By: Dassana Jayalath
So you're in business, and you've got everything up and running, but you're working from home. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Many people make it work. There's just one problem - all those existing home based businesses have existing customers. How are you going to find yours?
Working from home means that your business is not immediately visible to the outside world. You don't have a storefront, a warehouse or a prominent office for people to notice. You need to campaign hard to get attention. You'll have limited facilities and a limited amount of storage capacity for advertising materials. What can you do?
Just because your business is based at home doesn't mean it can't be connected to the wider trading community. If the product or service you are offering is aimed at the national or international marketplace, you first port of call should be the internet. For this, you'll need a company website. If you have good html skills, you may choose to build your own. There's lots of free advice available online to help with this. Alternatively, you can look up professional web designers and find somebody to build your page for you. Prices for such services vary considerably and the more expensive ones are not always the best, so look at examples of their previous work and make sure you're getting your money's worth. Your company website is extremely important. It will be the first part of your business most customers see. It is therefore worth the effort to get it right.
After building your website, you need to make sure that people will see it. You'll need to register it with search engines and with specialist pages based on subjects related to what your business does. You may also be able to exchange links with companies which work in related areas but are not directly competing with you. Your website may be used just for marketing or it may be used to sell your product or service directly. If this is the case, you may also wish to consider doing business via auction sites. Every individual promotion based on goods or services available through your website, and linking to it, can attract more customers for you.
If your business is locally based, a website can still help to make you look professional, but it is not as much of a priority. In this case, you need to concentrate your advertising campaign in your home area. If you are tragetting other businesses, this may mean making phone calls and paying visits to their premises to talk about what you do. Print up some information leaflets you can hand out. It's worth using good quality paper for these, even if they're black and white - paper makes the biggest difference to how people respond to them. You'll also need business cards, which are more difficult to make at home. Fortunately, there are a number of web based companies from which you can obtain these at a low price.
If you want to advertise your product or service directly to the public, you may consider printing some flyers. These are a cheap and easy marketing solution. You can put them through letter boxes or distribute them in locations (cafes, shop windows etc.) where the sort of customers you're looking for are likely to be. When you're running a home based business providing a local product or service it's worth promoting yourself as part of the local community. Make use of community locations like schools and libraries, and see if there are local projects which your company can become involved in. Let people know that you are there to help them, and watch your business grow.
