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Advertising costs can quickly pile up, especially if you are a small home business.

Getting expensive exposure on TV or radio seems out of the question when we are starting out in our small enterprises. Where can you possibly find cheap advertising for home businesses? The cause seems so hopeless that many of us give up before we even begin.

This article states that many home business owners are overlooking many inexpensive opportunities to promote their businesses and increase their sales.

Many of these suggestions have been proven to work, and require but a little ingenuity and imagination. Using these ideas, you should be able to improve your visibility, without spending more than you have to.

Start off by giving something for free. People love free stuff. Especially something with clear value. No matter what business you are in, if you offer something useful for free, chances are that you will get to meet more potential customers.

A lot of businesses have found it worthwhile to issue coupons. If you are a service provider, try issuing a coupon for an hours worth of your service. You will be surprised how many turn up to take you up on your offer. If you are engaged in selling products, issue coupons that your customers can use to avail of a discount.

Print some stickers. Stickers are a very cost-efficient way of getting the word out. Ask some of your family, friends, and current customers to display your stickers prominently in their cars or personal belongings.

When combined with a catchy slogan or perhaps an excellent business offer, your stickers will bring you business far above what it cost you to print them, which will be just a few dollars. This is an excellent example of cheap advertising for home businesses.

Personalize your receipts. Most businesses use rather lackluster or generic designs on their receipts. You can take advantage of this situation. By getting your creative juices flowing and adding a little advertising into your receipts, your company will stand out in your customer minds.

Use your receipts to remind customers of what you stand for. Inform them of any upcoming events or special offers. This way, whenever your customers rifle through their records, they will consider sending some business your way.

Send some cards. This is a little courtesy secret that top salesmen have used for years. First, you get some of your customer personal information, such as their birthdates, anniversary dates, address, etc. Then you simply send them some cards during their important days, such as when they are celebrating their anniversaries, or when they have a new child.

Frequently you will be the only one who remembers. This is heavy emotional stuff for customers. Trust me. By sending cards to your customers, you make them like you better, making it more likely that they will do business with you.

Develop the reflex of passing out business cards that clearly say what your service is. One topic is all you need. Use a pretty picture, very light colored, on your business card. Use the exact same picture everytime you have your business cards printed up so the picture reminds everyone of your business. Have lots of clear contact information on the card.

Let the info be absolutely clear and simple as possible to contact you. A short email address that mentions your business in it. Phone number. Street address. Web site with a short name and aggressively related to your business so it is easy to remember. Everytime someone asks you for info of any kind, write it on the back of your business card. People will now save the card with your business contact information on it.

As you can see, there are many inexpensive ideas that can help you boost your business. Cheap advertising for home businesses is available, you just need to know where to look.

James M. Lowe writes original articles, press releases, e-books, blogs and websites about home business opportunities.
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It surprises me how poorly we treat our most valuable company asset.

We wouldn’t dare buy an expensive piece of equipment for our business and then ignore it. If the machine required regular attention, we would put it on our calendar to regularly check it for oil levels and other maintenance requirements.

Yet there is an asset that each business consistently ignores.

What is this ignored asset?

Your customer list.

Businesses focus too much on landing new customers they ignore their former customers and sometimes even their current customers.

My suspicion that the underlying problem has to do with the way we start our businesses. When we begin, we have no customers. So we start the get new customer process. This is great. The problem is we never kick into the nurture the customer process.

Yet it is so much easier to sell an existing or previous client than to find a new prospect and sell them. They’ve already purchased from you, they already know who you are and what you can do. If your product or service is worth anything, you owe it to your customers to continually sell them your solutions.

A good example of this is a client I had a few years ago. He was in the supplements business and was struggling. The company had been losing $12,000 per month for the 18 months in a row. They’d hired a well known marketing consultant who seemed to know nothing about small business.

They wanted me to help them raise some more money. I’ve found over the years that money is rarely the real problem. That was the case here as well.

I asked them how many clients they’d had over the years. They had 160 active clients and 2,500 inactive clients. I asked when the last time the inactive clients had been contacted…no one could remember.

I had two of the people in the company each call 20 former customers a day. Within 30 days they closed so much business they were more than breaking even and didn’t need emergency funding to keep the doors open.

How do you nurture your customer list?

Regularly touch base with them every 4-8 weeks. Do not try to sell them, but find out how they are doing.

- Call to find out what has been happening with them
- Send them a article that can help their business
- Call them about a helpful seminar you heard about
- Mail them a book or a whitepaper that would be of interest to them
- Send them an email about a helpful hint for their business
- Put them on your newsletter list either physical or electronic

One of my clients triples their daily sales every time they send out a newsletter to their list. The newsletter is not a sales pitch it is an informative article about the concerns of their clients.

Dan Swanson is an Internet Marketing Consultant who helps clients attract an endless stream of qualified visitors and convert those visitors to customers. For more information about Internet Marketing Consulting visit http://www.iq2.com.

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