This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

Today we are going to look at an actual online business run by Brandon Aubie, a friend of mine who first began the business in high school. He is the owner of mySportSite, a fantastic and highly affordable way for sports teams to have their own website. He has a great story about how his business grew naturally and how patience has paid off for him, so naturally I’ve been pestering him to write it down for this blog for some time. My persistance finally paid off in time to make the article a perfect fit for this series.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned here for anyone aspiring to start and grow a business, be it online or traditional brick and mortar. Enjoy!

How mySportSite Came to Be and Grew
by Brandon Aubie

Businesses can sometimes get started almost by accident without the owner even realizing it. That’s what happened to me with mySportSite, which has now been delivering sports team, league, and association websites for over 5 years. Being an amateur web designer throughout my teen years and my father being a local rep hockey coach, I was asked to develop a website for my father’s team that could be used to communicate with players and parents in a quick an easy fashion. The first iterations of this website were moderate successes and after a couple of years I was approached by another coach from the city who wanted a similar website. For a nominal fee I setup this website and rejoiced in this moderate success. The year after, to my surprise, I was approached by three additional coaches who also wanted a website. It was at this point that I realized I may have a product worthy of marketing online.

During the summer months, I spent countless hours rewriting the website software to accept multiple teams with relative ease and began to market online with Google’s AdWords. It wasn’t long before I was starting to get calls from Texas, California, British Columbia, and even the United Kingdom looking to use the sports website service. This sudden growth was proof that I had a product that people wanted.

At this point I decided to take things seriously. I developed a business plan, a financial outlook table, a competitive analyses, and marketing plans. In less then a year my customer base grew by 500% and I started to notice a very interesting trend.

Over 75% of new customers for my business were referred by existing customers!

One of the great benefits of selling websites is that customers are literally paying you to advertise. Every person who visits a mySportSite website sees the mySportSite link at the bottom of the page knows about the service. This is especially useful when the visitors are almost always people related to sports. A minor sports team generally has between 15-20 players with parents. Many of these players have siblings on sports teams and parents who coach them. The power of referrals definitely shines through.

The best part of this is that customers, paying customers, are willingly advertising your service for free! What better advertising is there than a current customer telling others how great your product is? This is one reason why it’s important to keep customers happy. The old saying goes something like “A happy customer tells 3 people about your service and an angry customer tells 10.” It is to your advantage to capitalize on those 3 people to the best of your ability. Here are some ideas for how to use current clients to your best advantage:

1. Offer current customers coupons or discounts on products for every referral they send to you.
2. Go the extra mile for a customer and politely ask them to let others know of your service. You’ll find that people are more than willing to do this.
3. Use high class clients as spokes models for your product. If X uses this service, it must be good!

I recently wrote about the importance of paying attention to metrics in order to achieve growth. If you’re an online business then one such important metric is your website statistics, which provide the basis for seeing just who is coming to your site and what is turning people into customers.

Today I came across Google’s Conversion University, a fantastic set of articles that provide guidance on how to establish web metrics and interpret them in a meaningful way. This goes far beyond identifying what the unique visitor count is, and I highly recommend giving it a look if you are serious about improving your business web performance.

There may be no ferris wheels, hot dogs, or rigged games, but the Carnival of Entrepreneurship is exciting for a set of entirely different reasons. Every week bloggers submit their best entrepreneurship related posts and the best of that bunch then become the weekly carnival. I’m very lucky to have the opportunity to be the carnival’s host for this week, so without further ado I present a gourmet sampling of the best business advice the blogosphere has produced in the past 7 days…

• Pamela Slim tackles the question of Is starting a business impossible when you are the sole income earner in your family? This is an issue that comes up repeatedly whenever the idea of cutting loose from employment is brought up, and Pamela sheds some light on how to make this happen.

• David Free highlights what being remarkable is all about in this excellent marketing piece that asks Are You Holding Your Bathroom for Ransom?.

• Becky McCray shares many an entrepreneur’s frustration with complicated business plans and has presented Simplified marketing plans for the real world.

• Marcos Markou discusses the importance of bringing in other people with strengths that fill your weaknesses in Being a Successful Business Owner.

• Daniel Scocco provides an explanation for Differentiating invention from innovation. In the process he also hits the very important issue of actually making profit from an invention.

• Yaro Starak preaches some patient small business building and points out the wonderful compounding effects that allow a business to grow exponentially. Learn how You Will Be Successful…In 5 Years.

• Now that the articles above have made you rich and successful beyond your wildest dreams, how about investing that cash? Steve Faber discusses Why Boring Stocks Can Be Oh So Sexy.

If only I had received just seven submissions the carnival would have been easy to put together. Alas I received plenty of good entrepreneurship and business related discuss that made choosing one article over another very difficult. If you didn’t make it this time, there is plenty of opportunity in future carnivals.

For more great articles in past editions, to submit your future articles, or to host the Entrepreneurship Carnival be sure to visit the carnival’s home.