At the beginning of a new challenge things can get a little confusing and your brain can get clogged up with too much information causing it to shut down. Beginning a new home based business is no different and often people quit too early for a number of different reasons and one of them is not being correctly trained.
HTML, SEO and PPC meant nothing to me when I first started and I did struggle a little at first. My computing skills were very basic and I had only sent my first email a few months before, but after a while I was a dab hand with my laptop.
One of the biggest things that people do not understand is that you do not need a big budget to get your project up and running. Sure there are costs when purchasing your business but as for advertising it, you can do a lot for free or little cost at all, so when you do start making money you can put aside some of your profit for advertising and release some time for yourself. Free marketing has a price but it is not financial, it is time worthy so you are paying by the amount of hours you are putting in.
Listed below are some of the methods I still use today even though I use paid methods as well. I use them because they work and it is as simple as that. Its always nice to get something for nothing, so here goes.
Blogging is free and if you did not know already, a blog is basically an online diary which people can write about any subject they like. In this case you would use this method to keep future customers or prospects bang up to date with the latest products and developments as far as your home business is concerned. Blogging is for entertainment and information, so when you write a post about your business do not write it as an advert, write it as information, so don’t write “buy this product!” for instance, because people may flag your site or complain. If however you have built your own blog and are not using one of the blogging companies you can post anything you like! Make sure you have a link on your main website to your blog page.
Start to use the free online classified sites. Just search in the search engines as you will find as many as you want. If you have quite a lot of free time post as many as you can. Write a good ad with an interesting eye catching headline and if permitted a link to your website. Many sites tell you how many times your ad has been viewed so keep the good adverts and rewrite the bad. What are you waiting for? Get writing!
Internet marketing forums work in two ways. First you can learn so much from the people on them because the amount of information stored there. Second when you are confident enough to start posting your own topics you will have your own signature file at the bottom of each post which will show your name and website therefore free advertising. This is one of the things that intimidated me most when starting out. You can start by introducing yourself and replying to posts that you may know the answer to. If you don’t know the answer, find it! You can build up relationships, find likeminded friends and most important find people that may be looking for a product like yours.
Press releases are a great free or very low cost way of getting some publicity for your site. You write a short article in the style of a newspaper reporter informing people of some new products or developments in your business. Search engines will pick them up as well and this will help you to start to become more visible online.
You can use some offline advertising like free classified papers, business cards and flyers. Be inventive and get advertising!
Stuart Nunn is an Internet Marketing coach and loves to help others succeed online. Check out his great new report on his newest online ventureYourNetBiz on his webpage.