Marketing & Advertising Your Home Business

The key to any enterprise is getting your potential customers first to know who you are and second to purchase your product or service. This is especially difficult for home businesses. Whether you have a product to sell or a service to perform you need to have someone to sell it to. Regardless of the business you are in, there are several easy and effective ways to market your business without spending a great deal of money. Following is a list of ways to get those first customers.

1. Join your Chamber of Commerce. This establishes you in the business community and often your fellow members will avail themselves of your services and recommend you to others.

2. Get a business telephone line with a listing in the yellow pages. Just the free one-line listing can bring in customers. Often people prefer to support local businesses.

3. Advertise where you customers are likely to see your advertising. If you have a cleaning business, you really don't want to advertise on college campus whereas if you operate a word processing business this would be an ideal place to start. Putting up well-made, professional flyers can bring in customers to a service business and sending out carefully crafted introductory letters and/or brochures will help sell new products.

4. Once you start getting customers, offer top-notch customer service. Do the job quickly, efficiently and effectively. If there is a problem, be forthright about it as soon as possible. Everyone understands that problems can happen-the sooner you remedy the situation the better. Even if you have to refer a customer to someone else, make sure that you ask them to try you first the next time.

5. Word of mouth is the best form of marketing there is. Once you've established a customer base they will begin to recommend you to others. If you've done a good job, you'll get a favorable recommendation and increase your profitability.

6. Never stop advertising or marketing. Once the initial struggle to gain customers is over, you still have to keep those customers. Also, the goal of every business is to expand to the limits that you have set. You'll always lose a few customers and you'll need to replace them with new ones or eventually you won't have any left.

7. INTERNET TIP: Marketing on the internet is very different than off-line marketing. There are many different approaches including joining link exchanges, banner networks, and placing classified ads. You should try several to see what works for your business. Establishing a newsletter is a great way to remind customers about your company and can help generate traffic to your web site. Email is a wonderful way to communicate with customers and to provide information about your company, assuming that the potential customers have asked to receive such information. Sending unsolicited email (spam) is as unwelcome as a telemarketer calling in the middle of dinner.

There are many more ways to promote and grow your home business. Because every business is unique, each business owner needs to find a different approach to establishing and growing their business. Hopefully this will give you a start. The library is also a great reference for finding books on marketing and advertising on a budget.

By: Lisa Smith