Making a home business successful is hard. There are some things you can control, mostly what you do yourself or hire someone to do for you, and other things that you cannot control. It’s really easy to focus on the parts you can’t directly control, forgetting that the things you can control can help the parts you don’t directly control.

Visitors to Your Site

You don’t directly control whether or not your website gets visitors. You can do everything possible to make it attractive to visitors and search engines, but sometimes that doesn’t bring in traffic.

You can control your link building activities. You can control your spending on pay per click advertising. You control whether or not you make videos or podcasts to bring in traffic.

You don’t know for certain if any of these will work or if any will suddenly quit working. But you can learn what makes them more likely to work for you.

With search engine traffic, expect that changes will happen sometimes. Your rankings go up, your rankings go down, your rankings fall into a deep, dark, dank pit leaving you wondering if you’ll ever see them again.

You can’t control that. You can try to influence with link building, but you can’t control it.

Even pay per click traffic you can’t control completely. You may get a new competitor or the algorithm that decides which ads get what space can change and you now have to rework your campaigns to go along with it. That’s online business for you.

Buyers

You can’t control whether or not people will buy from you. You can have the best copywriting, the most useful products and the best price, and still a certain percentage will not buy from you.

You can use what information you have to improve the odds that people will buy from you. You can test ads, ad placement, the copy describing the product, and if it’s your own product, your shopping cart, the checkout process, everything to do with how people buy from you or through your links that you control.

Work on these factors that you do have control over to make the most of the visitors who might turn into buyers. Thats’ the control you have.

Life and Chaos

No one has complete control over how their life goes. Sometimes it’s easy. Other times obstacles throw themselves enthusiastically into your way and make it hard to run your online business the way you used to.

You can control how you meet these challenges. You can hire someone to help you so that even when things get a little rough parts of your business will keep on going with less input from you. You can ask for guest posts on your blog. You can plan for problems.

You can’t be ready for every contingency, but you can cut down the ways that you can be caught unprepared. Think of where you want your business to go and take steps to help it move in that direction.

For some people, marketing their home business is a pleasure. It’s something that comes naturally. For others, it’s just plain work.

But no matter how you feel about it, you need to market your business if you want it to get anywhere.

You need to market your business if you want it to get anywhere.

Don’t Stick to Just One Method Forever

There are many different ways to market your business. You can do article marketing. You can talk to people you meet about your business. You can post on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites about your business. You can do pay per click advertising. You can do blog commenting. You can add to this list.

Whatever method you use, make sure it’s not the only one you use for all time.

Don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe you should master, or at least be comfortable with one marketing tactic before you start trying others. But don’t stay in that comfort zone. Move out and try something new.

How else are you going to know what will work for you?

Market Every Day

Well, perhaps not every, every day. If you need the occasional day off, do what you must. But until your business is really growing and thriving, market as often as possible.

Market as often
as possible.

There’s a balance here between marketing and otherwise running your home business that you have to strike.  Your marketing will only do so much good if you neglect the rest of your business. But running the rest of your business will only do so much good if you neglect marketing. They need each other.

Keep an Eye on the Competition

Knowing what your competition is doing can help you to think of things you should be doing to market your business. Don’t copy them outright, but if you see a great way to market try to find a way to adapt it to your own use.

Track Your Results

Keep track of where you’re getting the best results.

Do the best you can to keep track of where you’re getting the best results from. This will tell you which marketing efforts are paying off and which are a waste of your time. You need to know.

You can follow most referrers through a good website statistics program. Most hosts have Awstats already installed, and you can get some good information from there. You may also want to consider signing up for Google Analytics for a different source of statistics on your website traffic.

Keep working on your marketing and find out what is getting you the best results. It’s one of the best ways to find out what’s helping you to grow your business.

There are a lot of social media websites out there. You could spend hours each day on marketing on them, but which ones will give you the best results?

That depends on you and your target market.

No social media website is going to do you any good at all if you don’t put some effort into it. If you just sign up and drop your link in, you probably aren’t going to see much benefit from any of them.

Where’s Your Target Market?

Start by figuring out which social media websites your target market is using. With the wide range out there, they may be using a few, but there are some rules of thumb, such as more professional networking going on at LinkedIn and sites such as Twitter and Facebook having a huge range of people on them.

You can find people in your target market on Facebook by checking out the Groups pages. Search on your keywords and see if there are any active groups there. What about Fan pages for your competition?

There are a variety of ways to seek people out on Twitter. You can search on the site itself. You can find directories that Twitter users have signed up on so their accounts show by category, such as WeFollow or Twellow.

Social bookmarking sites can also be a good choice, although it can be hard to say how the quality of traffic will be. A ton of traffic doesn’t always mean a ton of conversions, subscribers or anything other than a ton of traffic. But sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit can be a fun experiment. Just beware the time sink.

How Do You Use Social Media?

How you use a particular social media site depends on which one you’re using. What works well on one may not be the best way to build a network on another.

To find people on LinkedIn, you may be best off letting them find you. Become an expert there. Join groups. Answer questions. Show that you’re an expert and build your references as a professional. It’s social, but more professional than personal.

Twitter does well if you can provide interesting information in a small space. It’s good if you’re able to tweet regularly and be interesting in some way. Share good article links, make interesting observations, interact with people as they post interesting things.

With all sites, the challenge is to keep them from eating up too much of your day. It’s very easy to get sucked into the various sites. If you don’t want to waste a lot of time on Facebook, for example, don’t start playing the games there. Sign up, connect with some friends and you can quickly tell who’s gotten too much into the various games. They might invite you, but unless you have time to spare you’re better off avoiding the games. Better to spend your time on things there that will benefit your home business.

Using StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and similar sites can also be a huge time suck. You can get some good traffic out of them if you build a good profile and connections, but you can also lose a lot of time wandering them aimlessly. Use them wisely and at times when you can’t so easily do things that will more directly bring in business.

On any social media site, being overly promotional is not a good idea. People aren’t there to have things sold to them. They’re networking because they enjoy it, to build their own business, to get good information, that kind of thing. If you do nothing but say “buy, buy, buy,” they’ll unfriend you as fast as they can.

Instead, give quality information to bring people to you. If you sound like an expert and they need what you have to offer, they’ll decide to do business with you.

How Many to Use?

You can’t do a good job of using all social media websites, not even if you only stick to the big ones. There’s too much to do.

You’ll be better off if you can pick a couple to focus on. Get good at marketing on them.

Dividing your efforts dilutes them. There’s a balance between being available on a variety of networks and being unable to keep up.

As with any other sort of marketing you haven’t tried before, start by using just one social media site. Figure out what you’re doing. Get some fans, friends, followers, whatever they’re called. Get comfortable.

Even though each site takes a slightly different approach, you can take some of what you learn from each site and apply it to the next one while continuing with the sites you’re already on. You’re learning how to bring in business with a possibly more personal touch than other forms of marketing may have been for you.

Social media marketing isn’t something that comes naturally for everyone, but it’s a big help for bringing in traffic and business if you use it right. Give yourself some time and really pay attention to the learning process. You might find it a lot of fun as well as profitable.

Most people don’t have a lot of money to spend on running their home business. They need to be more practical and really think about where their money goes. These are some low to no cost activities you can do that may help you to build a home business.

Most are more time intensive than money intensive. That’s a trade you often have to make. If you have the money to risk on making things go faster you can go that way. If you don’t have the money you’re going to have to spend the time.

Shoestring 1: Blog

Blogs are highly affordable to run, even if you pay for hosting and a domain name. They take a lot of time to build up, but can bring a lot of targeted attention to whatever you’re trying to sell, whether it’s a product or a service.

Shoestring 2: Article marketing

Article marketing isn’t easy. You have to write a lot of articles in order to succeed. You have to submit them to at least one of the top directories, possibly to several. You can automate this through sites such as Content Crooner or by buying article submission software.

Shoestring 3: Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking can build a great number of links. There are hundreds of sites out there where you can bookmark pages from your website. They’re not terribly strong links for the most part, but they’re still links.

Shoestring 4: Social networking

If you want to put a little more effort into particular networks, social networking sites can be great. You can create accounts on sites such as Twitter and Facebook and promote your products.

This is challenging in the amount of time it takes. You get more followers by giving good information, not just promoting your business. You can get plenty of followers by following other people, but if you aren’t getting them interested they won’t do you any good. You need numbers of engaged followers, not just followers.

Shoestring 5: Blog Commenting

Commenting on relevant blogs generally doesn’t bring a lot of traffic, but can bring some. It can show your knowledge in your industry. Just keep things relevant to the topic you’re commenting on and don’t constantly be promoting your site.

Shoestring 6: Forum Participation

Participating in forums can really help to bring people to your site, so long as you can leave links to your site in your signature line. As with blog commenting, you need to keep things relevant to your site and not be too promotional. Forum owners hate that and you’re likely to be banned and have posts deleted.

Shoestring 7: Squidoo Lenses

Creating a lens on Squidoo can feel as though you’re making content for someone else, but it’s also a way to build links to your own sites while earning a little income. They’re a little picky about certain topics, and have rules about how many times an individual lens can link to a particular domain, but within those rules they can be useful.

Some people build their entire business around Squidoo lenses.

With enough shoestrings for your business, you have a chance to tie up a pretty nice business. Keep working at it and you might go far.

A post over on Jessica Knows about her experience with some reporters misreporting how she discloses on her blog got me thinking about how mom blogs in general seem to be the ones getting an awful lot of the attention when it comes to disclosure issues and advertising. There’s been a lot of talk lately about more regulation of social media marketing and how bloggers disclose. For some reason, mom bloggers seem to be a popular focus of attention.

This drives me nuts. Mom bloggers are far from the only ones getting merchandise to try in order to review it. That’s something that has been going on for a long time in many other areas, as commenter Crunchy Carpets pointed out, and as I’ve been wondering as well. I’ll quote her, as she has it right:

What I am curious about is why the ‘mom’ bloggers seem to be getting more heat about reviews than other areas on the blogosphere. Are the male tech writers getting scrutinized by mainstream media and the FTC? They all get sent free stuff. Are the video game or movie sites getting grilled for their ‘promotional’ efforts. They all get sent free stuff.
Movie sites get sent to sets and on press junkets and given all sorts of freebies in return for ‘good reviews. Their morals have been argued about for years. It is all nothing new.

All this doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with appropriate disclosure. It just means that I don’t see why it’s suddenly a big deal when mom bloggers get the things other sites have long been getting.

It strikes me as sexist too.

Momblebee makes similar points, as do some of the other commenters.

Free samples have been given in exchange for review for a long time, longer than blogging has been around. It’s nothing new. Perhaps the only new thing about it is that just about anyone can start a blog, and not have the costs associated with starting a print magazine or newspaper. It’s very open.

Yes, that means some people will lie about the products because they think only a good review should be posted. Yes, some people will be fooled into buying things they wouldn’t have if an honest review had been posted. Goodness knows that dishonest reviews are common enough in the work at home arena!

But does that mean we need special disclosure rules?

I tend to think not. I would expect the standard rules on making false advertising claims should be sufficient. Best aimed at the blogger, and at the advertiser more if there seems to be a pattern of encouraging false claims. It’s awfully hard for advertisers to control what bloggers say, after all, and still keep things honest in both positive and negative comments about the product.

There’s no doubt that the internet is very much a wild frontier in many ways as of yet. It’s much harder to control what goes on when it’s so easy for content to be created. That’s not a call for speedy, harsh regulation. There’s an advantage to the wild growth and free flow of information that the internet provides.

Should buyers beware when they read online reviews? Absolutely.

Should reviewers disclose if they got products free or have a relationship with the business whose product they are reviewing? Of course.

But no matter how the disclosure is done, it comes down to a matter of trust. A good source will be trusted with or without the disclosure.

A bad one may be trusted once or twice, but if they share false information people will learn. Certainly not as quickly as the FTC would like, but that’s going to happen even with regulation, as new sites and blogs will pop up faster than they can be reviewed… not to mention everything that is based from outside the United States.

Much as one might like all reviews to be honest, it’s not going to happen.

As a blogger or business owner, all you can do is keep yourself honest. Being transparent about when you get something for free is a generally good idea. If nothing else, it will help you if the FTC does keep getting serious about this. It also makes it clearer why you’re talking about a product that maybe you wouldn’t have otherwise. Say what you really feel, even when it’s not 100% positive.

Of course, the focus on mom bloggers may in large part be simply due to the media. And if you think the disclosure issues are going to be a problem, you’ll also want to pay attention to the part about “atypical results”. Lynn Terry has a really good post on this issue. The FTC doesn’t even want atypical results to be used, even if they’re your own experience. They only want typical results, which strikes me as beyond problematic. How can you discuss your own experience then? How do you know what’s typical?

If you review products, whether you’re paid to do so or just receive them free, or even if you’re hoping to get an affiliate commission for sales through your links, it’s really going to pay to think about what you’re saying. Have a disclosure policy and stick strictly to it.

And, of course, keep paying attention to the story as it develops. It doesn’t matter what kind of blog or site you have, if you’re talking about products you need to know what’s might impact your business.