Working From Home Opportunities
The topic of marketing your work at home business covers an incredibly broad spectrum of activities, all with one final goal in mind: to spur clients and customers to buy your products and services.
When you start your home-based business, marketing should take up most of your schedule. After all, your business isn't going to get very far down the road until you start selling your products and generating the money that you'll need to give it life (and to pay yourself for all your hard work). As you gain clients and customers — and start doing paid work — you can reduce the amount of time and money that you devote to marketing, but it should never be forgotten. When you own your own business and rely on it for your livelihood, it's important to keep a steady flow of new business in the pipeline, ready to pick up the slack as you complete your work for current clients. For most home-based business owners, plan on making an ongoing commitment of at least 20 percent of your time to marketing activities.
Why bother? Won't your products sell themselves? Few — if any — products truly sell themselves (and if someone trying to sell you on a business opportunity tells you otherwise, your internal lie detector should be on red alert). Selling your products and services requires constant marketing — you can't simply create something and hope it will sell.
The good news is that you can promote your business in a variety of ways. If you decide to tackle even just a few of them, you can easily create a successful marketing campaign for your home-based business that can propel your home-based business to the front of the pack. In the following sections, we show you some of the most popular and effective ways to do just that.
Direct Mail
Classified Ads
Online advertising
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth means getting people to talk about you, your company, and its products and services in a positive light. Of course, the more people talk, the better your company looks as a result, and the better it is for your business. That's exactly why any good promotional campaign starts off with a heavy emphasis on generating positive word-of-mouth excitement. There's nothing like a little bit of buzz to get your sales to take off.
Here are some of the best ways to get people talking about your business:
- Networking: Everyone has a circle of friends and acquaintances — both in work lives and in nonwork lives. Or you might belong to a community-service or fraternal or sororal organization such as Optimists, Junior League, Rotary, BPO Elks, Lions International, or others. Your networks of friends and acquaintances are probably the first and best places to start a word-of-mouth campaign for promoting your business. They know you, they like you (at least, we hope so), and they will be willing to tell their friends and acquaintances about you (who will then tell others, and on and on).
- Volunteering: Why not give something back to your community by volunteering your time? Whether helping out at a local school, crisis center, animal shelter, or other community-based organization, you can be sure to meet a variety of people who may one day become your future clients and customers. Chances are, members of the board of directors and some volunteers are influential people who, if they like you and what you do, can give you business or refer business to you.
- Sponsorships: Sponsoring a kids' baseball team, local charity, parade, or other special event can be another good way to generate word-of-mouth promotional opportunities. Be careful, though, that you're not just one sponsor lost in a flood of others — your message will be ineffective. It's far better to choose your opportunities so that your business is featured and particularly noticeable to your target audience.
- Business cards and letterhead: These are the mainstays of most businesses' promotional efforts. Your letterhead and business cards can convey a lot of information to your prospective clients and customers, and get people talking about your business. Invest a few dollars in a professional logo design, and you'll make a great first impression on your prospects while conveying the right kind of message to your current customers and clients.
Word of mouth costs your business little, but the payoff can be great. Look for opportunities to generate a buzz about your business wherever and whenever you can. If people aren't talking about your business, you can be sure they won't be buying from it, either!
Referrals
Getting referrals — when people you know direct clients and acquaintances to your business — is the number-one way that many home-based businesses obtain new business. Although current clients are your bread and butter, and the best possible sources for vital repeat business, new clients provide opportunities to grow your business while covering for financial shortfalls if current customers decide to shop elsewhere.
Referrals are extremely powerful because when they come to you, they have already been presold on your business and your products or services. Here are some other advantages:
- Referrals are less expensive than many other kinds of marketing. No costly Yellow Pages ads to run, no billboards to erect, and no extravagant mail-order campaign to launch. Referrals cost little or no money to obtain. And maintaining a favorable relationship with the people who give you referrals means simply doing good work for them and letting them know from time to time that you appreciate their business (perhaps with a discount on your products or services, a small gift, or some other token of your appreciation).
- Referred customers trust you. When people turn to their trusted friends and business acquaintances for advice on whom to hire for a particular job or to provide a particular product, they automatically tend believe the recommendations that they hear. As the saying goes, You have only one chance to make a first impression. When someone recommends you, you've already made a positive first impression with your client-to-be.
- Referred customers are ready to buy from you. When people ask their friends and business acquaintances for referrals, they're ready to buy. People wouldn't ask if they weren't. And because people trust the opinion of those they ask, most people go no further in their search for sources than the person or business recommended to them.
Online Marketing
The Internet is a place for a home-based business owner to keep up with trends and sell a product or service. The information superhighway lets you compete in the marketplace with the big boys.
You can get general information to help you run your business. You can also get marketing information that you can use for your business. For instance, suppose you want to find out about trade shows in your area of business.
Having a website may be essential to your business, like selling Venetian blinds exclusively through the Internet. But even if you have a local lawn-care business or run an accounting practice from home, you can still use a website as a marketing tool to bring in new customers. You can let the public know you exist via the Internet. Your own web page can describe your business to thousands of potential customers. You can give information of general interest or specifics about your business. In a sense, your website acts as a brochure and is called brochure-ware. Be sure to list your e-mail address, telephone number, or other ways to contact you.
From a marketing perspective, having a web page is only successful if you get people to look at it and come back for more. Here are four things you can do to make your site an effective marketing tool:
- Imprint your site with your company identity. Make sure you display your logo and convey the impression you want the public to have about you.
- Give good contact information. Include e-mail and snail mail (the ordinary mailing address) so people can contact you if they want to know more.
- Have valuable information. In addition to whatever you want to say about your company and what you're selling, also include news or other helpful information that the viewer will be grateful for. Links to other websites are always appreciated (and can increase your search engine rankings because search engines' automated spiders follow links from referring pages).
- Make it interesting. Add giveaways, such as free offers or discounts for immediate sales.
