Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

An effective email marketing campaign can do wonders for a home business, if you do it right. The trick is to make sure your message makes it past the spam filters, which are getting harder to navigate every day.

Buying a list of email addresses from a broker is certainly not the way to go these days. As these people have never heard of you, or your business you can be assured that 95% of the carefully crafted emails you send out will hit the recipients “junk” folder immediately, never to be seen again.

Instead you need to create a good permissions based list of email addresses. This can be achieved by simply adding a “join my mailing list” button to your website or creating a simple guest book and offering a “share this” option increases the size of your email address even further.

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Any home business relies upon customers or clients to fuel their business. Owners spend a great deal of time and effort to attract them but ,as hard as you work an equal amount of effort is needed to retain them. This is imperative for repeat business and a source of future referrals.

And that is where many home businesses fail. There are many reasons why a customer walks away after being initially “hooked” but, here are some of the most common:

Failing to Understand Customer Expectations: Setting and living up to customer expectations is about 90% of the true secret of success. Home business owners often run into problems here by overstating their abilities and underestimating a customer’s reaction to a broken promise.

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If you have a home business with an online presence (and these days who doesn’t?), finding ways to drive more traffic to your website is likely often in your mind.

One of the things many spend a lot of time agonizing over are “keywords” they should be using to draw traffic to their site. You can hire a dozen different SEO specialists and it is likely they will all give you a different answer. So why bother with all that fuss and expense in the first place; especially since one of the most powerful keyword tools available anywhere is free?

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Those work at home entrepreneurs who run an e commerce website (simply the act of selling goods and services online) are always looking for ways to drive traffic in order to boost sales. Suggesting that such businesses offer free products or prize contests may at first sound like it runs contrary to those goals, but in fact both are great and proven ways to drive your online sales up.

Offering freebies is one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book, and the practice translates very well into the online marketplace. After all the word “free” is a magnet to the thrifty consumer and if you feature your free offers prominently on the front page of your website most people are going to be curious enough to want to know more.

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Twitter is the “buzzed up” social network these days, and just as with MySpace and Facebook before it, small businesses and individual entrepreneurs are trying very hard to put it to good use in the marketing of their products and services.

But how useful is it really? Well everyone and his granny is on Twitter these days, so you or your business probably should have a presence as well.  In order for it to bring you sales or web traffic though you need followers, and lots of them. Many people begin by following the followers of a business rival or someone in the same field in the hope that those who were interested enough to follow the competition will follow them too (boy that is a lot of following.)

Once you have achieved a decent number of followers like any other web page you will need to provide interesting content to ensure repeat visits. The beauty of Twitter is of course that the updates are so short, so that often a simple link to a relevant or interesting article, review or product will suffice.

Do not expect a big flood of business right away from your Twitter page. In other words do not neglect your other promotional techniques in order to devote a huge amount of time to Twittering. But with one or two interesting tweet outs a day it can be a quick and easy way to gain more than a few extra customers.