Marketing your Home Based Internet Business

If you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business and marketing your home based internet business is at least if not more important than the product or service you are selling or providing. In the pre internet days, marketing your home based business was as simple as handing out flyers and letting people know you do baby sitting or cut lawns, but those days are gone and they will not be back.

Now you need to let someone who knows you do not have a physical storefront (normally), rarely post a physical address or even contact information that you are a legitimate seller or provider of a service. I am not trying to discredit or endorse anyone especially the small guy, but try to get the contact information or a physical address to the biggest names online. Pick anyone of them from the largest retailer to the most popular search engine, they do not display that information on their sites at all.

The point is if you are selling something online, you need to earn the respect of your potential customer. You do not need to gain their respect because, do not be mistaken, respect is earned and not gained. When you are faceless and nameless in the world of thieves and deception selling online becomes a challenge. And you address that challenge through marketing.

What you need to do is to establish an ongoing relationship with the people you want to interact with online. Research has shown that most customers will only make a purchase after 12 direct contacts from an online vendor. The way you make those 12 contacts with the potential client is through marketing. You don’t need to initiate all the contacts, but you need to provide a secondary service that is complimentary to your product that the potential customer is interested in and keeps coming back for.

This is normally done with a combination of an auto responder and a weekly or monthly newsletter. The auto responder is simply a service that does “almost” what it’s name applies, it auto responds to people that have visited your website and have physically asked you to keep contacting them

The internet is global and the laws are certainly different in each country, but the anti spam laws in the United States are quite strict and that is the largest market for most online marketers. The solution to spam is to let your potential customer purposely request you to contact them, and that is the second function of the auto responder is to verify that the person requesting the information from you actually requested it.

The most important factor in marketing your home based internet (or even offline) business is follow up. Today’s visitor may be tomorrow’s customer and this concept has been around for decades.

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