Now that you have your business goal, you can start to think about ways that the Internet can help you achieve that goal. To start off, it will helpful to identify your home base online. Identifying your home base will make it easier to figure out how to use all those social media accounts and online marketing to drive the right traffic to the right place.
A home base is where you want everyone to eventually end up. You may (and probably do) have multiple social media and online networking websites and accounts where you spend some of your time. But you probably also have a website or blog where you maintain and update information and where you collect leads or actually sell products. This is your home base.
So how do you use your home base to help with your business goal? Let’s go back to the example home-based business from yesterday. Our goal for that business was to increase sales by 20% in 2010 (need help setting a goal? We covered the basics in yesterday’s post). Let’s think about how our home base can help achieve that goal.
- For Online Sales – We’re selling widgets from our home. One way our home base would help would be to sell the widgets directly from our website. So now we need to start thinking about what information we need to provide to sell the widgets on our website (along with all the technical details like a shopping cart and payment gateway, etc.).
- For Collecting Leads – If instead of widgets, we’re selling a service, we could use our home base to collect leads. Our home base should probably provide information about what we do, how we do it, how to contact us, testimonials, etc. We’ll probably also want to provide useful information and possibly something free to entice potential customers to give us their information (blog, free ebook, newsletter, etc.).
Now that you have some ideas for your home base, you can start to think about ways to reach out to potential customers online to reach your business goal – our next topic in this series.
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