i) Straight forward strategy
A good business strategy and planning instantly distinguish between your own business with the competitors, and give your potential or existing clients no reason for not to do business with you. A good home based business strategy should have considering the targeted market needs, the competitors and the strength and weakness.

Many home based business owner try to provide all services or all type of products to all peoples during the business start up, which i can say this is having no proper strategy set at all! The business owner must have to concentrate and develop the business start from a small niche market and slowly expand to provide an one stop solution.

ii) Follow the plan and set your budget
Develop a business plan before you start the business, and update it from time to time during the business goes on. A proper planning and proper budgeting would help the business to attain higher goals that if you just plugged always at your business one day at a time. The plan, if properly developed, it can even help the business owner to get back on track if something gone wrong.

iii) Protect your cash!
Running a small home based business, you are going to constantly battle to hold on the cash. Overruns in start up cost, lower anticipated profit margin and sales grow slower than expected are among the most common cash drains in business. As the business owner, you have to learn to guard your cash in the sense of rejecting to many different demands on your business. Learn to project the business cash flow in fair degree accuracy is the most important aspect in a home based business. No discipline in controlling the cash would easily cause the business falls into failure.

iv) Watch the profit margin
Many business focus too much on the sales but overlook the profit margin, even some of them are under pricing the service or product provided. Even increase the selling price might be crucial, but consistently work on lower down the cost may be more effective. A small change in the cost structure would lead to a big change on your profit margin.

v) Have fun with the business
Make sure you are running a business that falls into your own interest otherwise you will feel boring just because you have treat the business as a daily routine job that doesn’t means for anything.

i) Product – There are several aspect that the business owner should take into consideration for the product or service provided in relation to the marketing strategy. The business owner have to consider the benefit for the consumer or customer if they purchase the product or service and detail research in this area is a must. The business owner have to think of creating a outstanding packaging that it could be separated from the competitors’ packaging. The business owner also have to consider the warranty use of the product and how to make the customer feel that they are staying in the comfortable zone after they buy your product.

ii) Price – The next important P is the pricing strategy, if you set the price for a product high you will be facing a great resistance in pursuing people to purchase your product, if you set the price for a product low you will generate a perception of low quality for the product. The business owner have to do some home works to find out what is the best price to charge in order to convince the customer that they have a perception that they are not buying an expensive product with the same product quality which the competitors are able to provide.

iii) Promotion – The business owner have to think on how to promote the product or service provided in order to generate great sales projection. The activities that the business owner would go through includes identify the type of advertising medium that is to be used, the marketing effort that is to be carried out, discuss about public relation, describe the promotional and the plan for using advertising specialties or premium items such as pencil, flower and so on.

iv) Place – The word place means by itself indicate that where your product should be sell at and where your customer can purchase your products. Most of the home based business or small business are selling their product through website, auction or direct mail order. For example, if you own a SEO company and where you sell your SEO product should be through online marketplace like forum, online classifieds, webcart and so on. Place is not determined as where the product originated but is best determined as where you should sell your product.

i) The customer – You must understand the market needs, be focus on a niche market as well as how often the prospect will buy your product or services. You must also know exactly what those customers are doing even you have to know in which sector they are belong to. Understand the customer well is important to your home based business, because they play an important role in rating your products or services and how well you have done on the customer service and follow up. As a business owner, it is also important to know what question would your prospect ask before they raise it to you.

ii) The products – Before you launch the product into the market, you as the business owner (sometimes the product designer as well) have to know in detail what your product is. You have to do your homework on research, training and as well as feedback from customer to get the full knowledge about the product. The better you know about the product, you will be able to identify the potential problem or question that your customer would face, thus you are able to provide a prompt solution to the customer in case they raise. With this, the image for your business in terms of customer service also increase.

iii) The tool – The tool that i mentioned it here is not the tool that you use to create the product or the tool you use to repair the product. The tool that i am talking about here is strategy that you use to sale your product, this includes product sample, customer testimonial and etc. I would say every type of home based business would have a different set of sales tools.

iv) The competitors – Know your competitors well is very important in fighting for the sales in a niche market, you have to know what your competitors doing, how long they have been in the market, the price they charge, their key person in business operation, the customer service level and whatever thing that they are doing in they sales strategy. By knowing your competitors well, you are basically able to plan the sales for now, tomorrow and the far futures.

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.