Home Based Business Success

In my last post I discussed the importance of finding your target market and how to begin finding it. You not only have to find a good target market for your home based business, you have to find one that’s going to be profitable. That means one where people are happily spending money and there’s every reason to believe they will spend it on the products or services you will be selling. Remember there’s no use spending your marketing resources, weather they be time, money or bandwidth on people who aren’t buying, or promoting products they’re not likely to buy from you.

One way to research market profitability is to look at what markets your competitors are selling to and how long they’ve been selling to them for. Now, you’re not likely to just submit a survey to current or potential competitors and get an answer on this. You have to use other market research tools. One way to do this is to go to websites that cater to your target market and see who is advertising on those sites. Check the Google Adsense or the Yahoo ads running on the sites and who’s running them. That is who you’ll be competing against in the particular market.

Check the history of such ads. Look at the same sites for a week or two. Are the same websites and companies still running ads? If so then there’s a good chance they’re making money on the ad, and in the market. The other possibility is they are using the ads to build a web presence by building traffic, even if they aren’t monetizing it at this time. You should be able to tell by going to their site and seeing what it is they are marketing.

Another way to get great information on a potential target market is to look around for forums related to it. The existence of large and active forums, or smaller ones with passionate members is a sure clue of a market with some interest behind it. The other great thing about forums is it shows questions, problems, and concerns of people in the market. You can tell even more by participating in some of these forums. A bit of creative posting will bring to light what people want solutions for and what they’re willing to pay for.  If you have a market that’s willing to pay for a solution, especially if you are the only, or one of the only solution providers, is pure gold for your business.

Once you’ve been a member of a forum for some time, you can even conduct surveys in some cases. These are invaluable for gleaning information about what potential consumers want and how much they’re willing to pay for it. You will not be able to do this all the time. Quite the opposite is true, but when you can use this technique on a forum, it’s extremely valuable. If you have a website that deals with the market you’re hoping to conquer, you can host a survey there. If you have enough traffic, you can get great information. You can also check out http://surveymonkey.com. They’ll let you design a custom survey and even host it for you. If you have fewer than 100 respondents it’s free, but they can handle much larger surveys for a small fee.

These are but a few of the techniques you can use to research a target market for your home based business. In future posts I’ll look at the next steps on the road to making millions with your home based business. Here's to your success!

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As a business owner, one of your goals is to increase sales, unless you’re one of the few who’s already got more sales than you can handle. There are some things you must do in order to maximize your total sales and minimize your marketing expenditures used to attain them. One of the most important steps you can take as a business owner and marketer is to test everything you do for effectiveness and return on your investment (ROI).

One of the advantages to operating on the Internet is that things happen much faster than in the off-line world. That gives you the ability to test everything you do for effectiveness and see the results fairly quickly. You can then switch your resources to support the most effective strategy. This  is true for virtually all your marketing efforts, including ad copy, headlines, the type of advertising you’re using, the products/services you are selling, your target market, and any geographic or temporal targeting you may be using.

Selling online gives you the ability to what is referred to as split testing. Split testing is the technique of changing one variable in your marketing efforts and measuring against a metric. For example, you may change the headline in an ad, and then run both variations of the ad at the same time, in an equal split (hence the term “split testing”) and measuring the metric that you’re testing for. The metric may be anything that you are trying to increase, such as ad response, sales, conversion ratio, and so on.

In the world of Internet marketing you are able to quickly determine the efficacy of seemingly small changes in your marketing efforts and then use the more effective marketing methods. You can effect significant changes in your total sales rather quickly by doing so. The great thing is that you can, and should, test virtually all aspects of your marketing campaigns, and you have the ability to do so in most cases.

If you are using pay per click advertising you can very quickly determine differences in ad wording, headlines, and geographic targeting by running simultaneous ad campaigns. The variable you’re testing is the only difference. For example, you can test two different headlines against each other in Google Adwords by running two different ad headline variations and checking for click-through rates. You should also use Google’s feature that lets you check conversion ratio of the ads. This is the number of clicks that actually result in sales.

You may find that although one headline resulted in a higher clickthrough rate, those visitors were more interested in looking than buying so the ultimate conversion rate was lower. I’ve seen fairly large differences in clickthrough percentage from seemingly small changes in PPC headlines. I’ve also seen the headline have a dramatic effect on the conversion ratio.

When testing ads, test two ads against each other. Use the winning ad or headline, then test the winner against another variation. Keep detailed records of the testing results. In a short amount of time you can determine what is the most effective. If, for example, your clickthrough on a PPC campaign went from 1.8% to 2.2% by effecting a one word change in the headline (a result I’ve personal seen), you just increased your clickthrough rate by 22%.All else being equal, that will probably also increase your sales by a similar amount.

If you’re using PPC ad campaigns, something else that you have to test, or risk losing your shirt, is the conversion rate of all your keywords. Some are just not profitable, and you need to identify which ones are and which ones are costing you money. You can then eliminate the unprofitable keywords from your campaigns, and use those funds for profitable keywords.

If you're an affiliate marketer, you should extend your testing procedure to the products you sell. In nearly every case, you'll find that some vendor's programs are better than others. Some will convert your traffic to sales at a higher percentage, and some will give you few returns, while others will generate many more. You should check your conversion rates between your vendors and your EPC (earnings per 1,000 clicks). Some vendors will convert at a lower rate, but more than make up for it by offering you a higher payout amount. In time you will develop a solid portfolio of vendors that offer high EPC and low return rates, but you must test and examine the results on a regular basis in order to get there. 

It only takes a few percentage points one way or the other to make a significant difference in the success or failure in your marketing efforts. In many cases, testing will yield results that are much greater than a few percentage points. You can double or triple your sales, but you must use one of the greatest advantages of Internet marketing, the ability to split test everything and quickly measure the results. A solid testing procedure will give your business a healthy increase in ROI and sales, and make your smile even larger.

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