If you are like me, you want to make money online and work from home. I’ve got a toddler under two at home and the idea of paying someone else to watch her so I can NOT make enough money to pay my bills at some zero-future job…well, it just kills me. You hear others make money online and work from home and you want to know: What is the reality of marketing a home based business if I’ve got a tiny budget to start? Whatever you choose to sell (and that’s all business is – the sale of goods, services, or information), you have to figure out how to get the word out (and that’s all marketing is – letting people know about your product) on a shoestring budget.
By reading this article, you will understand that if you want to market your business from home, you’d be wise to use social media marketing. Social media marketing is so cheap you’ll be amazed. Social media marketing will enable you to reach a much larger yet more specific audience than conventional advertising. Plus, social media marketing is fun and cures the common home based business problem of isolation.
What is social media marketing? It is an inexpensive method of marketing your product by using social networking sites. Social networking sites are sites like YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and more and they are FREE to join and it is FREE to post information there. You are allowed to put links on your social site posts that lead interested Internet users from the informational posts at the social sites to additional information or directly to your online center of business. That center may be a website, a blog, or a simple page with your contact information, depending on what you are selling.
Social media marketing is free except for investment of time and energy. And it won’t take you as much time as you might expect to learn how to use these social sites, because they are made to be user friendly. You don’t have to be a programmer or website designer to make an attractive informational post. This easy access interface is a cornerstone of Web 2.0, the new generation of online gathering places that are attracting tons of new users every day.
Social media marketing allows you to tap a very large audience and to connect with people specifically interested in your product. There are lots of people using these social media sites and more joining every day. The profile of the average user is encouraging, too, suggesting that the largest growing group of site user is over 30, educated, and sporting some discretionary income that they feel comfortable spending on the Internet. With so many people searching for information, you can certainly find people searching for YOUR information, product or service. As you build an online marketing presence over time, the search engines will begin to find your informational posts, too, and your traffic will increase exponentially. (Search engines seem to assign extra weight to informational posts at popular social sites.) The sky is the limit with this marketing model.
Social media marketing is also the remedy for two problems that plague people who want to work from home: isolation and lack of business networking. In the process of using these social media sites, you’ll explore the sites and find others with similar interests. It is easy to “friend” another site user so that you can follow their posts and, if they are interested, they can follow yours. Friendly online interchanges are the basis of social networking sites and the remedy for isolation.
Other business owners are using these social media sites, too. You find them posting information about every facet of small business ownership – from office organization to tax planning. It’s actually really nice to find out what another small business owner thinks the best shipping method is, or the most efficient way to keep customer records. They did all the work figuring it out, and now you can leverage off that work they did without spending hours on it yourself. And you aren’t confined to a geographical region for business networking, so you can exchange helpful tips with people half way around the world. It’s very different from sipping stale coffee at your local Chamber of Commerce networking event. Social media marketing will enable you to network with a whole new set of people.
Essentially, social media marketing leaves conventional offline advertising and even paid Internet marketing in the dust when you are operating on a tiny home business marketing budget. The added bonus of beating isolation just makes it all the sweeter. And since social media marketing is free, you’d be crazy NOT to add it to your repertoire of small business marketing strategies. Investing the time and energy to learn about social media marketing will pay you back a hundred times over.
