Marketing in your home based business
Living the dream!
How much fun is it to roll out of bed when you want, maybe do a little exercise, or walk the kids to school, run a few errands and then get the laptop out about 10.30 and start to work on your home based business?
This is the dream, right?
But is it becoming a nightmare?
Low sales, or zero sales overnight!
Low traffic numbers.
Why isn’t anyone buying my stuff???
At this rate, you may even have to go back to the dreaded job!!
Nooooo!!!!
To stop this from happening you are quickly going to have to learn the skill of marketing in your home based business!
Marketing is your lifeblood
No sales = no business!
And marketing is the lifeblood to get sales.
You may have come into your business to change the world, but unless you master the skills of marketing, you soon won’t have a business.
Fortunately for myself, I have fallen in love with marketing.
However, for many home based business owners, they hate it with a passion!
It might be because of the self-promotion thing.
Or they hate selling or pushy sales people.
What I like about online marketing, is that it can be a little bit anonymous.
You’re not hounding someone at the shopping centre as they buy some bread and milk! (I hate those people!)
It’s a great thing about an online business.
So how do you go about marketing without coming off like that pushy salesperson?
Selling by helping
The best way to market your home based business is simply to help people.
What are your customer’s pain points, problems and struggles?
Then set about helping them and solving their problems.
If you focus on helping people and use this in your content and marketing, then selling is no longer an issue.
A quote, I believe from the great Zig Ziglar says: “If you can help enough people get what they want, then you can get whatever you want”
This may be all well and good you say, but what methods can I use to market my business and help people at the same time?
Have a blog
Having your own website and blog is the perfect way to market your business and help people at the same time.
Your blog will be the foundation of your business where you can write out content that both engages and helps your reader.
You can then tie in your promotion at the end where you can provide a solution to your customer’s pain points and problems.
Your main focus, though, is to help and add value for your readers.
Another good way to market is through video.
You can embed a video on your blog as well as have your own YouTube channel.
The key with writing content for your blog is to have good search engine optimisation (SEO) by utilising keywords that get you found in a Google search.
This is a great way to market your business, essentially for free, but it is definitely a skill that needs to be learned about with your marketing.
Along with free methods like SEO, you will also need to invest in your business with paid advertising if you wish to grow and scale your business.
AdWords
Paid advertising using Google or Bing Adwords is known as Pay Per Click advertising.
When people are searching for an item in Google they enter a specific term into a Goole search which is known as a “keyword search term”
For example, they are looking to buy a video game and enter: “Most popular video game for 2017”, and a whole heap of results pop up.
What you can do, is buy an AD for this particular search term, and it will be shown in at the top of the search results.
And when someone clicks on your AD, you pay Google an amount, hence the term “pay per click”.
When done right this can be a very lucrative way to scale your home based business.
Email marketing
Right from the start of starting your business, building a list of email subscribers should be a primary priority.
You can offer your subscribers what’s known as a “lead magnet” such as a free report, a cheat sheet, or video in exchange for their email address.
Once you have their email address you can communicate with them as often as you like to send them both content and offers, just for the cost of a small monthly fee for an email autoresponder.
You can use a free service such as Mailchimp, or an expensive option like Infusionsoft, or something in between.
Personally, I use Aweber, which starts at $19 per month and offers a reliable and robust service.
The power of having an email list can’t be understated, and is vital to use in your marketing.
Solo Ads
Solo Ads is leveraging the power of other marketer’s email lists to build your own.
How it works is that you can pay for another marketer to send out an email to his own list to your offer.
You pay for a certain amount of clicks, for example, I have paid for a solo ad for 100 clicks.
On occasion, I have received over 50 opt-ins to my own email list and made several sales, basically covering the cost of my ad.
Not every solo ad is this successful, however, so it is good to find a few certain people to work with that is a good fit, but this is a great way to help build your own list.
I use a company called Udimi for my Solo ads, and they offer a great service.
Facebook Ads
There are over one billion people on Facebook.
Whatever market, niche or business you are in, they are hanging out somewhere on Facebook.
This is why Facebook advertising is an essential skill to master in your marketing plan.
If you do it the wrong way, however, it is so easy to burn through a lot of money very quickly.
This is why I recommend getting some advanced training if you want to take this seriously.
My go-to guy for learning Facebook Ads is Dan Henry, and I would suggest you take a look at his free webinar.
You can also advertise on other social media channels such as YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.
But I recommend that you start with just one and master that first, and I believe Facebook advertising is a good place to start.
Spamming
Believe it or not, some people actually teach you to do this!
Take my advice and don’t bloody spam!
If you want to be taken seriously as a marketer, don’t fall into this trap of spamming Facebook groups, or messaging people about your “opportunity”.
Yes, networking is important and so is building relationships, but spamming people is not the way to go about it!
Seriously, just don’t do it!
Work on learning these other methods, and concentrate on helping people.
This is the best way to have success marketing in your home based business.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below.
To your success,
John W. Newman
Helping you create TIME AND FINANCIAL FREEDOM by building a PROFITABLE Business Online!
Dream It… Believe It… Then Achieve It!
Love social media? Join me on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Instagram.
Hi John. I remember when spam was just a canned meat product. It’s come such a long way in the past several years. Fortunately marketing has come a long way too. I like online marketing. It isn’t the old-fashioned pushy advertising like on television or door-to-door where you interrupt someone to try to get them to buy your stuff. A blog is marketing that sits out there on the internet waiting for the right person at the right time. Everything else is about connecting with people and building relationships. That’s what networking is all about. Build the relationship first, then offer the solutions you have to whatever they need as they come up. The relationship is the most important thing.
Haha! I remember the canned spam Ben, wish it were still that way 😉
I like your view of online marketing, I feel the same way.
When you put your message in front of the right audience, it doesn’t even feel like marketing, you are actually helping people that want it!
Thanks for your feedback 🙂
John!!! You modeled your marketing solution reeeeeallllyyyy effective as the perspective you shared is invaluable TO EVERYBODY no matter what stage of the game they are in. When you are working online, so long as you are helping, so long as you are a resource, so long as you have an answer, you will experience success.
As for Facebook advertising, thank you for that name drop. I really needed that. Facebook ads are elusive to me. As for Solo Ads, I have used them before, but the traffic and CTR was really weak. I didn’t try the network you mentioned. I will look into that as well.
Oh! And your writing style?
It’s pretty great!
Thanks so much Shonna, glad you liked the article 🙂
Facebook Ads can be hard if you don’t know what you are doing, but Dan really knows some clever tactics and strategy. Even if you just watch the free webinar you will get some real value bombs!
Solo ADS can be really hit and miss, but I have had some good results with Udimi, but some sellers are better than others, so it takes some time to find a few good people to keep working with.
Best of luck 🙂
Hello my friend, marketing is the life blood, if any business would hope to succeed, therefore as website owners we need to know what needs to be done in oder to succeed. Your post is very good , easy to follow. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Norman, you are so right!
Sales and marketing tie in together and are definitely the lifeblood of your business!
Glad you liked the article 🙂
Hi there,
This is agreat article and you have a great product here to promote.
A lot of people are looking for ways to make money online and become financially independent and thus move away from the ‘day job’.
I like the piece that you wrote about being first and foremost putting yourself out there to help people.
Thats where our journey begins and if we can get on that track, things will fall into place afterwards.
Cheers and best wishes
Phil Browne
Thanks Phil, I think stepping out of your comfort zone is a big stopper for a lot of people when they start an online business, and that is why most people don’t do it.
It’s totally a mindset thing, if you can get your mind right you can do anything!
Thanks for commenting 🙂
I have learned a lot here. I think I really like the tips about helping people, that sounds like good way to build trust and get some customers. I have never thought about the possibility with Facebook ads and ads on other social media, but of course that is possible to! I just started an online business and have a long way to go and a lot to learn and I’m thankful for these kind of posts.
Facebook Ads in particular is huge and you should look at it once you are looking to scale your business.
In the beginning, I would just concentrate on building out your site with good content, and using keywords and best SEO practices before worrying about paid advertising, but it comes to a point that you need to advertise to grow.
Thanks for your comment Linda 🙂
Hi John,
I’ve just set up a new blog, and I’m still learning about the marketing part. Some great tips here. I want to market more on social media platforms, so it’s great to know that I don’t have to do it all at once. I would be quite lost, to be honest. It makes perfect sense to just master one platform at a time. I’ll have to check out Dan Henry, never heard of him. Hopefully, I’ll get a better understanding about Facebook Ads.
Have a great day.
Zuzana
As a newbie, it is very easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you jump around and get ahead of yourself.
This is one of the many reasons I love the training at Wealthy Affiliate, it is step-by-step training and their is a community of support in place if you get lost.
Thanks Zuzana 🙂
Hey John
I enjoyed reading your article.
I’ve not heard of Dan Henry and am going to look him up now.
I’ve tried Solo Ads but have only had limited success. I’m obviously not doing it properly. Perhaps you know of some training guru who could help me here.
Thanks for the information
Jackie
Hey Jackie, Dan really is a a man going places and he really knows his stuff.
To be honest, I don’t know of any solo ads training out there, that may be something I could look into myself… You have me thinking now 😉
Thanks for commenting.
Having a basic understanding of Copywriting can take a person a long way once they are exposed to the benefits of that process. Most people in this business don’t really realize that they are in the marketing and advertising business, not just the blogging and SEO business. It’s much more important to understand how to communicate, which the basis of marketing to your niche market.
It really is all about marketing and advertising.
Even writing good content can be referred to as “attraction” marketing.
I watched a video recently that said that this business is all about creating a distribution channel.
Where people once had to build a following on TV and it was really expensive to do so, people now can build a following on YouTube, or a blog, or via email or a podcast and we can now market our business and ourselves for little cost.
This really is the golden age!
Thanks for your feedback 🙂