Their are only 3 ways to grow your business. Thats it. 3. Not 17, not 5 not 1.

When you boil it down to basics, all business are trying to grow by addressing a combination of these three methods at any one time, and invariably only 1 of these methods with sufficient effort to achieve results.

What are they I here your brain inquire?

1) New Business.

Thats right, everyone knows you grow by getting more NEW customers than last time. Your sales and marketing efforts are no doubt double focused on reaching suspects ( people with a pulse ) and making them into prospects ( people with a pulse who are interested in your product/service ) and then moving the prospects along a 'funnel' until they buy or don't buy.

New business is found by the usuall marketing events, brochures, advertising, trade shows, space advertising, cold calling, telesales, and co-opted ( joint venture ) activites ( where someone shares the expense of any/all of the former approaches - i.e. Car Company pays for the space adds for vehicle type x in your area )

Becoming more usual now, is the addition of the Internet or Online Marketing to this usual mix of activities. At the low end, you have a brochure based website telling anyone who happens by who you are, how wonderfull you are to work for or do business with and what your selling - with the best of these low ends including a call to action 'contact us' link. At the high end you have the blogging, social network savy, paid click advertising, search engine optimised site with links and offers, video, audio, free reports, email capture all presented in terms that appeal to the prospect of your particular product or service and every direct response doo-hickey going to capture your contact details so that the pipeline is kept busy.

If you can add 10% more new customers than last year ( all things like price etc being equal ) thenyou grow ( revenue at least ) by 10%.

Lets be honest now; you probably put all your marketing into finding new business dont you. No shame in that, its the obvious action for all businesses.

( lets not concern ourselves that its 6-15 times harder to win new customers than milk existing customers. )

2) Getting more business from existing customers.

Having done busines with a prospect, they became a customer. And a customer is for life ( until death or disapointment ). The trick, of course, to doing more business with existing ( previous ) customers is to keep offering them something of value to make them come back to you time and again ( even and especially when they could go somewhere else ). An American marketing guru ( who often claims a $5000 per hour price ) often points out that its your duty to provide your customers with everything they need or want and not to short change them with that one sale. If you sell water, and someone is thirsty - its your duty to sell them not 1 glass but to offer the 8 glasses a day as recommended, and then 8 every day and so on. By focusing on the lifetime customer value that such transactions build, you can easily grow your business beyond that single transaction identified in method 1.

The 'backend' is where the money is. The reason that supermarkets offer loyalty cards is not to make you loyal by giving you a card, but to ensure that they can target market you with product offers for things you buy based on your ongoing business with them.....and this marketing is both unique to you the individual BUT also to your local demographic - your neighberhood store is merchandised based on the group demand of your area - along with (some of ) the offers instore.

The key here is to stay in touch with your customers, identifing things of value to them and making them aware of the opportunity to return to you to buy again and again. - So find things of interet to THEM and locate products and services that are also of interest to them.

3) More transactions.

Getting your customers to buy more frequently will also grow your business.