It's a problem that many small businesses dream of facing, and many will never get the chance to do so-when to expand into new markets and which new markets to aim at. Once you've survived the first few years as a new start-up and are in the enviable position of having secured a genuine profit, expansion is normally the next obvious route, with the siren call of new audiences being hard to resist. However, in many respects, expansion can be as difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and risky as the original business launch, so you have a lot to consider, a lot to research, and a lot to learn.

I launched my own business, LatestFreeStuff.co.uk, in 2012. Since that time I've been able to drum up 400,000-plus web hits per month, 75,000 email subscribers, 70,000 Facebook likes, and more recently, 8,000 Twitter followers. When you've started from scratch, that's an amazing place to be, and at the end of last year I decided that America was calling-it was time to expand the business.