i) Free gifts
Always accompany the product or service with a small gift, people just like free gift and there is no question about it. But make sure the free gift is related to what you are selling and it can be used together with the product or service. For example, a free DVD game is come with a purchase of a PS3 console, a free headphone is come with a mini HiFi.

ii) Distribute coupons
Distribute coupon to the public and encourage them to buy from you, you don’t have to distribute it through an advertising campaign but you can distribute it in the entrance of shopping center, distribute through the local book store, or distribute it through the first purchase from the customer. Design your coupon as attractive as possible, you stand a chance to close a deal.

iii) Organize contest
Organize free entrance contest for the public, develop an interesting contest and attract the public, make sure you make it with fun and you will attract the media coverage to publish the event, yet another free advertising for your business.

iv) Organize and participate in event
Organize and participate in any public event to gain public exposure for your home based business, because you don’t have a sales outlet where you will not gain much public appearance, actively participate is these events and get people to know your business.

v) New customer offers
Attracting new customer to purchase something from you is the most difficult challenge for your home based business, try to give offer for new customer during their first purchase, if no offer in price is possible, at least give out some freebies or second purchase offer, this will build the customer stronger first impression to your business.

A good marketing plan should include the analysis of the potential targeted market include the customer’s behavior, the competitors and the strength and weakness of the business compare to the competitors. A marketing plan is not as simple as just a list of advertising or promotional activities. The conclusion to a marketing plan is to predict competitive reaction and a brief consideration of possible longer product term options.

Creating a serious and well planned marketing study take into consideration of each individual product or service group will definately create analysis overlaps between other product or company-wide strategies. It is strongly advised that each product line or service are look into detail separately. Doing a research for each product may reveal the individual product characteristic that may not be considered by other businesses.

With this marketing tool, the advertiser (business owner) is actually publish their product or service in the marketing network and allow the publisher to publish their product in their website, or when the web users search the related keywords from google search engine. In return, the publisher will earn a share from the referrals.

Not a new variant but a not very well-known version of affiliate marketing is the promotion of affiliate product links/websites via Google AdWords. With Google AdWords, a very targeted marketing is possible and well and attractive written advertisements equipped with the right keywords can bring in big money. All the affiliate has to do is to figure out which keywords that are related to their product or service are affordable to promote. And that’s where secret to success is, everyone can buy the expensive and obvious keywords to promote products but when it comes to affiliate success via PPC advertising the inexperienced marketers are being weeded out or are left with big holes in their pockets. Finding the right combination of keywords, target group, advertisement copy is the critical piece of the puzzle.

To summarize – affiliate marketing via PPC on Google can be very lucrative and quite a few people are making a living of it. It sounds easy to do but to break into this field a new affiliate needs a lot of luck, big bucks or patience and knowledge.

Face to face selling may require a sales person with powerful sales presentation skill, despite having a fancy presentation slide or computer animation for the presentation, the verbal communication and interaction with the prospect is much more effective in closing a sale. In most case, the home based business or small business owner is able to successfully get the sale close if they have a chance to meet with the customer, with this, the product knowledge must be in depth in order to answer any question that might be shot by the customer during the presentation.

Many home based business and small business is starting out small and the business owner would probably the sales person with the target of generating as much sales as possible to get the business rolling. Your effectiveness as a sales person will be a critical factor in the success of the business.

Yellow pages ads are usually sold in annual basis where this is different from other print advertising medium whose usually provide in campaign basis. There are several formats to choose from, it can be in text form where only address and telephone contact to be listed, or it can be in banner form where the home based business owner is able to choose from various of ad sizes depends on your advertising budget. On top of listing the address and telephone contact, banner advertisement also allow the business owner to list the range of products or services, email address and the logo of the business.

If you are to ask to compare the cost between yellow pages advertising and other advertising mediums, i would tell you, there is nothing can be compared. How much to pay for the ads is depends on how much space you intend to occupy. The bigger the ads space, the higher the cost, the bigger exposure for your home based business.

i) Direct mail – Considered as the highest impact compared to any other advertising medium. The message reached every single targeted recipients in a personalized way and this method is also the most expensive advertising medium per person reached.

ii) Television – Based on study,television viewers are more apt to fully tune themselves into an advertisement, but it does offer the advertiser an opportunity to speak to a captive audience.

iii) Radio – This advertising medium offers a dramatic improvement over the print advertising method. The listed is more captive to the message unless they switch off the radio or tune into other station. Compared to television advertisement, this is a lower cost solution.

iv) Outdoor and transit – The very good example of this advertising medium is the billboard that you can see from the high way. I would say this advertising medium is the least effective way due to its high visibility factor where no one would actually spend time to read or view the advertisement.

v) Newspaper – Can be said is the cheapest solution in advertising for home based business or small business. However, targeted ads placement is important due to its high quantity of advertisements and in many case, it is easy for all but the largest ads to get lost in the visual clutter.

vi) Magazines – It offers a slightly better opportunity to catch the reader’s eyes. Readers tend to peruse magazines more carefully than they do in reading a newspaper due to the less advertisement published in a single page.

vii) Internet advertising – Advertising online is one of the most famous advertising medium in today’s business world. Although having a website for your home based business or small business is crucial, but you can still consider to advertise on others website.

There are several type of online advertisements that you can participate for your home based business, banner advertisement and text link advertisement can be one of the favorite choices. The cost of each advertisement varies by the popularity of the website, the space that you would like to occupy in that page and the targeted location for your advertisement.

Normally, the owner(webmaster) of the website will determine the rate of every space and position of the advertisement, the bigger the banner and the obvious the advertisement shown in the website will cost you more. Depending on how the webmaster would like to run the advertisement campaign, usually a report shows the behavior of the ads will be generated and sent to the advertiser.

Before buying an ad space from any site for your home based business, make sure you are not buying a pop-up ads, this website would usually not ranking well in the search engine while some of them might be blacklisted by the search engine, and furthermore, most of the famous web browsers block pop-ups. Evaluate the website carefully and decide the best location to place your home based business ads.

Other than buying ads from website, you can also consider to participate in the search engine online advertising program like Pay Per Click Management, the famous one will be google adwords.