With the holiday season very much upon us, it’s time to start contacting your customers. A quick card to remind them that you offer items that make great Christmas or other holiday gifts. Odds are, many of them will be wanting ideas.

Tiny Prints has some beautiful, professional cards. You can even have photos printed on them to give a more personal touch.

Getting your holiday cards professionally printed is a good thing, but I would also recommend using a more professional touch and signing each card by hand. It may take a bit of time, but it shows just a little more thought than a printed signature. If you have a huge list this may be rather more than you care to take on, but do it if at all reasonable.

Consider including a coupon code on your cards. It will help you to track the response your cards get as well as motivate people to order from you. Just remember to think about whether or not you need an expiration date or other terms of use for the code.

Existing customers are a group you should never neglact in your home business marketing efforts. Take a little extra time when they’re more likely to be shopping.

Technorati Tags: home business, holiday business, holiday business cards

For many home businesses, the holiday season is a great time. People buy more. If you sell physical products, there’s probably customers looking to give what you sell for Christmas presents.

This applies to a wide range of home businesses. People who have joined network marketing and direct sales opportunities can probably sell a lot of their products for use in gift baskets. If you can recommend complementary products, even if they aren’t in your product line, your customers will appreciate it.

Affiliate marketers can do similar, depending on what they focus on. The nice part is that you may be able to sign up for programs that will give you commissions even on the products that go along with their core recommendations.

Of course, much of your marketing should have long since started for the holidays, but you can work at it even now. Contact existing customers to inform them of holiday specials. Use pay per click marketing to build more traffic to your website. Don’t give up just because you haven’t gotten the head start you want. Get moving now.

Technorati Tags: holiday marketing, christmas marketing

One of the keys to success in running a home business is connecting with others. Good relationships with other people in business can help you to build your own. It’s also just a lot of fun.

DirectMatches.com is for people who are running a home-based business. You get to network with other people as well as have the chance to win prizes.

In the setup, it’s rather like a lot of social networking websites. You have your profile in which you can tell other people about yourself and your business. There are networks to join, a blog to post in, contacts to be made. But the focus here is on business, not on the personal side of your life. Members can also post videos and classified ads.

One of the good parts is that it is free to join. There are paid memberships as well, but you can start out free before deciding if paid is for you.

DirectMatches.com claims 65,000 members, which is a good base of people for you to start meeting and help you build up your home business. The ads along the sides are member sponsored, which gives you an idea as to what you can be paying for on this site.

Home business owners have a lot of options for what they want to do. They can run fairly traditional businesses out of their homes, such as network marketing, daycare or bookkeeping, or they can use their skills in the newer businesses the Internet has made available, such as website design, virtual assistants and affiliate marketers.

However, you can combine affiliate marketing with many of these opportunities. It’s a way you can offer the most complete options to the customers you come into contact with.

A website designer, for example, may offer hosting or can simply recommend hosting through various companies, and be paid for referring the customers. A network marketer can offer products and services that are related to what he or she is selling, but aren’t available through the network marketing company.

All you have to do is think about what more you can offer your existing client base. There are probably plenty of items that are related to the things they trust you on anyhow that you could recommend and earn money through the affiliate program. Read the rest of this entry »

The entire point of joining a direct sales opportunity is to gain financial freedom. It’s not something you do because you want to lose money. Yet a lot of people - most, in fact, don’t do all that well at it and many do lose money.

How do you avoid this?

First you need to realize that direct sales is more than the classic companies such as Avon. It’s a great company still, but if they aren’t what you want to do, you aren’t stuck. You have a wide range of possibilities in direct sales, from the more traditional cosmetics to food to rather more “personal” merchandise.

And of course there are many more possibilities. The wonderful thing about direct sales is that you can find something to sell that you will be absolutely delighted to offer. After all, what’s the point of trying to sell something that you don’t really want to sell? Makes it too much like a job you hate.

One of the things that people don’t always realize about direct sales these days is how it has changed due to the Internet. It’s no longer something where your only option is to bug everyone you know to join the opportunity or buy products for you. Your horizons are much broader now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Direct sales is popular for a lot of reasons. You can get support from your upline. You can get into a business that already has an established name, which can help you with your sales efforts. Great products in an area you’re interested in. You can sell to family, friends, acquaintances, anyone you come into contact with who likes your products.

There’s a lot you can do just on a local level. You can go to craft or other vendor fairs. You can give your business card out at the drop of a hat… or without a hat dropping. You can build a mailing list of past customers and market to them.

But there’s another level to take it to, one you might find intimidating at first, but that can be very much worth your efforts. You can market online.

This is where you may need to hire help. Marketing online is very different from marketing in the real world. You’ll have to check the company’s policies on having your own website and what you can say about the product there. Read the rest of this entry »

Network marketing and direct sales are great for people wanting to have a home business. You can get instant name recognition if the company is well established, or have something people wish they heard of sooner if they aren’t as well recognized.

But many people will say just about anything to make a sale or get you into their downline. You know the routine. No selling required. Make money with no effort. And so on.

The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing is a report I believe you will find tremendously useful. It will get you thinking about your own marketing tactics if you already have a business. If you’re still looking, it will give you tools to think about how people wanting you to join their business are trying to recruit you.

Technorati Tags: network marketing, 7 great lies, free ebook

When you need to deal with people a lot in your home business, it is very important to be able to manage your leads well. There are many ways to do this, from creating your own list using one program or another on your computer to keeping your leads on paper to finding the right software solution that is designed to help you manage your leads.

Lead management done right can help you to be more organized, and therefore be more productive in your home business. If you find you’re always losing track of potential customers or downline signups, it’s probably time to take a look at how you’re keeping track of them.

A software solution is not for every home business owner. If you’re keeping up perfectly with your leads already, there is little need to change. But for others it can be a huge help.