Do you already have a small business which you want to grow and make more profitable or are you starting a new business?

This page is designed to help you to think about the different ways you can grow your business to the size you.

There is no "right size" of business, just the right sized business for you.

The first thing you need to do is to understand the way your chosen business model works over time.

Only then can you recognise which are the important levers and decide which you need to be concentrating on developing and improving.

Because you want to grow your business, you'll want to look at this excellent offer.

Business growth master and marketing expert Jay Abraham has brought together 54 of the best business brains to form the League of Extraordinary Minds.

Starting in late October you have the chance to listen to 9 panel interviews for free as small groups of these experts discuss how to thrive in today's economy while your competitors are struggling to survive.

This is being a huge success with over 27,000 entrepreneurs joining in the first four days and many more have taken up the option to hear these ideas for free since then.

The first call on gaining customer trust featuring 7 of the League really helped to move from concept to something tangible that you can see the value.

Highly recommended for any small business owner who wants to grow and/or improve profit.

I know that you are in business for profit so it is important to make sure that you understand how profit is generated before talking much more about sales growth.

At its simplest

Profit = Sales - Costs

where Sales = Turnover = Revenue = Income = Fees

It doesn't matter what terms you use, the important thing to always remember is that profit is the difference between sales and costs.

Because profit is the difference, you can't work on profit directly.

You have to think of increasing your sales and reducing your costs.

On this basis there are only three ways to grow your business profits:

1. Increase your sales volumes

2. Increase your selling prices

3. Reduce your costs

For many years it has been claimed that Jay Abraham has been the highest paid marketing consultant in the world (and as he charges $5,000 per hour and a slice of the extra profit created it is is not hard to believe.)

Jay Abraham's "Three Ways To Grow A Business" is famous for its powerful simplicity:

1. You increase the number of customers

2. You increase the average transaction value

3. You increase the number of times the customers buy per year.

Nearly everybody makes the mistake of focusing on number 1, increasing the number of customers and ignores the opportunities available from the other two methods.

Best selling author and entrepreneur Mark Joyner has identified an alternative approach in his book "The Great Formula"

1. Get your message in front of more eyeballs

2. Get more money per eyeball

3. Sell more products to your customers on the back end.

This model is a little more complicated because it brings the marketing issues into the equation together with your conversion rate of turning enquiries into sales.

In an Internet Marketing world we can see that the eyeballs relate to the number of hits a website may get.

Many of those people are going to click away, either because the page wasn't what they thought, they have seen a better offer elsewhere, they are not convinced or they are not ready to buy.

But some will buy so the more money per eyeball is a combination of the number of people who buy and the amount of money they spend divided by the number of eyeballs.

So you grow by

a) persuading more customers to buy

b) each customer spending more money

This is effectively a restatement of the first two items in Jay Abraham's 3 Ways To Growth model but it is a different way of looking at it.

Website traffic that isn't relevant and not interested in what you are selling is a waste of any time and effort spent in attracting it. Yes it will increase the number of eyeballs but because the traffic won't convert into sales, the money per eyeball falls.

The last point in Mark Joyner's formula is vital - making extra sales to your customers after they have bought once.

Although increasing the back end is a key Jay Abraham concept, his three ways to grow model does not make this factor as explicit.

If you create a business which consists of spending money trying to attract potential customers, spending more time and money converting those prospects into customers and only have a one time sale, you have a very tough business.

The key message is that the profit is in the back end - the sales you make to your customers after their first transaction and after you have recouped all the costs involved in your lead conversion and lead generation.