Here are ten steps to grow your home based business.1. Focus
It’s easy to want to put all your ideas into action at once, but you’ll be most successful if you start by focusing on the things you do best. Put your energy into marketing one or two products or services that you do really well, and you’ll have the best chance of finding a niche in the market.
2. Diversify
Once you’ve mastered step 1 and gotten a foothold in the market, you’re ready to expand your offerings. Your customers will appreciate having related products to choose from. What’s really important about branching out into new areas is to continue to provide a high quality service across the board. Branching out could hurt your reputation if you drop the ball in other areas.
3. Use your customer base
One of the easiest ways to grow your home based business is by increasing sales to existing customers. Consider offering volume discounts, like two-for-one sales or offer discounts when people sign up for multiple services at once.
4. Hire part-time help
You might not have the need or the budget for a full-time employee, but consider a part-time employee, intern, or freelancer. Building a network of skilled people can benefit you in the future, and having another person’s perspective can help you make better business decisions.
5. Partner with a related business
Working with other companies is one of the easiest ways to market your products. Sell baked goods? Ask local coffee shops if they’ll carry them. Are you a graphic designer? Offer to do low-cost graphic design for other businesses in exchange for referrals to their clients. There’s always someone you can partner with in a way that will benefit you both.
6. Create a website
Gone are the days when you needed a storefront to sell products. A website lets you sell to anyone, anywhere. Websites these days are cheap to maintain. They’re easy, too: the internet is full of do-it-yourself websites that don’t require programming knowledge to build. If you want a website that is really special, you might want to consider hiring a professional web designer.
7. Grow your clientele
Think about customers you haven’t targeted yet. If most of your customers are 18-29 year-olds, you could start marketing to people in their 30s. Or if you market to new mothers, maybe there are related products or services that you could sell to parents of older children. You can also expand from retail to wholesale, or vice versa.
8. Try new marketing techniques
If you’ve mostly been buying print ads, consider web-based ads. If you have tried Google Adwords, you might want to try to advertise on Bing or Facebook. Try sending out a newsletter by email, and don’t forget about social media. If you have a B2B target market, you could start your own business networking group. The key is to always try at least one new marketing technique. If it works, great, keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, try something else. Entrepreneurship is about experimenting with new ideas.
9. Grow your physical business
These days, even a home based business can afford to operate out of another space. Consider renting temporary office space to get benefits such as tech support and conference services, or to hold meetings with clients. Sharing office space with other small businesses can also be a great way to grow your network. A great way to get inexpensive office space is to offer free services to another business in exchange for office space.
10. Consider franchising or licensing
You may be able to license your product or service to another company who can market and sell your product for you. Piggybacking off another company is a great way to grow your business without increasing your overhead.
Source: successharbor.com