Groove has become one of the go-to platforms for young, small businesses that are just starting out.

Besides the software they offer that helps entrepreneurs with customer support, they also offer a unique blog that features high-quality content educates readers through simple, easy to understand and useful content.

The Groove blog shares their story and shows others what their journey has taught them.

And the blog shows how learning from their mistakes have brought them closer to the success and growth that they envisioned.

Because their content is so great and insightful, I wanted to boil down some of the best advice from the Groove blog.

I’ve broken everything down into several sections.

Building Your Team

• Assess the Types of Employees You Need. In the beginning, you may not have any room for juniors since you’ll want first to build a team of professionals that bring experience to the table. Whenever you do decide to hire for junior positions, make sure you can offer them full support.
• Be Careful With Remote Employees. Working from home is, contrary to public opinion, not suitable for everyone. So if you decide to hire remote workers, make sure you hire the right ones who have ideally worked as freelancers in the past. Working remote may sound like a dream, but working remote requires a lot of discipline.
• Decide on Full-Time or Project-Based. There is no right or wrong answer in this case, especially if you’re a business that’s just started. See what works best for you from a financial and human resources point of view and then act accordingly. You’ll figure it out by trial and error, so try to learn from your mistakes.
• Deal with People Leaving. If you’re a four-person team and one of your team members is leaving, it’s a big deal. Losing a team member when you’re a small team cuts a large percentage of your team’s output. However, it happens more often than you know, so try to stay calm. Don’t take it personally, accept their decision and most important of all, don’t focus on their leaving but on what to do next and how to prevent this from happening in the future. That means getting to know your employees, connecting with them and listening to their expectations and helping them achieve their goals.
• Decide If You Need Developers. Depending on your goals, decide if professional developers are truly needed. If so, then you need to figure out a budget for hiring them. Sometimes, though, the best strategy is to take small steps and let your business grow naturally without rushing it or pushing it too hard.
• Settle on Interview Questions. Be careful when deciding on interview questions, as you need to ask the right questions to find out if the candidate is a right fit or not for your company.
• Have a Great Networker On Your Team. Networking is crucial when you know you’ll soon need to expand your team. Don’t rush into it and connect with the right people so when the time comes for new hiring, you’ll know who to contact.
  • Post Job Listings – Try searching for sites that are in your industry and post a job listing there.
  • Tell People What You’re Looking for – Use word of mouth and inform friends, family, and acquaintances that you have an opening and you’re looking for someone to fill it.
  • Contact People You Admire – Reach out to other people in the industry you admire for tips, questions, network connections or even to offer them the job.

• Look for Good Employees. Hiring new people is always an important decision, but when you’re a new business, the stakes are really high.

• Deal With Firing Employees. Being able to make tough decisions is a key element to becoming a better business owner. That said, firing is never an easy decision to make – we’re all humans so empathy and caring about your employees is not something that makes you look weak, on the contrary. But when you notice that keeping a certain employee on your team does more harm than good, then you know it’s time to let go. It’s important to show you are truly interested in the wellbeing of your employees without losing sight of your goals!

For more tips on how to build a great team of workers, please read this full article here.

Increasing Traffic

• First Dabbles In Traffic Growth. If you’re just starting out, then you need to drive traffic using as many possible sources as you can. However, keep in mind this is only a short-term approach and that once you gain enough traffic, you will need to rethink your strategies. Meanwhile, try as many different channels as you can, to drive some traffic and to learn more about your audience.

• Focus On Appropriate Channels. When you’re done experimenting with different channels, it’s time to analyze the stats and determine which specific channels could further help you grow. Important things to keep track of are the quantity of traffic a specific channel has brought, the time and effort you put into each channel but also the quality of the traffic each channel has brought (for example, the number of visitors that will convert to customers). Afterward, prioritize the channels that are worth it, and divide your attention carefully between them.
• Focus on The Right Channels. After figuring out the right channels for you, it’s time you understood them better and learn how they work and how they can help you drive even more traffic and get even better results.

For more tips on how to increase traffic to your site, please read this full article here.

Growing Your Email List

• Offer Quality Content. If you’ve had your blog for a while now, you know that not every post will be successful and get picked up by the audience and that’s ok. Sometimes, you have really good posts that become viral and even maintain their success for longer periods of time, and sometimes you get mediocre responses or even posts that just don’t generate enough interest to get picked up. The important thing here is not to let setbacks discourage you. Learn from your failures, your least successful posts and apply what you learn. Over time, you’ll learn what your readers expect from you and how to deliver what they want and need, and you’ll get more traffic. Keep working on producing quality content, study how the audience responds to it, engage with them to find out what their needs are and try new approaches to improve your content.
  • Scroll-up Bar – Try different types of signup forms and see what works best for you. Scroll-up boxes are call-to-action forms that pop-up in a natural way when the reader gets to the end of a blog post, after reading and getting a sense of your content, when he or she is more likely to decide if your blog is worth it or not.
  • Top-of-Page Bar – Experiment with a top-of-page signup bar, that follows the reader while scrolling through your web page without being an aggressive presence but also making sure it’s right there, whenever the reader decides to sign up.
  • ○New Homepage Design – Ignore the regular expectations that come with a homepage and try different approaches until you find something that works for you and your readers. Keep your goal in mind and act accordingly – if a type of homepage works for a specific business, it doesn’t mean that you’ll encounter the same level of success with it.
  • ○Premium Content – Want people to give you their email addresses? Then give them something in return. Make them an offer they just can’t refuse. Giving exclusive access to premium content is an excellent way of sparking the interests of your readers.
  • ○Giveaways – Giveaways are one of the surefire ways of increasing your subscribers’ number. While the conversion rate will most likely, not be very high, giveaways will at least bring you a new set of readers. It is up to you, then, to engage them and make them become regulars of your blog.

• Always Test. Testing is the key action to running a successful blog. Yes, it’s a lot of work to do, but don’t let yourself get discouraged by the quantity of work. Instead, take everything step by step and start with small changes and then work your way from there. The smallest changes can mean a big deal, so don’t underestimate and discard the little actions you can perform for your blog!
• Fix Your Mistakes. Email marketing can be quite overwhelming, especially if you’re just starting out and have no idea what to look for and how to grasp everything. Mistakes will inevitably be made, but the important thing is to start correcting them as soon as you notice them, no matter how late that will be. Most of what you will learn will be from your mistakes, anyway, so don’t beat yourself up for it and keep going.

For more tips on growing your email list, please read this full article here.

Conclusion

If you want to learn more about the above topics, I highly recommend reading the articles mentioned at the end of each section.

The articles posted on the Groove blog are backed up by research and their own journey, so you know you’ll always get valuable information. Make sure to check them out!