Tag: offline business

    Guerilla Marketing to Grow Your Business

    It’s about growing your own home business by using some offline tactics to do your marketing that are traditional but have been working for ever. So for those of you who have never tried to grow your home business, there are three point six billion people online. So remember to get your Web site up there like I mentioned on Thursday so that you connect with those people.

    If you want at first start connecting with your local community. Believe it or not,  yes, Yellow Pages is a great way to start. Get your advertising info into Yellow Pages and that does cost money but that will last you a lifetime in order of “word of mouth.” Once people start to get to know that you’re in the Yellow Pages in the directory, they can look you up easily and get your phone number and your address also maybe depending on the Yellow Pages. And of course, it is put up in the Yellow Pages on the Internet. And once they have your web site, you have a Web site up and an address. You can put that Web site and your phone number and e-mail and your mobile phone on business cards. On your Web site, have a contact form to “contact us” form as they say on your Web site that they could fill in and contact you for more information about your business.

    You can actually pay for the domain and pay for the hosting for a web site and it is certainly less than a hundred dollars You could easily learn WordPress. I know you don’t want to but obviously you could and that would be also free. Once you have that, you could put up a few blog posts and you have a Web site or you could hire someone to do that or get a free Web site as long as they allow you to attach a email auto-responder that will make a list of the people who contact you. Once they get onto your e-mail address list then you are in business with possible customers because that’s a very simple way for you to start your business growing is by getting on the Internet.

    But anyway, for those of you who are local businesses, you have to do some marketing for your business. There are still direct mailers out there depending on your community they could be reasonable. Send out a press release saying that you’re in town and available or you could do some ads in your local paper.

    You could also network out there in your community. There’s a lot of business networking groups. I’m not sure if they’re free to join in your community. The Chamber of Commerce in our community you pay a yearly fee but you have a lot of free networking by being in the chamber. Go out and volunteer in your community at a local food bank or any local business entrepreneurial type group. Go to a Meetup networking event. Meetups are free and create your own Meetup where you provide information and people can come and learn about your business or service depending on what you actually do and you could actually be there and meet up with others who are in business. Those are just a few of the ways that you have to be able to get out into the community so people get to know about you as you have to network.

    You have to market your business. So obviously you could also do a press release send it to your local newspapers saying that you’re in business. They’re always interested in profiling new businesses this community. Those are some of the traditional ways that Jay Levinson of the Guerilla Marketing book series has for you and let me just get his Web site because of course everybody has a Web site now and you can go and get some more guerilla marketing hacks for your local business that you don’t have to cost too much money to spend to get them.

    Gmarketing.com or his book “Guerrilla Marketing” by Jay Conrad Levinson.

    But anyway , so guerrilla marketing is a great way to save money in order to grow your business when you’re offline. Obviously there is some cost to be an offline business in people finding you in your local community. Tell all your family and friends that’s an inexpensive way. Hand out cards to your family and friends note cards to anyone you know. So for our offline business it’s now of course you can get online and get more business from the Internet. That’s why you need a web site. So as I mentioned get your Web site up there. Then you’re going to have to go and participate in social media.It doesn’t cost money to get on to social media and just chat and add your social media pages.  So that’s another hack is to get your Web site up and then get connected on some of the social media that might be of interest to you.

    So we’ll be talking about some of them that we’ve talked about in season one like Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest  and  Twitter .  Then you can see that it is possible even if you have a shipping company to be successful on his Instagram or even of course company like Ikea it can be very successful on Facebook. So hopefully you’ve got a few ideas today and I’ll give you some more when I get Guerrilla marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson out!

    Categories: Networking, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags: , , , , ,

    Your Website Is Your Online Hub

    I’d like to talk about running your own business and some of the systems that you need to put in in order to have a home business whether it’s offline or on. I wanted to emphasize the importance of having a Web site for your business. So today I wanted to talk about your ONLINE HUB.

    I like to call it the ONLINE HUB which is your Web site on the Internet. It will have its own unique address. You will have it on your business cards for people to go to whether you’re offline or online.  Visitors can click on and go to your business there and your web site will be important in your business for running it. It will be the place where you can actually talk to them about your business by talking about your product or service on your blog. And if you don’t know what a blog is we’ll be talking about that later. And then also it will be the place where you can get them to subscribe. Any of your visitors who come to your Web site, they will be interested in your business and maybe they want to get a newsletter from you. You should have a place called a lead page where they can sign up for either your newsletter or your emails that you send out weekly or monthly depending on your business As well your web site can be the online hub for where you can sell to them if you wish.

    So ,for example, you can have a page on your Web site which talks about your product or your service and it gives all these details about it even if they are interested in learning more than they can read about it.

    Obviously you could put your phone number on the page or you could also give them a button to click and sign up by e-mail to contact you with information about your product or service. You can even have a sales page which you can link up to a payment button service that will actually sell to any visitors that come to your business website.

    So, the ONLINE HUB  is what I like to call the and that is your Web site has a unique location on the internet. Whether you’re an off line or an online business, you should have a Web site that is easy to navigate easy to read and simple enough that they can figure out where to go when they have a question. Also, have a place where they can search and find information if they need to have your phone number, your contact e-mail and you have a place where they can sign up for their e-mail newsletter if they wish. It could be right on your front page of your website or it could be on a separate page that you will send them to if they click on or gotten that kind of thing.

    So your ONLINE HUB is your Web site. It’s important to have in your running of your business because it can be the place that you send visitors whether it’s from a business card or from on the Internet. You send them through social media to check out your product or service on your website. It is an important part of your business and it should be running efficiently quickly and be an easy place for them to contact you for them to buy. Of course, also, to get on a list to learn more about your business and get information from you.

    So if you haven’t thought of- your offline business should have a Web site and it should be running efficiently.

    So we’ll be talking a bit more about your Web site in the next episode in some of the ways that you can make it easier for them to find you and to connect to you and to buy from you.

    Get your Web site up!

     It’s a great place now for people to check you out.

    Mobile Responsive

    A lot of people now are using their mobile phone to search for products or services. So it’s time to get your web site to be mobile responsive. You know where to find out if your Web site is mobile or responsive. All you have to do is get a phone out and find the browser that you’re going to use and use it to search for your search for your own business if you haven’t done that yet. See how it looks on mobile in order to be a mobile responsive web site.

    For mobile responsive , the look of your web site changes so that it has a navigation which is easy to use with buttons to push and to go and to sign up etc.. It actually looks a bit different from your actual Web site on the desktop.

    For a non-mobile responsive website on your phone will have all the text, all the buttons, all the pages, all menus small and very hard to access. So you need to be able to get a mobile responsive web site. At some point, we’ll be talking about how you should make sure you have the priority of having a mobile responsive web site.

    But for now, let’s just go next week have a look at some of the things you should have on your Web site that are important to your visitors, your leads and who will become your customers.

    Yes, you better get your website up there on the internet even if you are an offline business!

    Join “The Business of At Home Business” to learn more!

     

    Categories: Run a Home Business, Website Tags: Tags: , , ,

    Do You Want To Start A Home Business In Your Community

     

    Today we’re going to be talking about some of the things you have to think about when you’re before you start your business. And some of the actual research you have to do before you start your business. So first off we’ll be talking about starting a home business and picking a business. And today it’s all about offline. So we’re going to be talking about local business and working out if your home office and there are many ways you can do that.

    There are some restrictions obviously to what you can do from your own home office. You can check with your local authority on what kind of businesses are allowed as a home business in your community. For example we don’t really have hairdressers. We don’t have car shops. We don’t have you know auto body shops. We don’t have various other ones basically things that make noise and smells because of course you have to think about your neighbors which we’ll talk about another time when it comes to offline.

    But in terms of home businesses and what one you might be interested in, one of the recommendations I would say is that try to do something that you already know about and that’s something you’ve been working in. Whether it’s the food industry (that would be a concern in terms of doing it at home) or if you were to had an internship as a bookkeeper or you were working in marketing or your writing business and you were writing for business or you were an office administrator for business. These are skills that you could do from your home in terms of a local home business.

    You just have to decide if there’s a market out there for you. So you have to decide how to figure out if there’s a local market for your business. So they see the first things that we would do, which we did a long time ago in the 1990s, was have a look and see who else was out there in the local community who was doing the same business.

    I think there was only one Engineer near us at the time so we had not too much competition in our local area and then of course we had to look at the kind of work that’s out there for us in terms of being able to have a steady flow of business. So you want to research at what is selling in your community whether it’s a product or service.

    How many people or how many businesses are out there? 

    For example, if there are five to 10 home cleaning businesses in your community and your community is only 5000 then you might want to consider a different business.

    But one of the things I want you to think about if there are other businesses out there doing the same service then most likely there is a demand for that business especially if they are in the business for at least five years or more than they have enough clients to keep them busy. So you’ll probably find enough clients to keep you busy. And of course there’s always people moving into your community and it is always growing. Assuming your population will grow enough to support five or six of what you do as your product or service then you might want to consider putting some tentative idea out there that you’re in business. See if you get some interest in people wanting to know what your business is and whether or not they could use your business.

    If you have no idea, my first recommendation would be to decide on a business.

    Don’t forget that you pick the wrong business just pick something and then get an internship or part time job in that type of business to see what it’s like to see if there’s certain skills or knowledge that you don’t have for that you might need in order to do that same business. Then you’ll need some experience to learn about it and see how the business sells its products because that’s one of the important things to learn if you want to sell your products. So be in the market similar to your business product or service and then you have to allocate a few five to 10 hours on learning about your type of business part time outside your day job in order to get some of the skills you need to be in business.

    We’ll talk about that on Thursday when we’re talking about running your own business and some of the skills that you need as an entrepreneur. Then once you have a primary a pretty solid understanding of what the business entails and what kind of requirements are needed. You can certainly have a tentative look at maybe starting selling a bit of what you’re doing part time.

    Now I forgot to mention that there are a lot of good government Web sites which have information on starting your own business and how to do it and some other requirements that are required for by the government So go and just do a search for starting a home business and add your country and you’ll probably find a great many places on Google where you can learn more about what their requirements are for starting a business.

    Say you’d like to start so what you need to do is to do research and maybe gain a bit of knowledge about your business that you want to be and is probably recommending that you already know something about the business that you want to go into and then make some kind of decision on what you think you could do day to day and be useful in your business.

    For example I think I mentioned yesterday that I don’t think even though I have the skills to be a bookkeeper I would be happier as a bookkeeper. So I’m not going to have a bookkeeping business. Whereas I love being an artist and I’d love to have an artist business and that would keep me going day to day even though the sales might be less than in a bookkeeping business.

    So it’s something for you to think about is are you willing to challenge yourself to do that you have the passion to do that you want to know the things that you need to know to do the business. Don’t go into something that people are just saying “go into it because it’ll make you rich.” It won’t make you rich because you don’t have the passion for it.

    So we’re going to be talking about some of the practical ideas next time where you can do your research for offline and starting your local business. Obviously, anyone can go get their computer out and start an online business from their home office without really any requirements from the local authority.So we will talk about online research next week and it will be for offline and online.

    So let’s hope the you got some information out of that and we’ll go out and research your local community and see what’s out there and whether they need another dog walking service or whether they need another cleaning service or whether they need another bookkeeper or another accountant or another.

    You know there’s lots of business that you can do out of your home that are not required to go out and be in a rental office in your hometown. ‘

    So go out and have a look and see if you have enough passion in order to do business.

     

    Categories: Run a Home Business Tags: Tags: , ,