Home Business Advertisement

smileawhile55

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking about what's involved in getting attention for a business that you've started from home.

What are the most cost-effective ways to raise awareness of your new venture?

I see a lot of people in this situation handing out cards and flyers at gatherings, and recommendations from friends is also common too i.e. Word of mouth. A Facebook page is free to set up also but unless you know what your looking for it can be hard to come across.

Are there any other ways to inform people or is this it?

Thanks a lot,
Smileawhile55

jimmii

Depends on your target market and industry. No easy fix I'm afraid! We tried a bit of everything really then just kept going with the bits that showed a good return. If it's online no matter what you do most of your traffic comes from Google so nailing SEO is key and AdWords can help a good bit.

EIREX

The well known classified ad websites including adverts.ie ! are really good sources of new customers and very cheap to advertise on.

smileawhile55

Thanks for the replies!

@jimii How costly or time-consuming is SEO? Is there a steep learning curve for people just starting out?
What if the product/service you provide is in a saturated market, how do you stand out?
(Or I suppose this is part of what you mean by nailing the SEO? )

@EIREX Would I be right in saying that people not only use Adverts.ie for home business ads but for people selling their items on a one-off too?
Point being, do genuine home businesses get buried in under the seller item ads often?

jimmii

smileawhile55 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies!

@jimii How costly or time-consuming is SEO? Is there a steep learning curve for people just starting out?
What if the product/service you provide is in a saturated market, how do you stand out?
(Or I suppose this is part of what you mean by nailing the SEO? )

In a competitive market then SEO can be quite a long process to get your organic ranking up there are quite a lot of boxes to be ticked and then you need a bit of patience for google to appreciate all the work you have done! If you haven't done it before then it can be quite time consuming so might be worth getting someone else to do that for you there are lots of companies out there who do it but definitely don't go for any of the "omg I will get you on page 1 overnight" adverts as they often do get you to page 1 using a few tricks and then you get hammered by google as they have been sly about it and you are stuck on page 20 for the next 6 months. If you do go down that route get a reputable company to do it that is very important.

If you are directly competing against big budget companies then its going to be very tough to crack but these days it is probably the most important tool for the majority of businesses for attracting new business.

For the period 30/9-30/10 62.5% of visitors to our site have come from google and despite 15k likes on Facebook just 14% has come from there so for us focusing more on google than social media pays off when it comes to website traffic. Obviously it differs from industry to industry (we're high street retail) but I would imagine for a lot of new businesses its a similar pattern.

EIREX

There is a lot of noise on the classified sites but if your product is in demand and at the right price people find you.

It's really low cost.

enviro

Hi OP, can you provide specific info such as

Industry/product/service?

Target market?

Online/BnM?

Answer these ques and I would gladly offer my strategy for you.

smileawhile55

Interesting posts, thanks again for the information!

@EIREX I recall seeing an advertisement on such a classified ads website for a custom cake home business. While I'm sure that visitors to the site may stumble across this advert, it just doesn't strike me as the first place someone would go to find a cake. That said, it is a low cost alternative as you say, and not a bad one either.

@jimmii thanks for sharing your stats info with me! I didn't realise how much investment was required to get a good ranking from SEO. It must be slightly intimidating for someone to take the leap and start up their own home business, never mind sorting out the logistics end of running a business from home, but also invest in SEO and other methods in order to really stand out. Then again, that's just marketing I guess.

@enviro thanks very much for the offer but I'm just curious about the methods of advertising people use for their home business. I don't have my own home business myself, I just have a couple of friends that do, and wanted to find out what others in similar situations use.

I heard somewhere that it is possible to pay for page ranking in Facebook search also, is this something any of you are familiar with?

jimmii

smileawhile55 wrote: »

Interesting posts, thanks again for the information!

@EIREX I recall seeing an advertisement on such a classified ads website for a custom cake home business. While I'm sure that visitors to the site may stumble across this advert, it just doesn't strike me as the first place someone would go to find a cake. That said, it is a low cost alternative as you say, and not a bad one either.

@jimmii thanks for sharing your stats info with me! I didn't realise how much investment was required to get a good ranking from SEO. It must be slightly intimidating for someone to take the leap and start up their own home business, never mind sorting out the logistics end of running a business from home, but also invest in SEO and other methods in order to really stand out. Then again, that's just marketing I guess.

@enviro thanks very much for the offer but I'm just curious about the methods of advertising people use for their home business. I don't have my own home business myself, I just have a couple of friends that do, and wanted to find out what others in similar situations use.

I heard somewhere that it is possible to pay for page ranking in Facebook search also, is this something any of you are familiar with?

SEO, much like anything, can be as cheap or expensive as you want. The easiest bit of any business is the product the hardest bit is getting the customers you have to use as many tools as possible to do that. A few people I have talked to are putting 90%+ of their online spend into SEO now and doing that over AdWords etc. I wouldn't go that far but its definitely something that warrants the investment.

What exactly is it you are planing on doing and what do you want to achieve? That is going to make a big difference in what is going to be the best thing to do.

EdenStudios

smileawhile55 wrote: »

Hi everyone,

What are the most cost-effective ways to raise awareness of your new venture?
Thanks a lot,
Smileawhile55

Google Adwords is the quickest way to get traffic to your site. You can literally turn it on and have qualified visitors to your site right away. Obviously there's a cost IE your CPC (cost per click) you pay directly to Google.

Organic SEO or natural listings on the other hand is a long game and although there's no immediate cost, you'll want to devote time to this consistently to begin to see results. That's the cost.

Ideally you want both methods in action for various reasons.