Promoting Your Home Based Business

Today we are going to briefly change subjects and again discuss some ways of promoting your home based business. One potentially cost effective way to promote your business is to participate in small, local outdoor markets or festivals or rallies. Many of them are held every weekend, you just have to look around to see them. You may find some events held in local church parking lots, some in grocery store parking lots, and many times in open areas near shopping malls.

There are several advantages to participating in these open marketplaces. One advantage is that usually there is minimal (if any) cost to be a vendor there. Another advantage is that you get to personally meet the people that could be interested in your product or service. You can talk to the local residents and find out what they are really interested in. You can hand out business cards or flyers to everyone who walks by your booth and the best part is that you can set up a booth with just a simple table, chair and possible tent.

Attached a picture of what our booth looks like at a local marketplace. We did invest in a banner (what you see wrapped around the table - like a table skirt) and a tent. The tent is very necessary especially when it is bright, sunny and even a little warm out. Sitting outside for 4-5 hours in the sun can really be an otherwise exhausting experience. There are simple chairs that you should also bring, but I recommend that you bring chairs that will allow you to be seen at your booth when you are sitting. We used to have small lawn chairs at our booth, but the problem was that when you sit down, you are at or below table level, and customers walking by your booth may think there is nobody at your booth. We have found that if the booth looks unattended, people will not stop to see what your table is offering. We usually have some tall chairs (like director's chairs) or a tall stool to sit on so that the booth always has somebody visible in it.

What we put on the table are products that are for sale, flyers for services we offer (car, boat, motorcycle and RV detailing for our business), business cards with contact phone numbers on it and informational brochures about the products we offer for sale. We make sure to have enough product to sell immediately to customers, because when they attend an event like this, they usually want to make a purchase now and take the product home today. We are living in an immediate gratification society, so people tend to not want to wait for an order to come in.

We make sure the information brochures are handed out to people that are seriously interested in our products. We also recommend that when you hand out brochures they include your contact name, phone number, e-mail address and website (if you have one) so that if the customer wants to make a purchase later, or wants to re-order product, they can easily get in touch with you. What really works well about the brochures is that even if the person did not purchase from you at the time, that brochure can have a tendency to "develop legs". What I mean by that is the brochure may be left on the potential customer's table, and someone else may pick it up and begin asking questions about what is on the brochure. That other person may the your million-dollar sale, you never know.

But by having that brochure run around other people's homes and offices, you have managed to get advertising out to a targeted audience (if they were not interested in your products, they would not have asked for an information brochure) and will most likely generate sales from that. Your main cost is in getting brochures printed, but the rest is essentially free advertising. Do not expect each brochure to generate sales, but as you get more brochures and business cards out into the local area, people will begin recognizing you and your products/services and may be more inclined to purchase from you in the future. Most importantly, this is a very affordable way to promote your home based business.

Not all open markets or rallies will generate money for you that day. It is sort of like gambling, some days you may do really well, other days, not so well. The important thing is to always be cheerful when at your booth and to always be willing to talk to everyone who passes by. That is because the next time a potential customer meets you, they will probably remember how you treated them at the rally. You never know when you might meet that person again, it may be in a grocery store, when you are both standing in the check-out line. At that time, they may see you and remember having met you at the market. That chance meeting may even generate more sales in the future, you never know.

Please feel free to contact us if you are looking for ideas on how to find local, outdoor markets in your area. You can e-mail us at hawgwash1@yahoo.com. We would love to help you get your home based business off the ground without spending an arm and a leg in advertising.

Until tomorrow...