Think about it. How long does it take you to clean your home from top to bottom? My little apartment takes about an hour to 90 minutes depending on how OCD I want to be about it. Let’s say it takes two hours to clean your home from top to bottom. What else could you be doing with that time? You could be working your business and earning income.

I’ve said this before many times. You have to be smart about where you invest your time when it comes to building a successful ibusiness. If you make a $50 sale per hour when you work your business, it costs you $100 in lost opportunities to clean your home. However, if you hire maid service for $25 an hour (prices will vary), then you still come out ahead $50. Plus, you get that awesome new home smell when the maid is done.

Talk to me in the comments. How long does it take to clean your home and what would you do with that extra time?

Spongebob Squarepants is an animated show that highlights the antics of a quirky sea sponge who lives in a pineapple in an underwater city called Bikini Bottom. His best friends are a starfish named Patrick Starr, who literally lives under a rock, and a squirrel named Sandy Cheeks, who lives in an underwater bio-dome. The show has been on the air since 1999 and is one of Nickelodeon’s top rated and longest running cartoons.

Spongebob is what I like to call a clueless newbie. He has no idea how the world works and no plans to change that. For him, life is all about working at a fast food restaurant and chasing jelly fish. So he would seem to be the most unlikely suspect to teach anyone, anything about something as serious as entrepreneurship. But he does. And rather charmingly, I might add.

Lesson #1 – Don’t Be Afraid of Having Ideas

[This video is sped up so you can watch the episode in just over 5 minutes. Warning: You may die laughing.]

In an episode called “Patty Hype”, Mr. Krabs, the owner of the Krusty Krab where Spongebob works, is hurting for customers. So he asks his employees for some ideas that will bring in business. Spongebob throws out this idea of selling a more colorful version of the restaurant’s signature burger, the Krabby Patty, called Pretty Patties. Literally, he whips out a tray of Krabby Patties that are every shade of the rainbow.

Immediately Mr. Krabs and Spongebob’s co-worker Squidward begin ridiculing him. They laugh in his face and tell him that is the stupidest idea they had ever heard. This angers Spongebob and he storms out of the restaurant determined to sell Pretty Patties.

We have all been in Spongebob’s shoes. We share our ideas with our friends and, instead of being supportive, they laugh us into the fetal position. I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve had some pretty lame ideas in my life. Chances are good that you have too. So have the people who giggled at the one you broached in today’s meeting.

The thing is, some lame ideas end up being mega successes (Pet Rock anyone?). And some ideas that look great on paper turn out to be epic failures (Speedos anyone?). Regardless, you should never be afraid of having ideas. Everything in the world that exists today started out as an idea in someone’s head. You just never know. The next great thing might come out of yours.

Lesson #2 – Ignore the Critics

This isn’t the first time Spongebob has had a crazy idea. In fact, he has a lot of them and he is often scorned by his peers for them. But one thing Spongebob is very good at, besides making Krabby Patties, is ignoring his critics. While that doesn’t always work out well for him, most of the time he manages to get through the insanity alright.

It doesn’t matter who you are. Someone somewhere is criticizing you about something. You may not even know that they are criticizing you, but I can guarantee you that they are. Even people who have changed the world for the better- Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln, and Oprah- have people who do nothing but speak poorly about them all day every day.

People criticize for many different reasons, but the one that rules them all is fear. Either they are afraid for you or afraid of you. They may be afraid that you will get hurt if you fail or they may be afraid they will no longer have an excuse for their own failures if you succeed. So to discourage you from taking action on your ideas, they criticize them.

Entrepreneurship is scary enough without taking on someone else’s emotional baggage. If you wholeheartedly believe in your idea, don’t let other people’s fears stop you from pursuing it.

Lesson #3 – Surround Yourself with Positive People

But just as there are people in the world who will do nothing but criticize you, there are people who will support you with love and enthusiasm. When Spongebob storms out of the restaurant amid the laughter of his boss and co-worker, he runs across his best friend Patrick.

Now, Patrick isn’t the brightest bulb in the lamp, but he has a big heart and he loves his friend Spongebob. So when Spongebob tells him that he is going to sell Pretty Patties, Patrick jumps right in with words of encouragement and helping hands.

While you probably don’t want too many people in your life exactly like Patrick, you do want to surround yourself with as many positive people as you can. Positive people are like kryptonite to negativity. It can only hang around for so long before it weakens and dies.

Lesson #4 – Believe in Yourself

So Spongebob opens his Pretty Patty hamburger stand and shouts, “I’m ready!” There’s just one problem. He doesn’t have any customers because he did nothing to market his business. He and Patrick sit and wait. And wait.

And wait.

Finally, a customer stops by and asks if he sells food. This causes Spongebob to nearly have a stroke whipping out one of his Pretty Patties. Just like his coworkers, the customer laughs and ridicules the sandwich.  This discourages Spongebob, and he starts to think Mr. Krabs was right in saying that his idea was stupid.

In a moment of despair, he pulls out a tray with all the Pretty Patties on it. The customer notices he has a burger in his favorite color, grabs it, and starts chowing down. He loves the sandwich so much that he runs off and tells the world about these new burgers called Pretty Patties. Spongebob’s restaurant is an instant hit.

It is easy to get discouraged when you start a new venture, especially when you’re working hard and not getting any results. The truth is, though, there is no such thing as an overnight success. When people exclaim that such and such company was an instant smash hit, dig a little deeper. I promise you will find years of sweat and toil in obscurity before the spotlight finally shone on them.

I started my business in late 2007 but it’s taken me almost a year and a half to learn this lesson and move forward with it. Don’t let yourself become discouraged is success is often slow in coming. Keep the vision of your goals at the forefront of your mind to inspire you when the road gets rough.

Lesson #5 – Enjoy your rewards

Sponebob’s explosive success brought him the one thing he truly desired. The Krusty Krab.

After seeing how much money Spongebob is making in his new business, Mr. Krabs tries to cash in on the success of Pretty Patties and decides to trade the Krusty Krab in exchange for the hamburger stand. Spongebob, of course, is ecstatic because he loves the Krusty Krab and when he gets the key to the restaurant he thoroughly enjoys his time as the new owner.

Your successes are your rewards for your hard work. Celebrate them! Break out the champagne. Have dinner at a fancy restaurant. Pay yourself a bonus. Celebrating motivates you to keep going. You’ll be anxious to hit the next milestone so you can party like it’s 1999.

Because it is a kid’s show the episode ends in hilarity. It turns out that the Pretty Patties had some disturbing side effects prompting everyone to come back and demand a refund. Instead of having a wildly successful restaurant, Mr. Krabs ended up with thousands of angry customers yelling at him. So I guess the most important lesson that Spongebob teaches us about entrepreneurship is to know when to get out. On that note, I’ll say good luck and good night

Are you kidding me?

I swear on a box of chocolates, the last time I looked at the calendar, it was January. I can’t believe the holiday season is already upon us. But now that it is, it’s time to get to work. If you have been looking for a way to earn extra money from home, tapping into the holiday shopping spirit is a good way to go about it.

We are entering the biggest shopping season of the year. Some statistics I saw earlier stated that 38% of people surveyed have already started their holiday shopping. Sure the economy sucks and jobs are scarce. But none of that doesn’t matters because people will find a way to get presents under the Christmas tree, even if they have to put things on layaway to do it.

And not everyone is broke. You may have tumbleweeds blowing through your checking account, but some people do have money and can afford to purchase the hot toys and electronics flooding the market. These are the people you need to look at for inspiration on how to earn extra money this holiday season.

[Learn how to figure out who your target market is]

Bring on the Earn Extra Money Ideas

You can make money this holiday season in three different ways: by directly selling to the customers, as a middle man (or woman), or by selling to the businesses that interface with the public.

Direct Customer Sales – In this scenario, you make money by selling products, or providing services, directly to the customer. If you are particularly crafty or can provide a service of some kind, then the holiday season is the perfect time to put those skills to good use. Once, I read a newspaper article about a stay-at-home mom who earned extra money from home by making and selling Christmas wreaths. She didn’t break the bank, but she did make enough money to give her kids a pretty good Christmas that year.

Now she did that by selling to her local community. The nice thing about putting your business online is that you have access to a larger customer base and the opportunity to make a lot of money.

Indirect Customer Sales – Affiliate marketing is another way you can earn extra money online. You’re still selling products to the customer. However, you’re doing so on behalf of businesses or other individuals. You are paid a percentage of the sale for your efforts. While you don’t make as much money per sale as you could if you were selling to customers directly, you don’t have to deal with inventory or any of the other hassles associated with running that type of business.

There is a learning curve with affiliate marketing, and it requires dedicated effort. Additionally, many companies pay on a monthly basis, so you may not get your payments in time for Christmas shopping depending on when you start. However, this makes a great long term business.

Business to Business Sales – This is no different than direct customer sales, except you will be selling to businesses. The reason why I separated this from the other category is because people often forget that businesses are customers too. They need materials to make their products and assistance with selling them to their customers. You can earn a lot of extra money for your holiday shopping by finding a way to fit yourself into their business processes.

Now that you have a few ideas on how you can earn extra money this holiday season, you are probably wondering how to get started. Well, we’ll talk about that in upcoming articles.

Marketing is a major component in your business’ development. Without an effective internet marketing strategy that brings in customers and generates sales, your internet business is just an expensive hobby.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Hobbies are great for relaxing. I have quite a few of my own which include writing fiction, decorating cakes, playing casual games, and collecting music. However, they’re not so great if you are trying to put food on the table or pay your rent. For that, you need a money making business. To make money, you need customers and to get customers, you have to market your business well.

Identifying your target market makes selling your products a whole lot easier. Instead of running around the internet posting your sales message in every online nook and cranny, you’ll save time and money by advertising in places where your clients are most likely to view them.

Creating an effective internet marketing campaign that captures the attention of your target market requires you to think about the ways people find products and services online. In 99.9% of cases, when people need something, they go to sources they trust.

• Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing
• Referrals from their social network (friends & family)
• Favorite websites
• Online news sources
• Online classified ads

To show up on your target market’s radar, you have to be in the places where they hang out. I’ll use myself as an example. I am a fiction writer. I’ve been writing fiction since I was a child, which means I’m pretty passionate about this particular hobby.

• I use a search engines to find tips on writing better
• I read the blogs of other fiction writers
• I visit websites that publish news about the publishing industry
• I own a website that provides creative writing tips
• I usually buy books about fiction writing in an offline store, BUT I first research them and look for coupons online
• I belong to several writing forums
• I used to subscribe to a fiction writer’s magazine but now I go to their website to read recent issues

If I’m part of the target market you’re trying to sell to, then you have to be where I am online. That means having representation in the search engines for the keywords I use as well as advertising on blogs, forums, and online magazines that I visit.

To figure out where your target market spends their time online, you need to use your imagination and put yourself into the shoes of your potential customer. Let me tell you a little story.

You’re Overcharging Them!

For a number of years, I worked in the hotel industry. I loved it. Sometimes I think I might get into again. Long ago, I had a sales manager who was aggressive about squeezing as much money out of our guests as she possibly could. Since her bonus depended on how much revenue the hotel generated each month, this was understandable.

One year, she decided to raise our rates. At the time, I was in school and worked as a front office clerk so I could eat Kraft macaroni and cheese instead of the cheap store brand. In fact, most of my coworkers were just like me – young college kids with no real business experience.

One day she overheard us bitching about the rates and how difficult it was selling people at the higher price point. Understanding that it’s hard to push a product you don’t believe in, she decided to give us a valuable lesson in sales. Though the lesson lasted about half an hour and I’ve pretty much forgotten everything she said at this point, there is one thing that always stuck with me.

“Our clients are not like us. Most of the business customers that come to our hotel have their rooms paid for by their companies. But even our leisure guests have incomes of $50,000 or more. They can afford the $80 per night we are charging to stay at the best hotel in the city.”

And she wasn’t kidding about us being the best hotel in our town. There were, at least, 5 other hotels and none of them came close the quality of our hotel. But enough bragging.

The point she made was a valid one. Our guests could afford our hotel rates, but because we (the employees) couldn’t, we were overlaying our poverty mindset onto our customers and unintentionally putting up roadblocks to selling them on our hotel. Stepping outside myself and looking at our product through the eyes of our target customer made me more comfortable selling our rooms at the higher prices.

Walk in the Shoes of Your Target Market

Just as I had to think like our hotel guests in order to sell to them, you have to think like your customers in order to effectively market to them. Take out a piece of paper and answer the following questions:

• What types of forums are your customers likely to participate in?
• What kinds of blogs and online magazines do they read?
• Do they own web properties? (This is good to know because you can turn your loyal customers into commissioned sales people by having an affiliate program)
• What types of social networks would they use to connect with people of like mind?
• What types of keywords would they use to find information online through a search engine?*

(*Keyword research is a subject worthy of its own article series. For now, just jot down some general keywords you think your customers might use.)

Start searching the internet for websites that match what you’ve written down. Try to generate a list of at least 50 places where you can advertise to your target market online. This doesn’t mean you must advertise on every site you have listed but you want a good selection. For more marketing tips, visit the site’s archives.

The time it takes to build a good reputation is disproportionate to the time it takes to destroy one. I’m talking years vs. seconds. Not only do you have to worry about the natural misunderstandings that often occur online, but you have to also have to worry about internet abusers who thinks it’s fun to destroy another person’s reputation.

Case in point: Exxon Moblie Corp had someone register a Twitter account and person tried to pass themselves off as a representative of the company. While the damage was minimal (at a time when gas was almost $4.00 a gallon in the US, I would say that Exxon dodged a bullet), the incident highlights the need for businesses and individuals to be proactive and vigilante about what is happening with their names online.

Things You Can Do to Protect Your Name

1. Register at the major social networking websites even if you don’t intend to participate. This will prevent others from registering your name and trying to impersonate you. You can use KnowEm’s UserName Check service to see if your chosen username is available on 100′s of sites.

2. Set up a Google and Yahoo alert for all names connected to you and your business.

http://alerts.yahoo.com/

http://www.google.com/alerts

These companies will send you a notice each time something pops up in their search engines about your chosen keywords. This is great for helping you nip potential problems in the bud.

3. Use the same internet handle and avatar consistently. This helps build brand awareness, cuts down on confusion, and makes it easy for people to find you online.

4. Monitor search results for your name. Take time each week to do a search of your name, business name, and internet handle (if it’s different) and see what comes up in the search engine result pages. The last time I heard, 80% of people used search engines to find information about products, businesses, and people. So yeah, it’s important to see what they’re see.

5. Respond quickly and positively to criticism, especially if the criticism is based on erroneous information.

6. If you have not done so already, register your personal and business domain names. It’s only $10 per name at Namecheap.

7. Duct Tape Marketing has a comprehensive list of resources for managing your online profiles.

What to Do if Your Online Reputation Has Been Damaged

1. If someone is impersonating you on a website, immediately contact the administration. Most will shut down the account to avoid legal problems if you can prove that the person is an imposter.

2. Send out an official notice, by press release or your blog, disavowing the fake account. Tap your network and have them write about the incident on their blogs as well.

3. If customers are complaining about your product or service and the complaint is legitimate, deal with the problem. Trying to ignore the complaints or covering them up will only cause the situation to blow up in your face.

4. Manage your search results. If you don’t know what search engine optimization/marketing is, then may I suggest a crash course in the subject.

5. If someone is distributing erroneous information about you, go to where the information appears and politely ask that it be removed. Don’t be surprised, however, if the site refuses. Some websites, like RipOffReport, have a no-deletion policy. They don’t take down anything posted to the site. Most, however, will allow you to tell your side of the story. Be sure to remain calm and professional when doing so. Blowing up in a rage will only make the complaint seem legitimate.

6. Find and promote the good stuff written about you. Solicit customer testimonials and display them prominently on your website. If someone mentions you positively, make a note of it on your blog or social networking profile.

7. If the sheer magnitude of negative press is too much for you to handle, consider hiring an internet reputation company to help you clean up the mess.

Wrong.

In reality, I only wanted to attract the people who could benefit from the services I offered, who I could actually help, and who were willing to pay the asking price. By trying to go after anyone and everyone, I attracted people who didn’t fit all of the criteria. Either they wanted my help but I couldn’t help them or they were willing to pay for assistance but they didn’t need the exact services I provided.

These types of situations could have been avoided I had simply taken the time to define my target market.

What is a Target Market?

A target market is a group of people, usually defined by a set of demographics such as age, gender and location, who are most likely to buy your product or service. Put another way, these are the people who have a problem and need your product to solve it.

For example, say you’re a web designer who sells custom-made websites. Your target market would be people who want a professionally designed website. Now that’s a pretty big group of prospects, but you can narrow it down based on the characteristics of your product. If design websites at a cheap price, then your target market are people who want budget-friendly design services.

How to Define Your Target Market

Since I already had a product to sell, I needed to do some reverse engineering to identify my target market. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down my service offerings, SEO article writing and virtual assistant services. Then I thought about the type of problem my services solved for the people who needed them. I saved people time and money by taking on tasks they didn’t know how to do or wanted to spend time doing. For example, I provide them with search engine optimized content for their website which frees up their time and energy for the other things they would rather be doing.

When I first started blogging, I had chosen “blog tips” as the topic of my blog. The problem is that not all bloggers need article writers. The majority of personal and professional bloggers create their own content. My target market was people who needed a constant stream of content but didn’t have the time, knowledge, or inclination to create it themselves. This meant online magazines, affiliate marketers, and serial niche builders. That category is still pretty broad, but I’ve since narrowed it down somewhat.

When identifying your target market, you don’t have to hit the bull’s eye on the first try. As long as you land somewhere close, you can fine tune your customer profile until it matches your product offerings.

Defining Questions

To get a general idea of who your target market is, ask yourself the following three questions.

• What does my product do?
• How do people use my product? Or what problem does it solve?
• Why type of person or company would need what my product does?

Like me, you’ll probably end up with a large group of people. To trim it down, apply some demographics to your target market.

• What gender is more likely to use my product?
• What age group would find my service useful?
• Where does my customer live? What type of place is it? What are the people like in their community?
• What economic resources are available to my target market?
• Who can afford to pay for my product or service? This question is especially important if you are selling luxury or high priced items.
• How often would they need my product or service? Knowing this will help you price your product accordingly.

For highly specialized products, you want to get even more specific:

What type of lifestyle does my target market live? Are they environmentally savvy? A jet setter? A stay at home mom?

What are their religious views?

What are their political views?

How savvy are they with technology?

What stage of their life are they in? Are they retired? Just graduated college? Experienced a job loss?

The internet is very useful for finding information on your target market. The more specific you can get, the more targeted you can make your sales message which means more sales conversions. In a follow up article, we will talk about how to use the information you gain to market to your ideal customer.

Keep in mind that your customers aren’t always looking for answers to a question. Sometimes the problems they are looking to solve is simple boredom or needing information they read put into proper perspective. This is why it is important to understand what your target audience cares about before buying PLR content that addresses that.

Here are several ways in which you can put the PLR content you purchase to work for you.

* Article Marketing – This is the act of writing articles and submitting them to article directories like Ezinearticles and GoArticles. To be effective, you want to submit articles to more than one directory (at least 10). Submitting to multiple article directories increases your exposure as well as the number of links to your website. The more links pointing to your website, the higher it’s ranking in the search engines which mean more traffic to your site. It is important that prior to submitting cheap PLR articles to an article directory that you rewrite it so it is at least 50% different from the original.

* Blogging – Having a blog that you update on a regular basis encourages people to return to your website. It is also a good way to brand yourself in your field of expertise and offers innumerable ways for your audience to promote you. The experts recommend that you try to blog every day. If you cannot keep up that pace, you can use PLR articles to fill in the gap.

* Guest Posting – A good way to generate traffic to your website or blog is to tap into the audience of other websites. Guest posting on blogs in your industry, or sister industries, exposes you to their readers who will naturally visit your website to see what you are all about. Additionally, because you are seen on a blog they trust, overcoming the trust barrier will be much easier. When submitting private label content to a guest blog, you will want to completely rewrite it. Most blogs do not accept duplicate content for guest posts.

* Search Engine Marketing – Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing is the art of ranking well for certain keywords in the search engines. Keywords are the words people use to find information when they search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Ranking well for the keywords your target audience is using will draw them to your content. Search engine optimized PLR content can help your website rank well for the keywords you are targeting.

* Email Marketing – This form of marketing includes newsletters, email courses, and sending marketing offers directly to your audience. Delivery of your message and marketing is sent directly to their email box. Never send unsolicited mail. Your message will be received much better if you work to have people sign up to your list of their own accord. You can use PLR content to fill your newsletters or to put together an email course which will help you build your list. You can then start making money with affiliate sales.

* Blog Carnivals – Although not as popular as they once were, a blog carnival is an online event where the host blog posts a list of links to articles submitted by participants on the topic of the carnival. For example, a carnival whose topic is marketing would review and add to the list all articles that pertained to some form of marketing. If you want to participate in a carnival but don’t have articles on the topic or don’t know enough about the topic to participate, you can purchase PLR articles to post on your website that you can submit to be included.

PLR articles can be used many ways when it comes to content marketing. As long as you get your articles from a reputable provider to produces high quality content, you will have a good shot at achieving your goals. Check out my PLR store for content that you can profit on.

First, a Short Adsense Lesson

The types of ads which are displayed on your site are triggered in one of two ways. When Adsense first came out, the code would scan your content and serve up ads based on the dominant keywords it contained. For example, if your PLR article was optimized for “beauty salon”, then ads about beauty salons would be shown.

A few years ago, Google made a change to the code so that it would serve ads based on consumer interests. Basically, the program would scan the visitor’s cookies saved in their browser and serve up ads based on what it found there. So even if you buy PLR articles on ‘plastic surgery’ and post them, if your visitor has cookies showing they were interested in snowboarding they would be shown articles about snowboarding.

The idea behind interest based advertising is that people may be more likely to click on ads based on their interest but I’m not so sure. If people come to your site looking for information about plastic surgery, I think they would be more likely to click on ads about that particular topic. The option to opt out (which I recommend) is located in your Adsense admin panel under Allow & Block Ads, Advanced Settings.

How to Use PLR for Google Adsense

There are two ways to generate Adsense income using PLR articles. You can make money on the articles themselves by surrounding them with your Adsense code. The other way is to make money by using them to generate traffic to your website.

Whether you want to use the articles on your blog or submit them to article directories to generate traffic and build Pagerank, you should rewrite the PLR articles before you use them. The duplicate content penalty is a myth. However, Google and other search engines will only show a few instances of the same article in their search results.

This means, if you have duplicate content on your blog, it will still get indexed by the search engines but it may get relegated to a supplemental index that doesn’t show up in the regular results. To prevent this, you should rewrite the articles so that they are at least 50% different than the original. If you are submitting the articles to an article directory, then it should be at least 75% to pass their plagiarism/copy filters.

Where you place your ads in the PLR article is important. Through much testing, many webmasters have determined that the large rectangle (either the 300×250 or 336×280) floated to the right or left of the content works best. Do your best to blend the ads in so they look natural. Other ad units can be placed either at the foot of the article or in the sidebar.

It is important that you do not overcrowd your article with ads as this will turn off readers who will click away as quickly as they can.

Using PLR Articles to Drive Traffic

The more traffic you have flowing to your site, the higher the chance that people will click on your ads. You can use PLR articles to generate traffic in a number of ways.

* Submit them to article directories

* Submit them to forums with links back to your website

* Find appropriate questions on sites like Yahoo! Answers and link back to them on your site

* Submit them as guest posts on other blogs

To further increase traffic to your website, you should submit links to your PLR articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon.

Buy PLR articles for your niche projects.

Article Titles:

Avoiding Work at Home Scams Online
Business Marketing Strategies for Your WAHM Biz
Overcome WAH Business Challenges
The Benefits of Working at Home
Tips for Starting a WAH Business

Keywords Targeted: how to avoid scams, avoid work at home scams, business marketing strategies, marketing an online business, home based business marketing, work at home business, work at home online

Each work at home business article is approx 500 words. All articles are original writing. These articles are great for network marketing and affiliate marketing blog. Articles can be used any way that you want. However, you cannot resell or redistribute them in anyway. If you want your own pack of private label articles to sell, contact me about my freelance writing services.

Get more PLR articles.

A loss leader is a marketing strategy where a product is sold to the buying market at a price point equal to or below cost. This tactic is used to draw customers into the store in the hopes that they will purchase other items with higher profit margins.

You see this most often in grocery stores where the food store will sell staples such as milk or eggs below cost hoping you’ll buy other, more profitable, food stuffs.

How can using a loss leader help your internet business?

A loss leader isn’t just for retail stores. Even businesses such as consulting firms and web designers can effectively use loss leaders in their businesses.

Using a loss leader can help attract customers to your online store and put them in a buying mood. You see this all the time within the free market. Websites will offer something for free in exchange for traffic to the site or to build their email lists.

Loss leader marketing is sort of the same but a little bit different. A person who is looking for something free is in a different frame of mind than a person who is looking for a solution to their problem and is willing to pay for it. This is how you separate your customers from your fan boys. When you are selling something, the person is already in the mentality to buy and it’s easier to upsell them on other related merchandise.

Additionally, a loss leader can help you establish a relationship with your customer. They experience what it is like to do business with you firsthand. If they have a good buying experience, they are more apt to buy from you again when they have a need for the type of product you sell rather than seek out an untested competitor.

3 Tips for using loss leaders effectively

a. Only use when it’s clear that the benefits of using a loss leader outweigh the loss.

If you are using a loss leader to attract buyers, you need to be able to make money on them or otherwise gain some benefit from the sale of the loss leader. It needs to be worth the loss.

So you either need a system place that upsells them on other profitable products in place or some way to gain what you want.

b. It should be attractive to your target market

This goes without saying but the loss leader should be something your target market would be interested in buying. For example, if you were a life coach, selling a metaphysical CD at half price probably isn’t going to interest your target market who is really looking for help in achieving a goal.

On the other hand, giving 50% off one consultation as a means of getting people to experience your service would be attractive to your target customers and lead to the purchase of a consultation package.

c. Use a non-stockpile item

This isn’t as much of a danger for internet businesses as it is for retail stores but you want to make sure people are not able to buy your product in bulk or stockpile. That defeats the purpose of having them come to your store on a consistent basis.

d. Track your results

You must track how well your loss leader promotion is going. If it is costing you more money than you are gaining then by all means abandon it immediately. However, if things are going well you can consider keeping the campaign going for a long time.

In this competitive global marketing you need every advantage you can get. Using a loss leader in a smart way can help you generate the business your business needs to thrive.