Advertising Your Home Business on a Budget

When you start a new family business, no one knows who you are, is the greatest challenge, you will encounter is how to attract a new business.

If it is not in your community or market, people, you know who need your product or business service, you may not start your home-based business started. However, once you talk to your own who knows who needs your product or service, then your next task is to find others who will help to make your door open.

Many companies know that they should at some point in the future of advertising, but they hope that this day will be reduced road is long. Some people think that this utopian concept to achieve. But for us in the real business world, we must have to meet our family enterprise solutions, advertising and creative needs, while working within our budget.

For most enterprises will have to spend a lot of money to promote their home-based business is a misunderstanding. When you start, you really do not how much money advertising services, and if you do, you should spend money wisely.

You jump into the head of the advertising industry forward, let me share my learned about this issue among the most important lessons.

Advertising your home-based business lesson # 1
It does not cost an arm and a leg to promote your home business, unless you have no plan, not tested.

It is possible as far as possible, you should always test your advertising. Quick Start If you are dumping huge amounts of money without first testing your advertising business ad, you may find that they did not occurred on the road at the end of sale. Most of who committed this error write off their family business, they choose to, or economic or other excuses for any failures 100. However, if they do not want the responsibility for their own mistakes, they will never learn from their mistakes. Do not let this be you.

Advertising your home-based business lesson # 2
All tests should be done in blocks. If you start publicity, newspapers, radio and television at the same time, how do you know which advertising is to enable people to your business? You do not. You will know that something might be work, but you do not know what is the real trick to do.

Even if you tell your advertising to tell you how to find you, my experience has shown that less than 10% of customers will tell you what --- and who do not even get the facts straight! You can not rely on your customers tell you what advertising is good work from home business. You have to put extra effort to understand ourselves.

Advertising your home-based business lesson # 3
Only when you have a proven and solid advertising portfolio should give you spend big bucks on advertising. Even so, you should be careful to keep further measurements to determine how many ads the greatest benefits is. Sometimes, you may be able to reach 10 times that many people, but in the media and other factors, the different types to increase the exposure will only generate twice the sales. Let your eyes to adapt to this situation in order to take full advantage of your advertising costs up.

Advertising your home-based business lesson # 4
Lesson # 3 as shown, and sometimes your best advertising investment costs, you may actually be less money. When you first started, whether you are running a family business or outside of your home business, you need to allow people to talk about and your business ideas.

If you are in areas such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television media, you need to know your business promotion does not require large cash expenditures method busy testing ads. There are several examples:
Praise
* Card
* Press Release
* Non-prime time radio and television advertising

The following describes in detail each of a low-cost commercial types of information:
Praise

This of course is the cheapest kind of advertising on the planet --- it does not cost you anything. Ask your customers if they know who could use your products or services. When they are with your products and services are pleased that they are willing to tell you that you can contact the person, they will through your words.

Card

You can usually choose to 20500 U.S. dollars card. When you do this, on the one hand they are. Do not give more than one wife more for everyone. If they need you more cards, they will ask.

Some people on a regular basis with other known networks. Some of them have been called have been a few extra money. With these people, you can suggest to them if they are written on the back of your card one of their names and card presented to you, then you will pay the referral fee to them. You do not provide much --- sometimes one dollar is enough. In your query and your home business products, and to determine how many would be a good referral fee.

News

Press release is to produce for your family is a good source of business news. In the local newspaper business editor is a good business has always been concerned about those stories, to fill the newspaper business news section.

Of course, the business understanding the edited file to run the economy and more inclined to run your story, if you buy at his / her publication, but still printed the story of special events and openings advertising.

It is important to remember that the press release is that it must be constructed in the form of a news story. Even if you are a sole proprietorship, quotes from you should write in the third person format: John Doe said: "You quote it here."

A press release should be available early this year the most important information and conduct additional details to the final.

You should always provide the reporter who gets the task is simple and easy way that he / she contact you directly. In many cases, journalists will have to contact you to obtain more information, to enhance their in your story.

To learn more about creating Press Releases More information can be found in rusty Cowley's website: http://www.PRrainmaker.com/

The non-prime-time advertising on radio and television

Believe it or not, on the radio and television, the most favorable prices, some at night and non-prime-time venue. Of these goals is not a complete waste of time because they can easily ensure that the business of television shoppers.

These off-hours, less than the population of prime time.

Do not be afraid to check your local radio and television stations the rate of non-prime time to see what bargains may exist. With the TV, prime time is 19:00 to 10:00. Band radio, prime time is from 8 am to 17 o'clock. This is definitely left a few hours to provide advertising discounts for your home business a lot!

Last

When it comes to it, there are a lot of understanding of advertising, but when you have a basic knowledge of shooting down, everything will fall into place and bring more dollars, your bank account.

Entrepreneurship in Unexpected Places

I suppose if I had thought about it for a few seconds, I would have concluded that the desire for profit played some role in the invention of the printing press. On the other hand, my impoverished image of 15th Century Europe normally does not include much space for entrepreneurs. Then tonight, I stumbled across this passage in Alister McGrath's interesting history of the translation of the King James Bible:

The control of sections of society was slowly but surely shifting from the old patrician families to the entrepreneurs. The emerging breed of venture capitalists was looking for business opportunities.... Our story concerns one such opportunity -- the invention of printing. The financial backing of the new technology of printing was quickly identified as one of the surest ways to make money. Investment in printing technology became increasingly attractive on account of a major social change -- the rise in literacy. People began to read; someone had to produce the books they came to demand.

Despite the success of Gutenberg's methods, he did not make a fortune. It seems Gutenberg's "venture capitalist" (Johann Fust) sued to recover his investment and was rewarded with ownership of Gutenberg's press. The other problem for Gutenberg: No patents. Even though he had a head start, others soon caught up.

Best Business Magazines

Inspired by this article http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/showcase/chi-0306120068jun12.story The 50 Best Magazines of 2003, I started thinking about the best business magazines.

Here is my Top 3: Fortune, Business Week, and Business 2.0. Fast Company deserves honorable mention. The Economist is also a great read, though it would be too limiting to call it a "business magazine." I wish The Red Herring were still publishing. Same with The Industry Standard. Other magazines aimed at entrepreneurs, like Inc. and Entrepreneur, are pretenders. One promising "newcomer": Capitalism Magazine.

The Value of a Venture Capitalist Time

Warren Buffet is offering to have lunch with the highest bidder on eBay, with the proceeds going to the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco non profit serving the poor, hungry and homeless. (And, of course, Glide has its own Web site.) According to the New York Times, Buffet has done this twice before, and the lunches sold for $25,000 and $32,000, respectively. (As of this writing, the bidding on the next lunch stands at $20,600.)

I admire Buffet for this. He could easily write a check for much more than those amounts -- and he probably does -- but investing time is more meaningful. I once met with a venture capitalist who spent the first 10 minutes of our meeting telling me how valuable his time was. "My most valuable asset blah, blah, blah." What an arrogant bore!

When we value our own time too dearly, we are reluctant to give it away, even to family and friends. When I recognized this inclination in myself, many years ago, I stopped wearing a watch and threw away my day planner. That was a liberating experience. Although I have since acquired a PDA, I have learned to manage my time in a way that removes the "guilt" associated with spending time on people.

Dracula Land

The Washington Post is reporting on the struggles to build a Dracula theme park in Romania. This project has been in the works for some time and has been haunted (sorry, couldn't resist) by several controversies, but the government is behind the project. The big obstacle appears to be lack of interest from investors:


The planned location in Snagov, an upscale lake resort near Bucharest, is close to the burial site of Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Romanian prince who inspired the Dracula myth. A feasibility study indicated that the park would likely earn millions of dollars in profits and attract hundreds of thousands of foreign tourists a year. However, a year after being launched, the project has become idle because no major private investor has come forward with the estimated $15.6 million needed to build the park. Last week, 8 percent of investors sold their shares.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Then again, I bought shares in Webvan.