How To Grow My Business Online As A Home Business Owner

In my early stage, I always wonder how to grow my business online as a home business owner. Most home business owners are like you and me.

We are people who wanted to make more money and ended up starting a home business as a way to accomplish that.

I understood this and wanted to write this article from that angle.

This is not an article about doing newspaper, direct mail, radio, or television ads.

When is the last time you saw advertising from the home business using these strategies?

Here is another key point. Home business owners grow their businesses beyond just doing advertising.

I want to look at both advertising and other ways you can grow your business online if you are a home-based business owner.

Online Advertising

You can break this down into 2 categories.

1. Free advertising. There are many ways to do this type of advertising online, but a key point to remember is, that it doesn’t cost you any money to do it.

Many home business owners rely on free advertising as their primary source of traffic generation for their products and business opportunities. What many of them don’t realize is that free advertising does cost them in terms of time.

The most successful home business owners understand that time is money, and they place an hourly rate on their time. For example, if you spend 20 hours a week promoting your business on the Internet, and you value your time at $25 an hour, then, in reality, you spent $500 this week doing free advertising.

Once you understand this point and take it to heart, you will approach free advertising differently and will start to see better results.

Today there are many ways to do free advertising, but social media marketing is where you should be placing the majority of your time. The first step to that is to start a blog and update it on a regular basis.

Then bookmark your blog post on your primary social media accounts which should include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Work the social media angle and you can find a lot of customers and potential new business partners.

2. Paid advertising. This is easy to calculate because whatever you are spending is what your paid advertising costs are.

For example, let’s say you hire a blog writer at $10 an article, and you order 10 articles a month. Your paid advertising cost for this strategy would be $100.

This can be money well spent if you spend your time taking these blog articles and posting them, publishing them, bookmarking the post, and then promoting them all over the Internet in as many ways as possible.

Your fixed cost is $100, but the time you spend on marketing your blog should be viewed as a cost as well!

You can change your personal time to paid advertising by hiring a freelance marketer to do anything you do not know how to do, or do not have a chance to do. This is known as outsourcing and is a common way; Internet marketing is done effectively today.

PPC Ads

Here’s another important thing to consider.

Should you do pay-per-click advertising?

This is Google’s primary source of income, but other media are capitalizing on it as well including Facebook ads and the revenue they generate from it.

Any paid advertising that you do should be viewed as gambling to a certain extent.

The reason for this is you don’t have any analytics to monitor your results yet so you can’t determine whether your advertising is working or not.

It’s always best to start on a smaller scale and then ramp up once you have a proven track record to draw from. The same thing happens with PPC ads.

This can get very expensive real quick if you’re not careful. At the very least spend a little bit of time studying how to set up a Google Adwords or Facebook Ads campaign, and then pay close attention to it to determine whether it is cost-effective or not.

Email Solo Ads

One thing that many home business owners do is purchase email solo ads to established lists from other Internet marketers. This is a fast way to do email marketing until you build your list.

Email solo advertising can be very useful if you have an offer that would appeal to the list of subscribers who are viewing it. You’re better off not promoting a similar offer to the owner of the list.

For example, if you have a business opportunity you want to support, you wouldn’t want to buy an email solo from an Internet marketer who primarily promotes their business opportunity.

Existing Contacts or Customers

One way to grow your business online is to pay more attention to your existing contact list, or your existing customer base. It cost considerably less money to promote an offer to an existing customer than it does to try and create a new one.

The same thing is true for your existing contact base. Hopefully, you are spending a good portion of your marketing building an email list.

Your email list should be people that you’re working on building relationships with and enhancing your credibility with them. You can then email these people anytime you want, and promote your business opportunity or new products as you come across them.

Successful home business owners often describe email marketing as printing money on demand. That just shows you the value of having a list of people who have agreed to let you contact them via email.

If you’ve done your job correctly in the past, these people are going to open your emails and at the very least scan what you’re sending them. An excellent strategy is to include a couple of sentences and a link back to a blog post where people can read about your offer in more detail.

There are many ways to grow your business online as a home business owner. You must determine how much you want to spend on paid advertising, and how much of your own time you’re going to spend versus hiring a freelance marketer to promote your business.

If you need help choosing the right Affiliate Program, check out my #1 recommendation on building a successful Affiliate business online. You can get access to hundreds of training videos, 24/7 support, professional consultations, private access to training guides, tools, personal private assistance, my personal help, and much more.

PS: Click here to review my #1 recommendation in detail.