The phenomenon of the Internet has become a part of our daily lives, so it seems natural to build and internet home based business where you can work from home via the online community. In fact, many organizations are now doing business almost exclusively online. However, in order to build your internet home based business you need to market your products and services.

If you have a start-up internet home based business, you are probably working on a limited budget. Fortunately there are a number of resources available to you to market your internet home based business to the online community. One inexpensive option is to use a pay-per-click marketing program to advertise your internet home based business online. Many large search engines like Google and Yahoo! offer programs where you can advertise your business and only pay when someone clicks on your advertisement. The cost of each click varies, ten cents and upward, based on the popularity of the keywords you register.

Another inexpensive technique to advertise your internet home based business is to share advertising with other websites. If you know of websites that your consumers may frequent, you can discuss swapping advertising on each other’s sites. You can also write articles about your internet home based business products or services to be used in other people’s e-zines which offers you free advertising on the web.

Offering a newsletter or freebie is a great way to advertise your internet home based business for little time and effort. Having people sign up on your website for a free newsletter courtesy of your internet home based business is a great marketing technique. A newsletter allows your potential consumers know what you have to offer and how it can help them in their endeavors. If you do not have time to create a whole newsletter, then maybe start an e-mail list for simple tips or coupons.

Read the rest of the article here: Internet Home Based Business.

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Copyright © Charles Fuchs is an established online marketer who specializes in helping people start their very own Home Based Business. He specializes in showing people the best way to Make Money at Home.

I grant permission to publish this article, electronically or in print, as long as the bylines are included, with a live link, and the article is not changed in any way.

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Everyone knows that planning is essential to business. Yet, the average work at home professional does not have a current marketing plan. Many don’t feel they have the time or the skills to create a marketing plan, however a marketing plan can save both time and money and no special skills are required to create a marketing plan.

What can a marketing plan do for your business?
Just creating a marketing plan can benefit most businesses immediately. It gets you thinking about marketing as an ongoing investment rather than the haphazard approach that contributes to inconsistent results. Creating the plan can help clarify and distill your goals into achievable tasks. Knowing what you are going to advertise and when helps you narrow down exactly how you are going to do it far in advance. Planning in this way can pay off big for your business. It can help you stay on budget and increasing profit margins by reducing marketing costs. The resulting windfall can be used to pay off debts, re-invest for growth or put into savings for the future.

The immediate benefits can be quite astounding to those new to planning. It can put you ahead of the competition in both advertising space and in placement for events, online and off. The rules of some of these events prohibit two representatives of the same company from participating. By researching the options early, you can take the time to choose the events most likely to be profitable for you. Booking early for these events can ensure that you secure a position at some of the most popular events. Events like craft shows, bridal and baby fairs, and other events often give preferential treatment to those who book early, including reduced rates, preferential placement and any number of perks.

A marketing plan can help you budget purchases more effectively. For instance, if you plan to get a personalized item, such as pens, printed for a particular event you can price out the options in advance and begin setting aside money for the expense. If you happen to see a good sale or special in the meantime, you may decide to purchase early, possibly saving a significant amount depending on the sale. Without a plan, you may purchase these sorts of items without a solid purpose or end up leaving the decision too late and have to pay for expedited production and delivery. Since these sorts of items are often less expensive with higher quantities, planning in advance can allow you to purchase enough to last through several, if not all, the events you have planned saving both with the lower unit price and by avoiding additional set-up fees common to most print jobs.

Ready?
Relax! This is quite likely not as hard as you fear it will be. There’s no need to face the process with trepidation. There is no reason to avoid it as a daunting task that you need to procrastinate your way up to.

As a small business you don’t need a fancy program or any specialized knowledge to create your own marketing plan. Your marketing plan doesn’t need to be drawn out and complicated; it simply has to meet your needs. You don’t need a marketing plan that conforms to corporate level standards. It simply needs to keep you on track and moving towards your personal business goals.

Get Set…
Before you begin, block off at least one hour of time. If you have young children at home, you may want to book two hours to allow time for interruptions. Once you’ve blocked off this time, you will want to gather up your supplies.

If you are a paper planner you will need:
A notepad
A calculator
A calendar
A pen
A pencil
Highlighters
Post It Notes
*Easy Access to past and present business records
Working near the computer (if you keep your records online) or filing cabinet will ensure you can keep working. If your records are all over the place, take the time to gather them in one place even if they aren’t organized. You may have to do additional calculations to make the marketing plan effective, but at least you won’t have to search the entire house to do it.

If you are a computer planner you will want programs that can allow for the simulation of the paper supplies. Most word processors can easily handle this, though you may have to download a calendar template. You may choose to use a scheduling program if you are comfortable with using one, but there’s no point to learning a new program for this task. Learning a new program while developing a marketing plan can slow down the creation process.

Go!
First read through all the steps before you begin. This is important because you may choose to do some of the steps out of order.

Step One: The Budget
Your first task is to develop a marketing budget. Small businesses often find it necessary to budget both money and time. Since money can be rather scarce, especially in the start up stages, you will have to invest time to take advantage of free and low cost alternatives and undertake much of the marketing work yourself.

How much to budget is a matter of debate. The exact amount will vary depending on the size of your business, your comfort with risk, and your long term business goals. Someone with a small business who wants business to grow big enough to support her entire family within five years will choose to spend more than the business owner who is content to fund household extras.

If you are already in business, one way of coming up with a ballpark figure for your marketing budget is to review your marketing expenses over the past year. If you haven’t been in business for a year, add up what you have spent on marketing so far, divide the amount by the number of months you’ve been in business and multiply this figure by 12. From this yearly figure, decide whether you would like to increase, decrease or maintain this budget, keeping in mind that you may be able to reduce some marketing costs through advance planning. You can add or reduce the figure using a set dollar amount or percentages. For example, if you spent $100 on marketing in the past year, you may want to increase it by a modest 10% or a more aggressive target of $1000 in an effort to expand.

If you are not yet in business and developing a marketing plan, look at your sales goals and decide on a percentage of sales (or profit) that you are willing to re-invest into marketing. At 10% a sales goal of $3000 would net a $300 marketing budget. If you are basing your budget on retail sales, you will want to make sure you can still make a reasonable profit. If you are in direct sales and receive 40% commission, this scenario would leave $900 remaining after marketing expenses. Adjust the figure up or down until you feel comfortable committing to it for at least six months no matter what your sales figures dictate.

Don’t worry too much if your marketing budget seems miniscule. There are a variety of ways to stretch a marketing budget. Look for the article on this topic (Stretching your marketing dollar) next week.

Step Two: The Methods
After the often challenging task of developing a budget, this next step will undoubtedly be a breeze for you. If you are already in business make a list of the methods and venues you are currently using and have used in the past year. This includes both free and paid marketing opportunities. Things that you might be adding include:

Article Writing
Networking Groups
Online Expos
Advertising Groups
Newsletter/Ezine Advertising
Banner Ads
Pay Per Click
Direct Mail
Flyer/Sample Exchanges
Prize Giveaways
Press Releases

After you’ve completed a comprehensive list of what you’ve done, create another column or start another page that covers what you would like to do in the coming year.

Step Three: The Calendar
The calendar will become an integral part of your marketing plan throughout the year, so choose one that has large blocks for you to write in. Resist the urge to use the same calendar as you use for all your business and family needs. You can add marketing tasks to your general calendar later if having calendars is too confusing, but the planning part should be done with a blank calendar.

First, go through each month and identify the major holidays and events. This is easy because most calendars already have them marked off. Decide which of these holidays will lend themselves well to your product or service. For instance, mother’s day won’t be an ideal holiday if you are a consultant for toys (though you could try to promote certain toys as sanity savers for moms the idea probably won’t lead to a high volume of sales).

Second, you will want to enter dates that are specific to your company. When is your spring product launch? Do you work with a company that has specific campaign start and end dates. Pencil in as much of this information into your calendar.

Now, let’s take a minute to go back over your holiday or special event promotions. If you work with a direct sales company, determine how long does it take for items to be shipped. Count back from the event and add three days just in case and write this on your calendar. You can skip adding the three days only if you are confident that your company always ships with precision and timeliness. Repeat this process until you have a date which orders must be in by for each holiday and special event. We’ll get to the actual marketing and promotion tactics a bit later.

Next you’ll want to revisit those company specific dates. Count back 8 weeks from the product launch and mark that as the date when you’ll start booking forward with hostesses. This will also be the date when you begin to call previous hostesses and customers to get them lined up for the new season.

After you’ve established the basics, you’ll want to take a look at other promotional opportunities. If you are involved in online or offline fairs, you’ll want to slot these into your calendar. General dates are okay at this point, but be sure to write these events on your notepad so you can investigate and fill in the details later.

Finally, before we put away the calendar for this exercise, book yourself one to two days a month to follow up on special events for your customers. If you haven’t been making an effort to record things like birthdays, anniversaries and other special events in your customers’ lives, you could be missing out on some wonderful sales opportunities as well as a chance to connect to your customers on a personal level.

Step Four: The Nitty Gritty
Now comes the most labor intensive part of the process, putting it all together. You want to work to align your budget, your dates and your methods together, so you can create a plan of action to take you through the year.

Let’s take February as an example for a business that sells handcrafted jewelry. In this business the owner has decided to use 10% of last year’s income to determine the marketing budget for this year. In February of last year the income was $600, giving a budget of $60 in total. However, it costs the owner a steady rate of $10 per month for hosting charges for a website and has an ongoing ad for $5/month at a shop at home website. That leaves $45 for the marketing expenses for this month.

She doesn’t feel that this is enough for this year because she really wants to increase sales for this year. She peeks ahead in her marketing calendar and sees she has no major promotion for March, and her next big promotion is a spring promotion around Easter. She takes half of March’s budget of $75 (after website and set advertising)and allots the funds February and April ($37.50 each), choosing to do as much free promotion in March as possible.

Now, being handcrafted, it takes time to create and ship orders. While some orders can be created in advance, the owner doesn’t feel confident in her ability to gauge the most popular pieces in advance. So, she doesn’t like using supplies, if possible until the orders come in. She decides to allow 5 days for production and another 5 for shipping. That means all online orders must be in by February 4th for Valentine Delivery and February 9th for local orders. She decides to run her Valentine Promotion beginning on January 20th. Since the promotion starts in January, she decides to use a percentage of January’s marketing budget $40 (after website and standard ad) for February’s promotion as well. It’s an 11 day promotion out of a 31 day month, which is 35% of the month. This gives a dollar amount of $14.

She now was $96.50 to devote to her marketing efforts for the Valentine’s Day promotion. Now she has to decide which methods to use to promote her business.

She first considers using chocolate hearts with her business name on them and leaving them with a sign and display at the local mechanic. Unfortunately, at 25 cents a piece, the 500 minimum is too high to fit the budget. She loves the idea though, so makes a note on her notepad to reconsider the idea the following year.

She considers putting an ad in the local paper for the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. She would like to be able to afford a display ad, but knows that three ads would be more than her budget will allow for at $56.00 for a quarter-page. She makes a note to call her friend that makes candles, another who creates gift baskets and ask them if they’ll consider doing a joint ad. She assumes they will and takes $56.00 off her marketing budget.

She notes that there is an online expo that runs a “Love is in the Air” expo on February 4th. It’s cutting it tight for creation and delivery, but decides she’s willing to work extra hard if necessary to complete orders that may come in from the event. She sets aside the $10.00 vendor fee.

She then decides that she will use the remainder of her budget to directly market to the customers who bought around this time last year. She already has general postcards and will print up individual letters. She figures printing and postage will take up the last $30.50.

With her budget gone, she starts to examine free ideas for promotion. She decides to write three articles for the month, one on buying appropriate jewelry based on a woman’s personality, one on jewelry care and one on romantic ideas for Valentine’s Day. She puts the ideas onto her notepad and adds writing and distribution to her list. She also jots down several related ideas to enter into her blog. Then she thinks about the specials she will offer to her newsletter list and the ads that she’ll create for the advertising lists, networks and forums that she’s on.

The process is repeated with each month and each promotional period that she’s set throughout the calendar year.

Step Five: Making it happen
Using a PDA or a planner system, putting specific tasks and deadlines through the calendar year can help keep everything on track throughout the year. When you experience a lull or slow period in your business you can write ads or articles for future events. You could even write all your ads for the year at one go, to create a consistent feel and flow. You could create blog entries or articles for your newsletter months in advance of busy periods, when you know you’ll be too busy to concentrate on those tasks. You could also create your web pages for specials in advance.

Step Six: Measuring
Don’t leave measuring your results till the end of your marketing calendar. Assess your results after each promotional period or at minimum once a month. If a certain venue or method isn’t working for you, you’ll want to adjust your plan and re-allocate your resources so they can be put to best use.

Other Hints and Tips:
It’s important to keep in mind that marketing takes time to be effective. Don’t pull an ad after one attempt in a new venue. It takes time and repetition for prospective customers to decide to click on over to your site or give you a call.

Keep yourself out there and trying new ways to reach more customers. While it’s important to be consistent and stick with venues that work, you want to avoid reaching the point of saturation in any area. So keep seeking out new areas to expand into.

Always follow up and consider your current and past customers in your marketing approach. Repeat customers are less expensive to maintain than finding new customers to replace them.

Don’t forget to have fun! Marketing should not be all drudgery and dirty work, it should be exciting. And with a well thought out plan it should be.

Patrysha Korchinski has been a home based professional for nearly nine years. Through her business Incredible
Impressions she specializes in planning and promotions for small and home based business with a variety of services and options designed to help make the most of your marketing dollar!

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A television commercial in the United States of the last two years plays on a man’s craving for Dorito’s chips. He goes back and forth between his apartment and a neighbor’s who happens to have a bag of Doritos. He uses one lame excuse followed by another to get the resident to open the apartment door so he can grab a chip each. Finally, in a last follow-up he grabs the entire bag.

In sales, whether short or long term, follow-up is critical for results. The preferred follow-up to a customer is the type that we call a “valid business reason.” Without a reason, the process is as lame as the chip grabber. Whether your marketing is face to face or on the internet, your follow-up can influence your customer to buy or not to buy. Here are some ideas you want to consider for increased sales results.

A thank you note. It’s professional courtesy as well as a gesture of caring. If appropriate to your context, handwritten is best. If email, at the least personalize it with a person’s name. This is particularly important today with what Tom Peters’ once name “high tech and low touch.”

Discover their interests. With your needs assessment and rapport building, it’s likely you have found a personal interest or hobby. You can send an article or refer to a book that relates to this area.

If you promised to send any literature, send it. The more timely the better the impression of your reliability. You go one step up in the building of trust.

Maybe you have a new product or service. Take time to give thought of how to position this to your customer and then give them the information about it.

Mix your follow up methods. Use telephone, mail, fax, email and if you are in direct sales, make a follow up personal visit. Consider taking advantage of voice mail and leave a simple message of your follow up call.

And remember at some point simply to call to confirm your still in consideration. While you do not want this to be your sole reason for follow-up, at some point if the customer has not made a decision, you want to be able to readjust your contact schedule. Or, maybe even save yourself the mental hook to them and move them to a longer lead time.

If you want to stand out in the crowd, put any one of these ideas into action. You’ll make your customer feel appreciated and you’ll keep them coming back once they do buy. Offer your customer good information or a timely idea and you’ll demonstrate you have their interest at the heart of your work. Leave the chips behind. Follow-up with a reason to reassure your customer and get more sales.

Click here if you are interested in discovering how effective your sales skills are for sales results, with a free online assessment.

Sign up at Pat’s website at http://www.prostrategies.com for her free teleclasses! And a free monthly ezine.

Pat Weber - coach, certified telelcass leader, and corporate trainer, America’s #1 Coach for Introverts. Working with small business owners, independent
professionals and salespeople to get as successful as you want to be, have fun and work with more energy.

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There have been, perhaps, six critical conversations I’ve had that have shaped my professional consulting career. One of them was with an operations manager at a division of Federal Express.

I had just completed a successful, nationwide training program for the field sales force, so my credibility and confidence were soaring. Then, I heard a simple, but challenging question.

“We know how to measure sales productivity,” he said. “But is there something you can develop that will measure customer service productivity?”

Reflexively, I thought, “Why bother? Even if we can do it, reps will hate it.”
But I held my tongue, sensing that this was a rare opportunity to revisit some of my assumptions.

My gut reaction was informed by years of doing seminars across the country in which I brought together sales and service people into the same sessions. Evaluations told me that they felt they were adversaries with mutually exclusive value systems.

Sales types tend to see themselves as swashbucklers, rogues, high-wire types, who crave adventure and embrace risks. They thrive on contingent pay, on the prospect of receiving hefty commissions and bonuses when they make big sales.

Service folks tend to be more risk averse. Often, they have a clerical mentality, which commends accuracy while penalizing mistakes. I sensed, to my core, that if we suggested to them that their pay should be even partly variable, based on achievement, they’d rebel.

This was more than supposition on my part. I had introduced cross-selling programs for years into service departments, experience that informed my best-selling book, Selling Skills For The Non-Salesperson. I found I could design a great sales program for service people, yet many would balk, even after they had achieved success and financial rewards through it.

They explained to me, in a very straightforward way, that they simply didn’t want to be salespeople, and that was that. Noting resistance from the rank and file, senior management, in those days, refused to push for implementation, despite the fact that big profits were being left on the table.

What, if anything, has changed since I was asked this question?

Four crucial things:

(1) We know much more about measuring customer service achievement.

(2) Job enlargement, downsizing, CRM, and the rise of professionalism in companies have all contributed to an expectation of broadened CSR responsibilities and heightened performance.

(3) Global competition, especially from knowledge workers in countries such as India, China, and elsewhere, is beginning to exert pressure on domestic workers to find ways to increase their contributions, if only to keep jobs onshore.

(4) Management is more cost and profit conscious than ever before.

Customer Service Achievement

If there have been three unwritten commandments in the past for being a capable CSR they have boiled down to: (1) Sound nice; (2) Defuse angry customers; and (3) Don’t make mistakes entering or retrieving data or reciting company policies.

Now, associates are being discouraged from focusing primarily on themselves, on customer service, or the motions they go through as they work. They’re being required to focus on outcomes: on customer satisfaction and on customer loyalty.

They’re being shown, through new training and unobtrusive, real-time performance measures, how to evaluate the impacts they’re having on transactional satisfaction and a customer’s decision to buy again from their organizations.

To borrow a phrase from Peter F. Drucker, suddenly the customer handling process is being managed for results.

If we can objectively monitor, measure, manage, and systematically replicate customer results, there’s no reason to deny better pay to the people that can produce them.

Future articles will explore some of the other crucial changes that have occurred, as well as discuss the pragmatics of introducing a pay-for-performance plan into the customer service context.

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If you want to be number one in customer service, you have to do a number of things that make you stand out from the crowd. Here are 7 ways that will put you on top.

1. Roll Out The Red Carpet For Everyone. If there’s one thing people hate about poor service, it’s getting treated differently from others. It makes them feel inferior and second-class. Gary Richter says you should roll out the red carpet for everyone, but particularly those who don’t expect it. “I tell my employees, if we roll out the red carpet for a billionaire, they won’t even notice. If we roll it out for millionaires, they expect it. If we roll it out for thousandaires, they appreciate it. And, if we roll out the red carpet for hundredaires, they’ll tell everyone they know.”

2. Take Time To Know Your Customers. The fast pace of modern living together with advances in technology have together put a non-human face on much of our customer service. If you can find a way to re-connect with your customers one-on-one, you’ll strike a chord with your customers that will be like a streak of gold. Kathy Burns remembers a time when people took time to care and listen. “Some of you may remember, and others may have heard stories about, a time in life when the doctor would come to your home to check on you if you were ill. Or maybe you’ve heard about going down to your local pharmacy and having the owner greet you by name and ask how you’re doing. Not only did they ask, but they really wanted to know the answer and they took the time to listen to what you had to say. That’s customer service - taking the time to know your customers, really caring about how they feel, and wanting to go the extra mile to make sure they’re happy.”

3. Be Easy To Do Business With. One of the problems with modern businesses is that the systems we use to save time and money are often devised for the company’s benefit and not the customers. As a result, the customer experience is frustrating and difficult. Tracey Lowrance says this needs to be reversed. “Customers expect single source service. Customers don’t want to be transferred to every unit of your business to have their problems solved. They want to be able to do business with you with the slightest amount of discomfort. You must be easy to do business with.”

4. Go Out Of Your Way To Make Sure They’re Happy. One of the most important things your customers want from you is a guarantee that your product or service will work. So move heaven and earth to make sure it does. Bob Leduc suggests you shouldn’t make people pay until they are fully happy. “Instead of offering a money back guarantee, a service business can provide a guarantee to solve the customer’s problem. For example, a plumber can guarantee to come back without charge as often as necessary to stop the leak. A landscaper can replace without charge any plants that don’t survive for at least 6 months. A sales consultant can continue working without charge until the promised sales results are achieved.”

5. Notice What Customers See. A big part of what customers think about you comes from what they see and believe. Personal Selling Power noticed the following difference in two candy stores. “Although two competing candy stores had the same prices, neighbourhood kids preferred one store to the other. When asked why, they said, “Because the person in the good store always gives us more candy. The girl in the other store takes candy away.” True? Not really. In the good store the owner would always make sure to put a small amount of candy on the scale and then keep adding to it. In the bad store, the owner would pile a heaping amount of candy on the scale, and then take it off until it hit the right weight. The same amount of candy was sold, but perception is everything.”

6. Work On Everything The Customer Experiences. The customer experience isn’t just receiving the service or buying the goods. It’s about all the other little bits and pieces in-between. Such as the manner of the receptionist, the state of the floors and tables, the attitude of other staff, the ease of parking, the tone of the notices, the smile or lack of it on the face of the checkout team. Be like the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas who have a slogan that says: “We spend 600 hours a week pampering the plants. Imagine what we’ll do for our guests.”

7. Believe In Customer Service From The Bottom Of Your Soul To become a great service organization, you have to believe in customer service from the bottom of your soul. It has to be part of the way you work. Anita Roddick, founder of retail cosmetic franchise group Body Shop puts it like this: “I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated people decently, worked hard, spent honestly, saved honestly, gave honest value for money, put back more than they took out and told no lies. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.”

If you take time to look, there are many examples of great customer service around you. Follow these 7 laws of unbeatable customer service and you’ll join them.

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