You wouldn’t be working at home if you didn’t believe there was a good profit to be made. Opportunity is out there. But as is true for all marketing, you have to find how to reach your target customer, and do it effectively. Whatever your work-at-home business is, there is likely a market for it. My goal is to help you find that market.
It’s a Numbers Game
Some would say marketing is a numbers game. Get in front of enough people, and a certain percentage of those people will buy from you. If that percentage is high enough, you can have a lot of customers. I would call this the shotgun approach to marketing. Mass advertising like billboards fall into this category because people with all sorts of interests in all sorts of demographics drive up and down the freeway each day.
What kind of activities can you participate in with your work-at-home business to generate those kinds of numbers? Some of the ones that I’ve seen be successful are home shows and expos. If you are selling juice as a multi-level marketer, there is a good chance you will talk to lots of people who want another source of income at a home show, and lots of people interested in health at a health expo.
Find out which shows might be a good fit for your business, get a nice fabric backdrop to look professional and get peoples’ attention, and put on a good show. You might have to pay anything between $500 and $1000 to set up a shop for 3 days, but where else can you get thousands of people each day to walk past your display?
Getting Targeted
The shotgun approach is good to try, but you generally pay for eyeballs in advertising. When more eyeballs are watching, you’re paying more for those impressions, even if they are not qualified customers. Imagine if you could just pay for impressions on real potential customers. The more targeted a person is to your product, the easier the sell will be.
One very targeted form of advertising is online marketing. Most online marketing is inbound marketing – where someone is already searching for a product or service, and you pay to show up when they’re far along in the buying cycle. The various forms of online marketing are paid search (also known as pay-per-click advertising or PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO for short).
PPC
With PPC advertising, the gist of it is that you choose keywords that are relevant to your business, and then write an ad to show up for when someone is searching for that term. If your work-at-home business is selling greeting cards, you could bid on the keyword ‘buy greeting cards’ with the search engines, and your ad would display to those people who search for the same. The prices can range from $.10 per click to many dollars per click, depending on how many other advertisers are competing for that traffic.
SEO
SEO is the holy grail of internet marketing because you don’t have to pay for any of the traffic that search engines send your way. If Google determines that your site is the most relevant for the term ‘buy greeting cards’ and shows you up first, you will get lots of traffic from around the country, and it’s all free. All it takes is proving to the search engines that you are the most relevant for that keyword. Like PPC, your placement in the natural search rankings is dependent on the amount of competition from other sites attempting to rank for similar keywords, but you can optimize your site to gain free traffic from search engines.
So there you have it – some examples of high-ROI marketing that you can do when you work from home. I hope it’s been beneficial and has gotten your brain juices flowing. Can you think of other forms of marketing that also might be high yielding for work-at-homers?