How to Grow Your Home Business Intelligently on a Modest Budget

Many people are now finding success working from home. They create a small business offering a useful product or service that appeals to a wider audience than customers in Warrington alone.

By having a website and using free promotional services, they can get the attention of potential customers nationwide and worldwide too.

Running a new business on a modest (or shoestring) budget isn’t that unusual. Not everyone wants to ask the bank for a business loan or take out an overdraft to get the necessary funds to operate. It’s easier to plan to spend less and look for the opportunities for growth where they can be found.

Here are a few ways to grow your home business sensibly when you don’t have much money to invest at the start.

Mastering Sales

The first thing a new entrepreneur must do is to master sales. This is an uncomfortable thing for a small business owner if they’ve never worked in the sales field before. The first step to improving your sales technique when meeting clients face-to-face is to purchase some books on sales and marketing. There are plenty of time-tested books that salespeople credit with helping them get over their shyness when it comes to selling and making their first sale.

Selling on the internet is another activity altogether. Here, it’s challenging to understand what the website visitor is thinking. If you already have one of the psychology degrees, then you’ll have a better idea of what visitors might be thinking when they see product photos and read the product descriptions, but otherwise when dealing with site visitors, you’re pretty much in the dark. If you feel that you have the time, you could always consider taking a psychology degree if you do not already have one. You can find a variety of psychology degrees on educations.com to get you started.

Perfecting Your Website

Your website in many ways should be your sales engine. It runs 24/7 offering your product or service to the masses. If you deal with customers all around the world, then your website offers the potential to earn while you sleep which is excellent.

There are good and bad websites. The good ones do an excellent job of explaining what the business provides in products or services to its customers. The bad ones confuse and alienate visitors who aren’t sure how to navigate the site or what is being offered. When the layout is poorly conceived, then visitors aren’t sufficiently engaged and won’t complete a purchase when with a better designed site, they would have.

Making a better website or getting help from a professional web designer is the way to go. You can see what sites they’ve made previously and approach their clients to get their honest assessment as to how the design helped or hindered their business’s progress. A designer that has experience working with small businesses or has produced websites in your industry before is a plus.

Engaging Social Media

Social media is time consuming. However, for small businesses that to an extent have less money than they do time, social platforms represent a free promotional opportunity. One of the advantages that smaller businesses have over larger ones is that it can be more personal.

People have grown to hate the automated phone systems where they cannot get through to a live human being without running the gauntlet through “dial 1 for nothing you need, dial 2 to be confused or dial 3 to be accidentally disconnected, again.”

Using social media, you can show personality and a little bit of a fun attitude as long as you don’t go too far into unprofessional conduct. You want to avoid disputes because they flare up easily and everyone can see them. In a worst-case scenario, they could even end up in the local newspaper and not in a good way. Sharing your latest wins, being the face behind the brand and showing that you’re passionate and talented with what you offer is the way to approach it. Bear in mind that not every social platform is a great fit for all businesses, so see where your peers are most active and choose a couple of those platforms to utilize.

Using Classified Ads

Classified ads have become a little bit forgotten in the push for everything digital. Local newspapers often still run free local ads or business ads at a minimal expense. If you’re trying to pick up local customers, then local ads still work well. Learning and performing some local search engine optimization to help your website show up for local searches on Google is also another idea but it will take time to understand it.

Beyond newspaper classifieds, Craigslist is a good option to consider. There are ad categories for different cities, towns or countries, and sub-categories for different interests within each location. Therefore, you can place ads in multiple locations to attract people from several catchment areas. That’s also helpful if it’s overly competitive in your local area and hard to get new customers given the stiff competition.

Trying Out Paid Ads

Depending on how much money you have available, you can run pay-per-click advertising that costs money each time an internet user clicks on an advert. Facebook advertising can be more effective than Google AdWords at times because you can target one demographic of people with certain interests who live in certain cities and towns only. This level of specificity is way beyond what you get by advertising in a glossy magazine in a semi-untargeted way at great expense.

When you use pay-per-click advertising, you will see how many ad clicks it takes before you succeed in selling another product or getting a new customer. With that data, you can better understand whether paying for advertising online is profitable for your business or not.

Ask for Referrals from Existing Customers

When you’ve been operating a while and have a list of happy customers, you can always ask them for a referral. They often know one or more friends or business acquaintances who would benefit from working with you. Most people find recommendations from people they trust to be far more convincing that a cold pitch or advertising campaigns. Referrals tend to be a greater part of your business once there’s an established track record and plenty of past customers to ask for referrals.

Being a Guest on Business-related Podcasts

Approaching podcast producers to be a guest is a little unusual for a small business, but it’s a great way to get some exposure. There are more business podcasts than there are guests each week currently, so podcast hosts are crying out for interesting guests to come on. All you’ll need is a decent internet connection and a quality microphone to provide an interview. Some podcasts put up video versions on YouTube too, so having a 720p or 1080p webcam set up ready isn’t a bad idea either.

Building up a new business through clever marketing activities when operating on a minimal marketing budget isn’t the easiest thing to do. However, it can be fun to come up with clever ways to get noticed. Of course, Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin brand used his hot air balloon escapades to promote his business successfully when he didn’t have the financial resources for extended, expensive ad campaigns. This proved very popular with the public and is still remembered today. While you don’t have to go that far, putting yourself out there as the face of your brand helps enormously to get noticed.