Yep, I’m early on this. But why wait until New Year’s Eve to start even thinking about this?

What would you like your home business to accomplish in the new year? What would help you the most in approaching your goals?

I don’t have my resolutions set yet, and I don’t tend to formalize them. Maybe I should, as I know for some that helps to increase focus.

There are many things you can do to grow your home business. You can learn a new skill, study, focus on getting more customers or more traffic to your site… too many possibilities to list really.

So if you have a chance to breathe during the Christmas rush, take a little time to plan for the future of your home business.

One of the easiest ways to advertise your home business locally is to put ads on your car. Bumper stickers, window stickers, magnetic decals and so forth can be quite effective.

CustomizedStickers.com says they make getting stickers easy. They can even handle the artwork for no additional fee, or you can send in your own. All they do is stickers; if you want magnets for your car you’ll have to go elsewhere.

Their site notes that they are closed until after New Years, which makes this review a bit difficult. However, they do have a good FAQ page and promise excellent quality.

If you’re using your own artwork, make sure you check out their guidelines so that you get the best quality possible. If you’re familiar with one of the editors that can produce an acceptable file type, you probably won’t have too hard a time. They even take Word documents.

Read this over on ProBlogger and thought I should help spread the word because it is a very important issue for many AdSense publishers.

As you probably know, one of the big ways people have been increasing their AdSense clickthru rates has been to strategically place images near their ads, drawing the eye to them. Google has changed their policy toward this somewhat. Fortunately, they also show some examples of unacceptable image placements, so you don’t have to guess quite so much.

Basically, if the placement of the image suggests a relationship to the ads, it’s against the rules. Putting a line between them is no longer sufficient.

There are going to be a lot of disappointed people changing their sites over this, as this has been a very common practice among AdSense advertisers. On the other hand Yahoo has never allowed such image placements. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the hazards of marketing online is that many people will report your emails as spam rather than simply unsubscribe. And if too many of them do that, oops, you’re on a blacklist and suddenly your emails just don’t go through to lots of places completely unrelated to the person who couldn’t be bothered to unsubscribe correctly in the first place.

If you’re using a service such as Aweber or GetResponse they handle such complaints through their system, but you can still face a problem through your own emails. But if you get blacklisted due to things you sent out not through your services you can still have a problem.

You can protect your primary mode of communcation, Email by monitoring the blacklists. But this is time consuming, and you may be better off hiring a service to do this for you, especially if you run your list off your own servers or through your website hosting company. Read the rest of this entry »

The deadline is approaching… if you’re going to send holiday gifts to your clients, get them into the mail fast!

Do you have to give your clients gifts? No, but this is a great time of year to make them think of you.

It doesn’t have to be something large, but it helps if it’s something relevant to their needs that will also make them think of your business. That’s when promotional items can come in handy. The trick is balancing what you spend on your clients with the potential work they might send you in the coming year.

If you’re in direct sales, of course, a sample of what you carry can be nice to give to current customers. If you provide a service, think of what your customers do that is related to it.

The holiday season is a great time to market your home business to your existing customer list. Encourage them to think of you and motivate them to come back to you in the new year.

Technorati Tags: holiday marketing, home business

I found out about one that is pretty lively and gives you the chance to earn money. I’ve seen this model elsewhere, and some do well, some don’t, but the more quality posts you make the better your chances are of earning while interacting with your fellow affiliates.

Revenue Source provides Affiliate Marketing & SEO Forums along with a revenue sharing model that gives you a chance to earn through your own AdSense links. How often your link shows depends on a variety of factors which you will have to learn there.

However, the potential to earn money should not be your sole focus there. There’s some decent information being shared too.

One big mistake home business owners make is to not ask for enough money. I’ve heard it said that this is particularly true for women, as they tend to feel more guilty asking for what they’re worth, but haven’t seen stats one way or the other, so I can’t say how true or untrue that one is.

Once you have the experience, you should not let yourself undercharge for your services, products or however you may earn your money.

Experimenting with your prices is a very good idea. In some businesses this is pretty easy to do; just find a script that tests a variety of prices automatically for you and see which gives you the best profits. But other times it’s more challenging, especially if you provide services and are trying to build up a customer base.

As you build your business, make sure your prices are being fair to you and remember that raising prices is hard work. It can lose you customers. However, if your customers are just looking for cheap work you may not want them anyhow.

One tactic is to raise prices a little less each time for established customers. Explain to them that you need to increase your prices, but because they’re a current customer they don’t have to pay the full increased rate right away.

If you’re selling physical items, make sure you account for the time you are spending when setting your prices. How many dollars an hour are you willing to work for? Think about that as you set your prices and figure out how many sales you can make a day.

I know I made the mistake of undercharging when I did website design. I got some customers, sure, but they just wanted cheap solutions. If I were to reopen that business I’d charge a lot more. It’s the only way it would really be worth my time.

Make sure your business is worth your time. An unprofitable business can’t last.

Technorati Tags: pricing, charging, undercharging

You may recall the other day that I posted about the FTC regulating word of mouth marketing. Many other people posted about it as well, as this is big news among those getting paid for posts and potentially for affiliate marketers as well.

Well, this officially starts Monday I guess, but PayPerPost is now requiring disclosure about being paid to blog. It needs to be reasonably visible on the blog as a whole or in each individual post.

This is something that appeared on my to-do list on Wednesday when I first posted about it. I’m working on a nice general purpose one that should take just a few moments to add to my sites. I’m not just doing the paid to post ones, I’m hitting the affiliate marketing ones as well for good measure.

Are they paying me to post this? Absolutely!

Would I have posted it anyhow? Yeah, but the pay got me to do it a little sooner… I was cleaning the house. It’s Saturday and I have to take some time off work, don’t I? It had been on the list for after the kids were in bed. Such is life when you work at home.

Technorati Tags: disclosure, pay per post, blog