As we mentioned, we are highly focused on returns but it is very important to understand returns and the channels that are available for any business. What is organic growth and What is Paid Sales? We have described it at http://techshu.com/pricing/paying-for-organic-or-sales-growth.
Organic Growth Channels:
- Search Engine Organic (More content, links and the website keeps growing by its own. Wikipedia is a great example)
- Referral (People like it, they refer, get more people engaged. Facebook is a good example)
- Repeat buy (People remember you and come back - A part of branding exercise - Ebays, IMDB, Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google are all good examples)
- Viral (It gives you a push and then it needs to lean on repeat buy or referrals)
- Social Media Growth (Channel to support referral and viral growth)
- User Contribution (Where users comes and add value to the website, Amazon's success is because of users review, same thing with Facebook, Wikipedia. Even you take smaller examples like indiamike.com, it gets huge traffic and visibility of because of user participation)
In the initial phase of business paid activities must be performed to push organic growth as organic growth takes time and it needs a good base to grow fast. The initial base can be build using paid mediums.
Paid Sales Channels
- Ads (Search Engine; Social Media)
- Partnerships, Commissions (Low risk)
- Paid Market place listing
- Sales Team (One on one sales) - Important for high end enterprise levels
Please let us know if you have more queries.