7 ways for your home business to get its message out there

How to raise the profile of your home business

Freelance writer and blogger Sarah Cruickshank understands the pressures on home business owners and suggests ways to get yourself out there without spending too much time or money:

When you’re a home business the chances are you’ll be the one doing your marketing to get your message to your target audience, so here are my 7 top ways of getting your name known.

• 1. Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, are all platforms that don’t cost any actual money (although you will have to make a time investment).

  Don’t worry about engaging on all of them, but do find out where the audience for your home business is mostly based and start there.

  If a particular platform offers business pages then create one and begin to build an audience. Remember though this is social media, so you actually need to interact with your followers.

  Don’t expect quick returns either, a really good social media profile for your home business can take anything from three to twelve months to establish.

• 2. Blogging – Whether you choose a free blog platform (like Blogger or WordPress.com), or go for a blog on your own home business domain, the key things are to choose a subject to write on and to write regular posts with valuable content.

  Share your blog posts across all your social media platforms and look for opportunities to write guest posts for other blogs. Posts should typically be around 500 words long, have plenty of useful content and some good, high quality images.

• 3. Vlogging – Video blogging or making mini TV shows. You probably have all the technology you need on your computer already. You can talk directly to the camera, make short films using something like Animoto or make screencasts to share your knowledge.

  Again, make sure you share your videos not just on YouTube, but across all your social media platforms and remember you can also pin videos to your Pinterest boards.

• 4. Podcasting – If you’re happy to listen to the sound of your voice then podcasting is something you could explore. You could even get your podcasts accepted by the iTunes store!

  Both vlogging and podcasting take a bit of practice, but they are worth exploring so that you can share your message in a variety of different ways.

• 5. Article Marketing – is another good way to share your written pieces with a wider audience. Be aware that most sites are looking for articles of 500+ words. Some (like HubPages) only accept original content, while others will let you upload posts from your blog or newsletter articles.

  Some article marketing sites offer some payment, but others give you the opportunity to attach an ‘author bio’ with a link to your website or blog. That must be printed with the article every time it is used.

• 6. E-books – If you have a good knowledge of a subject you could write an e-book and publish it to Amazon for Kindle for sale throughout the world! Or you could collect together a number of blog posts on a related theme and turn those into a book.

  If you have the time and the discipline, you can write and publish an e-book in around a month.

• 7. E-courses – If you don’t feel you’ve got enough material for a book why not create an e-course you can send to people who sign up using an auto-responder package? You will have to pay to set up this service, but then you can set the frequency at which people receive emails (daily, weekly, fortnightly, etc).

  At the end of your course you can invite people to sign up to your regular newsletter and also offer them the opportunity to buy further products and services from your home business.

Each of the 7 strategies I’ve outlined require time and effort on your part to find and engage with your target audience and none of them is a quick fix. They are part of an on-going plan to build a trust relationship with your home business audience so that when they are ready to buy, they recognise you as a ‘go to’ brand.

Visit www.sarahcruickshank.co.uk for more information about Sarah and the services she offers.

Enjoyed this? You’ll work harder than you ever have before as a home worker, says Sarah, and you can read her 3 Top Time Management Tips for the Home Worker to help get the most out of your time.