can pick one to master—starting with viral growth, which depends on people sharing your business person-to-person without your direct involvement as a middleman.
The surest answer to how to grow your business is NOT do do everything.
If you try and do everything at once, you're going to waste a lot of time, energy, and money exhausting yourself by doing a little bit of everything all of the time, without any breakthrough results.
Your most effective growth strategy is actually to hyperfocus on one growth model, master it, and ignore everything else.
You may be afraid you'll pick the wrong growth model, or miss out on a new trend that could blow up your business in the best way—but for the majority of entrepreneurs the more likely outcome is you'll run yourself ragged for years, without seeing any major success.
As a matter of fact, most businesses don't turn a profit for the first year and a half they are in business—do you want to wait that long?
Focusing on one primary growth model can be incredibly freeing, even though it will take focused work. Thankfully there are only five growth models to choose from.
What was that? Only five growth models?
Yes, there are thousands of different tactics, hundreds of channels, and dozens of mediums, but only five specific growth models:
Each growth model is fundamentally different, and you'll learn about each growth model over the next five lessons, starting today with Viral Growth.
What is Viral Growth?
Viral Growth is a growth model that depends on your content, products, or brand spreading from person-to-person without your direct involvement as a middleman—much like the way a virus spreads from person-to-person without the direct involvement of "patient zero".
In this case "going viral" doesn't necessarily mean getting millions of views (although that can happen) but creating a path for people to spread the word about your business on their own.
That could mean you are creating social media content designed to resonate with your target customer (your Real People) but it could just as easily mean you're growing an email newsletter with a refer-a-friend program like I am with this newsletter, itself.
Viral Growth could also mean you're building a product with a network effect, like Dropbox or Facebook where the platform becomes more useful to your customers the more customers you have, so they're likely to invite family and friends.
Remember, your objective is not to master all five growth models or attempt to use all five at once.
Consider each growth model, and evaluate with one suits your strengths and your business best. Then, commit to that growth model and tune out every distraction so that one and only growth model is your focus, until you've mastered it and grown your business to reach your growth goals.