How to start a small business at home: steps on starting a small business

Starting a small business tips: What target market are you going to serve?

One thing that a lot of people miss when they are thinking of starting a small business at home ideas, is how can they help people. Most people come up with an idea and think of how can I sell people my idea.

You’ll have a much easier time starting a home business by finding a need, problem, or want that people have and solving it or helping them achieve it, rather than just trying to sell something.

Get out of pitch mode and focus on solving problems and adding value and your results will start to improve. So now that you have figured out your home business ideas and how you can help people it’s time to set up the tools and systems to grow your business.

How to start a small business at home: Set up your hub and website

One of the great things about starting a small business is that you don’t need to have a lot of overheads when you are just starting out. You’ll certainly want a few tools and systems in place when you are just getting started, but those costs are very minimal.

For example one of the foundation things you’ll want to have is a website and blog and email autoresponder. With these 3 foundation tools in place you can actually scale your business to a rather large size.

Why internet marketing is so important with your site, blog, and email list is that you own them. Social media marketing is definitely a key part of the steps on starting a small business, but you don’t own social media.

Marketing on social media is a great way to start to develop traffic leads and sales for your home business, but the platforms could change at any time. Some social media platforms may become unpopular in the future, or your accounts may be lost or shut down, you never really know.

You might be thinking “can blogging make money?” or how do you use a blog to grow your business. Well the foundation is that you own it and each piece of content is like a bill board promoting your small business.

A blog and website are your hub of your business and always something you want to continue to direct people towards. Your blog and website can be a great way to engage with and sell to your audience.

Starting a small business? Who knows you are open for business?

Another common mistake people make is they don’t go after the low hanging fruit as one of the first steps on starting a small business. All things being equal, most people do business with those that they know, like, and trust. Are you tapping into that market?

Unfortunately most people do this wrong and go back into pitch mode again rather than seeing if people are open. Starting a small business can be a bit intimidating especially if you feel like you need to convince all of your friends and family to buy from you.

Certainly friends and family are a great place to start building your small business, but they aren’t required to buy or join for you to be successful. The main idea is just to see if they are open to what you offer and then transition into talking about your business from there.

Reaching out to friends and family shouldn’t really need to end as you can continue to build through referrals and people they know as your customer base expands. At the same time you’ll want to start setting up an effective social media marketing campaign to promote your small business as well. 

How to start a small business at home: Do you have ways to monetize your business?

Certainly most businesses have some sort of product or service for sale as a foundation of the business, but there are many other ways to monetize your business as well.

For example you might create a YouTube channel to not only deliver value to your target market and generate leads, but it also could be an additional revenue stream as well. Monetizing YouTube doesn’t have to be difficult, and if you are truly providing value to your target market there, it can really just be a matter of time before you can earn money on YouTube.

Your blog can be another way to monetize your business. By having value based content people keep coming back for and offers on your site it can be a great way to make money blogging in addition to what your small business offers.

You can also create information products and courses like ebooks, or audio and video courses to earn income as well. The longer you are in your field and develop experience in your industry the more knowledge you should have to help your target market.

Turning this knowledge into ebooks, or courses can create another revenue stream for your home business as well. You could create a small $5-$20 ebook or course for sale to bring in additional revenue along side your primary service.

Get the best results when starting a small business

When you’re starting a small business it can be intimidating.  There are a lot of things you need to do but what or did you do them and how should you prioritize your time?

There’s really two aspects to building your business, active prospecting and passive marketing.  There’s a lot of activities you can do in your small business, but some make you money, and others cost you time.

Most new business owners get caught in activity, rather than productivity. Be sure to determine your highest priority tasks for your home business. Then make them a part of your daily habits.

When you’re just getting started with your small business the majority of your time should be spent on active prospecting.  Active prospecting is reaching out to people and telling them about your business and products or services.

Passive marketing is creating content that provides value to your target audience.  The great thing with passive marketing is it can work for you on a 24/7 basis.

The downside to passive marketing is it takes a long time for it to get big results.  Active prospecting can get you results almost immediately.

So if you just getting started definitely focus on active prospecting for the majority of your time. Then down the road your passive marketing can take over the majority of your results.

Tips for passive marketing to grow your small business

Now passive marketing is very powerful when you utilize a correctly.  You should be focused on doing passive marketing outside of your top income producing times of the day.

This means an early morning, or late evening. Basically when you can’t be in front of potential customers.  This is an ideal time to focus on passive marketing, because it will take time to get results from it anyway.

On top of that, your passive marketing should include an active strategy and a passive strategy.  Active strategies are things like doing Facebook lives and posting on social media.

The active strategies can bring in results quicker, but those post don’t last forever.  You’re passive strategy should include things like blogging and YouTube videos.

These are important because they’re evergreen content.  Meaning you create that content once, and it continues to work for you forever.  

You can also capitalize on keywords and SEO in this process.   This can create a scenario where your passive marketing brings in very targeted leads for your business.

People who are actively looking for the kind of value based content you make, can lead to a high ratio of sales and sign ups for your business. Apply these strategies while starting a small business and you’ll be in profits in no time!

If you’d like to learn more about setting up a passive marketing system for your small business, check out my free Lead Generation Boot Camp!