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Home » Marketing Articles » Nocost Marketing Strategies For Home Based Businesses

No-Cost Marketing Strategies for Home Based Businesses

Many small businesses are run from people's home computers and fall under the radar of business statistics. Whether you are working for a multi-level marketing company or selling painted bird houses the difficulty of advertising your products without a budget is overwhelming. Let us face the fact that $20 a month spent on classified advertisement isn't going to bring in a flood of visitors. A home-based business cannot compete with their larger counterparts. That is why in many cases owners are expected to tap into their personal relationships to make sales.

Like many of you I run a small home based business and have learned through trial and error what works and what doesn't. Despite putting some "notches in my belt" I have never stopped learning. In the beginning, many years ago, I wasted money paying for different types of advertisements. None of them worked well. Now my budget is nearly $0 and I receive thousands of visitors a year. How did I do this?

Strategy #1 Email: Instead of paying for lists and possibly getting in trouble for spamming I send businesses a very personalized email message. How do I find these businesses? I find them by looking on the web, going to their homepage, reading a little about them, and then sending them a personalized email about my product. The key is personalization. Write a basic sales letter which highlights your product, offers contact information and how it can impact a particular type of business. Since I run a magazine which survives off of advertising revenue I have developed sample letters for the clothing industry, auto industry, legal industry, etc. I then place their information within the letter so that when they read it they say, "Wow! This guy knows what is important to me!"

Strategy #2 Information: Search engines and customers love informative articles. We have all heard the saying, "knowledge is power". Customers want to learn about their business as much as possible. Posting informative articles on your web page will help visitors keep returning for additional information and hold them there longer. Information also increases your credibility as a business to the potential customer. If they agree with what you are saying they are more likely to purchase from you. Search engines, like customers, are constantly searching with their spiders for content related information. If your articles are about the product you are selling chances are that search engines will rank your site higher.

Strategy #3 Business Cards: Off-line marketing has never gone out of style. It may even be more necessary today than it was in yesteryear. There are plenty of printers out there that offer free business cards in exchange for a placement of their contact information on the back of the cards. In most cases the printer's information is small and unnoticeable making the free deal a good deal! Therefore I get my cards for only the cost of shipping and handling.

What you do with these cards is almost as important as how much you spend on them. People are interested in the self and love to talk about themselves as much as possible. Generally, I pass out the cards under the auspices that I would like to further a particular conversation or I would like to keep in touch with them. It is a great way to get their card in your hand and make a good friend. Now they have a personal relationship with me, are much more likely to look at my site and I can catalogue their information for networking purposes.

Strategy #4 Ezine Articles: Like I said in strategy #2 people love free information. Those same articles I placed on my website for my current customers can also be used to lure new customers. By making sure that you articles are informative, professional and worthy you can submit those to article databases for free content. Then websites pick up the article to post on their own site. The trick is to have your personal contact information either embedded into the article or as a tag line on the end. Personally I use my web address and my name. The better your article the more times it is posted around the web and the more customers you will get.

The four strategies work together to enhance the popularity of a website and reduce the amount of time you waste everyday. Writing informative articles about your product and submitting them to ezine directories helps to improve your sites search engine rankings, retain your customers and increase overall exposure. Passing out business cards and networking with other owners works well together and kills two birds with one stone. Sending out personalize emails and reading about your customers site helps to increase your understanding of your customers needs while advertising to them. The overall strategy of business is to make more money and spend less time and resources doing it.

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Know Your Tolerance for Investment Risk Before Designing an Investing Program

What is risk tolerance and how does it influence your investment decisions? Understanding what you can and cannot emotionally tolerate losing will help you make better investment decisions and ultimately gain higher returns.

What is risk tolerance? It's your ability to deal with investment losses ... usually in the short-run ... to have the chance of earning higher long-term returns than you would get in a bank account.

 On the one hand it's about how much you can afford to lose.

 On the other hand, it's also about how much money you can emotionally tolerate losing.

It's extremely important to your success as a long-term investor to know your tolerance for risk. It's a key part of designing an investment program that is appropriate for you and for picking individual investments.

What You Can Afford to Lose: An examination of your individual circumstances is required to figure out how much of your nest egg you can afford to lose in the short-run on investments that promise to deliver attractive growth in the long-term. But there are some general guidelines:

 Generally speaking, the more years you have until retirement, the higher your risk tolerance should be.

 Conversely, the more likely you are to tap into your nest egg early, the lower your risk tolerance should be.

The Emotional Aspect of Dealing with Risk: Studies of investor behavior show that emotions are a significant contributor to poor, long-term investment performance. Investors tend to get stuck on an emotional roller coaster that leads to poor investment decisions. Here is what the roller coaster ride often looks like:

 Investors get excited about investments that have already gone up and buy near the peak in value. When prices drop, investors find it emotionally difficult to accept and will rationalize holding on until prices improve. Then the bottom drops out and investors sell near the bottom, no longer able to cope with the anguish. Emotionally battered, they find it difficult to reinvest near the bottom and end up missing the next move up ... only to reinvest later on after values have risen above where they had sold (buy high ... sell low?) Then values peak once again, prices drop and the cycle continues.

Sound like anyone you know? This is why sticking with a disciplined investment plan is so important to successful investing. Overcoming your natural emotional reactions driven by fear and greed is the key. But that is hard to do.

 It becomes harder the more risk you accept in your investment plan.

What Percentage of Your Nest Egg Can You Lose? Before designing an investment plan, it is helpful to think about your risk tolerance in terms of a percentage. For example, you might say "I am willing to see my portfolio decline as much as 12% for a period of time if it gives me the opportunity to realize better growth over the long-term compared with leaving the money in a risk-free bank account or CD."

 Perhaps you could tolerate losing as much as 30% of your nest egg temporarily investing in something you thought could earn you a long-term growth rate as high as 10% to 15% per year.

Build a Disciplined Plan Around Your Risk Tolerance: No matter whether you're a big gambler or a scared chicken, knowing your risk tolerance expressed as a percentage should make it easier for you and/or a financial professional to design an investment program that isn't likely to push your emotional hot buttons.

 If the inevitable volatility of your investments remains within your emotional limits, you will be miles ahead in the long run simply from having been able to stick with a disciplined strategy.

You and/or a financial advisor can compare your percentage risk tolerance to the historical volatility (annual standard deviation) of different types of investments and design portfolio allocations that will more likely meet your long term investment objectives while staying within your risk limits.

Calibrate a Mechanical Investment Strategy to Your Risk Limits: With the use of computers and mathematically-based investment strategies, it is now possible to calibrate a mechanical investment strategy to your maximum risk tolerance.

This is what we have done at ConfidentStrategies.com. We have Model Portfolio strategies calibrated for a maximum risk tolerance of 5%, 7%, 12% and 30%. Fortunately, you don't need any financial or mathematical background to take advantage of these sophisticated models as the work is all done for you and presented in the easy-to-understand form of Model Portfolios.

Benefit From Higher Risk-Adjusted Returns: Our Model Portfolios have not only successfully managed volatility risk but increased longer term rates of return. The result has been very attractive "risk-adjusted returns" compared with more traditional investment strategies. "Getting well paid" for the risk you're taking may seem like an obvious approach, but few other methods of investing allow you as much control over the relationship between risk and return as mechanical strategies such as ours. To learn more about our investment models for stock market and mutual fund investing subscribe to our free strategic investment newsletter at http://www.confidentstrategies.com.