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.

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.

To grow your home based business you need to attract the attention of your prospects, advertising can help you to do so if used correctly. Unfortunately, many small businesses owners waste thousands of dollars on advertising efforts that only achieve minimal results.

If you want to get the most from the money you spend to promote your products and services, make sure to avoid these common mistakes.

Focusing on Your Products and services
If you want to get the attention of your business prospects, speak to their needs and wants. Your prospects’ primary concern isn’t that you’ve been in business for 25 years; it is do you know the problem they want to solve. Use your ad to identify at least one common problem of your prospects and the benefit of using your product or service.

Having a Weak Marketing Message
All to often you hear ads and it takes some thought to figure out what they are even promoting. Make sure your advertisement includes a 7-10 word description of whom you serve and the problems you solve so people who read or hear your ad know how you can help them.

Using the Wrong Words
A word here, a phrase there can change your response rate by hundreds of percent. When you spend money on advertising, first test a number of versions of your copy to identify the one that works best. Just by revising the ad copy so it was client and problem centered, I helped one small business owner achieve her best month in sales ever.

Missing Motivation
Most ads miss the mark in moving prospects to action. If you want to prompt prospects to visit your web site or your store or to contact you, include an offer that motivates them to do so.

Lacking in Frequency
Some people make spur of the moment buying decisions, but most need to become familiar with your services and products, and this takes time. If you want your advertising to work, you need to ensure that your prospects see or hear it regularly.

Web Sites that Don’t Move Prospects to Action
Many small business owners direct prospects to a web site where they have more extensive content covering available services and products. I constantly get calls from people who have been successful at attracting prospects to their web site, but generate few sales. Once prospects get to your web site make sure the content and visual organization moves them to take the action you want them to. Whether it is providing them with ample opportunities to fill in your service inquiry form, or including a subset of your product catalog in your web page navigation bars, help prospects move to client and customer status.

Lack of Follow Up
Sometimes making a sale requires sending a note or picking up the phone and calling your prospects. If you have an effective lead generation strategy, prospects will provide you with their contact information and the problem they want solved. Use the web, email, and the phone to follow up and close the sale.

Lack of Tracking
If you are making more from your advertising than you are spending, you’re ahead. Frequently small business owners can’t tell you which of their efforts helped bring in the business. Track each of your ad campaigns and you’ll know where to spend your money in the future, what to modify and what to eliminate.

Put your marketing house in order. Fix your strategy and your materials. If you don’t know what to change or how to change it, use experts to help you with strategy, copyrighting, design, PR, and media placement.

Avoid these common marketing mistakes and you’ll find ore people contacting you about your products and services and that your making more than your spending on your advertising.

There are basically two types of telemarketing, the inbound telemarketing and outbound telemarketing. With telemarketing, the telemarketer(usually will be the business owner) have to send out a flyer or newsletter to a group of targeted potential customer and invite them to make a phone call to your company to ask any information for the product or service your business provide.

When the customer call, the telemarketer will explain in detail about the product or service provided and at the same time pursue the customer to purchase your product or service. Where outbound telemarketing is the other way round, the telemarketer have to take the initiative to call the targeted potential customer and sell them your service or product.

When you are making outbound call, the first 10 to 15 seconds is the most critical time frame, you must try your best to attract your potential customer’s interest for your service or product in this period. You should also approach your customer politely to build trust and establish good first impression for your customer. During the conversation, you should speak slowly and clearly to tell the customer the objective or intention on your call to them, once you have successfully grab their attention, you could start using your selling script to promote your product or service to them.

Telemarketing can be an expensive solution or can be a cheap solution for your home based business, it is merely depends on how many phone lines you need and how many telemarketers you want to hire. If you are going to act as the telemarketer for your own home based business, i would say one phone line is more than enough.

i) Penetration pricing

The product or service is set at the lowest price in the market place, with this strategy the product or service have to be sold at high volume to meet the profit margin. This type of strategy is widely used by the franchiser, series chain retailer or the market leader and it is quite difficult for the small business to survive if to implement penetration pricing strategy, if they do so, they are actually competing with the giant players in the market.

ii) Fair pricing

The price is set in accordance to the quality or quantity of product or service to be sold. This strategy is widely used by the small business and home based business owner where a fair price is offered to the consumer and they can concentrate to develop the product or service to be sold in the highest quality.

iii) Premium pricing

The price is set at a higher level and this price strategy is more to be used on customized service, personalized product, and high technology product. The consumer is to pay a premium price for the design instead of the service or product itself.

iv) Discount pricing

Discount pricing strategy can be used to achieve the marketing or advertising objective such as during a seasonal festival. The price can be set at zero profit just to clear out the old stock where it maybe near the storage life time. There are several of discount pricing strategy that can be used such as quanity discount, seasonal discount, 2nd purchase rebate, trade in discount and so on.

These pricing strategies serve as a guideline while setting the price for your products or sevices, you can use these strategies for your home based business or customize one for the business, as long as it is suitable for the business.