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.

Scope of product
Creating more product lines is one of the strategy to provide the client an one stop shopping service.

State of art product
Create an technically advance product or service can form a powerful strategy if the business has the capability to offer state of art product, and usually this type of product will cost more than a normal one.

Brand name product
Generally a product established with strong brand name would command at higher price and create a memorable brand would usually cost the business expensive in term of advertising.

Niche market
Offering the product or service to a target niche market is one of the common strategy for small business. Usually smaller volume of product would cost higher operating cost, but the business would face lesser competition in the market.

Service
Offering a world class customer service can be used to differentiate a business from the competitor who offer low class of service quality or totally not at all.

You can’t put up a beautiful (or any) web site and hope that people will just arrive. You have to let them know in every possible way, that your business web site is there. This has to be part of any internet marketing strategy you develop. This is actually a basic marketing principle. Customers are not going to look for you, you have to look for them.

Promoting your web site online and building traffic is the subject of thousands of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars. Using the web to promote your site, however, assumes that your customers are surfers. But there is a large percentage of our population that is not as savvy with the internet as we would like them to be.

So, what about the large percentages of the population who are not? They will only find out about you through traditional marketing and public relations media. This is particularly true if you serve a fairly local market. Fortunately these are the easiest and cheapest prospects for you to reach off-line.

Here are some of the ways to make your web site known:

i) TV, print and other advertising

ii) Stationary and business cards

iii) Catalogs, fliers, billboards, blimps, etc.

iv) Direct mail (prominently on every document)

v) Telemarketing (make it part of the script)

vi) News releases to targeted media.

Unless you have a high budget, the TV, radio, classified ad route is not recommended but if you do run ads, be sure to mention your web site everywhere. Make it part of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Another guiding principle is that your off-line internet marketing activities should make it easy for your prospect to go straight to your web site. One of the best ways to market your website off-line is direct mail postcards.

If your prospect sees your website on a billboard as she’s driving home, she probably won’t look you up when she gets to the office the next day. This is not the only medium that has problems like this. Newspapers are bulky, radio has to spell it out and like before most people are driving at the time. On the other hand, if your prospect is sitting at her computer and a post card comes in the mail announcing your web site, she can just turn around and type in your URL and she’s at your web site.

Now if someone is in the office reading a trade journal and comes across an article about you in the magazine, it’s not difficult for him to copy your URL into his browser and pay your site a visit.

I don’t mean to say that those other avenues won’t drive traffic to your site, but it will take numerous impressions and repetition to get them to remember your address.

On the other hand, direct mail postcards are generally received at the home or office where a computer is present, and if received somewhere else they are small enough to keep with you until you can get to a computer. This way, your prospective customer will be able to take the take right over to their desk top computer, type in your address and go right to your site. Brilliant!

I have seen the greatest success in off-line web site promotion with direct mail, and specifically direct mail postcards.

Lets take the business consultation service for example, if you need $5000 per year to run this home based business and this cost including the advertising, marketing and other expenses, then the business owner would need to determine an hourly rate. If the business owner choose to work 30 hours a week which is about 1560 hours a year then the business owner need to charge an hourly rate of $3.3 to breakeven. If the business owner charge an hourly rate of $6, then they will make a profit of $4360 per year.

How much to charge is usually determined by couple of factors, the home based business owner have to calculate the rate base on their own schedule and how many clients they are targeting to handle in a year.