What Are My Realistic Costs To Running A Home Based Business?

By: Jasper Silvis Click author's name for more of his/her articles

If your home based business requires sponsoring members, a common question your prospects will ask you is "How much money will I realistically have to spend to run this business?". If this is a question you often hear, or are asking that question yourself, I encourage you to keep reading.
The amount of money you spend on marketing your home based business is inversely proportional to the amount of marketing tasks you would like to automate. With me so far? You only spend money on the services and applications you use to market and promote your message while you are not around. Doing everything yourself? Then you pay either nothing or nominal fees. More on that later.
We cannot talk about marketing costs without talking about the most effective forms of marketing per cost. The king of all internet marketing, of course, is Google AdWords. But unless you excel at keyword research and have separate domain names with focused targeted relevant content per adgroup, your cost per click will be too high costing you thousands more than you bring in.
Therefore, if you are just starting out as an internet entrepreneur, the most effective form of marketing for you, based on cost per lead is none other than attraction marketing with videos and articles. Then, of course, you will be posting tweets about your articles and videos in your Twitter account, updating your Facebook status with your articles and videos, submitting press releases based on your articles and videos, and adding posts to your blog with both articles and embedded videos, like the one you are used to watching from my Social Media Marketing Guide web site.
I know it sounds like a lot, but you need to hear some honesty. If you do not have a lot of money to fund your Google AdWords campaign properly, which is at least $200 - $500 per day, then your first 3 months marketing your home based business will be spent generating at least 50 articles, 50 videos, 50 press releases, and building thousands of social media friends and following.
Now we both know there is not a lot of time in the day. So there are going to be some things you MUST decide to outsource, and the remaining tasks you MUST create a system for with a daily action plan. Let's focus first on the most effective of all the forms of attraction marketing I mentioned above - and that's videos.
You need a single place to submit your video once and it will be sent to over 20 popular video submission sites, any blog site you own and register, lots of social bookmarking sites, and the fun one, having the audio portion automatically stripped and submitted to lots of podcast sites. The one place that does all this is Traffic Geyser. You will see a link to it in the recommended resources section of my Social Media Marketing Guide web page. Their cost is $99 per month with a $1 first month trial period. Worth every penny!
Coolest part? They have a custom video player you can embed in your other pages, so prospects viewing your videos on your landing page won't click away to your YouTube account before capturing their information. If you only had $100 per month to spend on marketing, then I would strongly suggest $99 of that go to Traffic Geyser. No kidding. I don't even care if you do not use my affiliate link. Just get an account and thank me later for all the time you are saving and exposure you are getting.
Remember I mentioned having a daily action plan? Try to follow along with this train of thought then tweak it to fit your needs. Write the script to your video first. Then film your video, making updates to your script as you tweak the wording. Then submit your video to Traffic Geyser. In the blog setup section, add the transcript, making sure you set links to some of the content (like your Twitter account, and linking every mention of your name to an About Me page). Complete the video setup, making sure your video description is less than 250 characters to pass the rules of some of the other video submission sites.
After Traffic Geyser submits the video to YouTube (usually the first one to get it since the blog sites link to YouTube), edit the description and add lots more relevant content and keyword tags, since YouTube does not have a 250 character description limit. Then take your video script, and tweak the wording to make a unique article, submitting it to many sites like EvanCarmichael, Hubpages, EzineArticles, Amazines, GoArticles, Squidoo, and so on, embedding your video wherever possible. Then take the general content of your video script and turn it into a short press release, submitting it to WebWire, 24-7PressRelease, Free-Press-Release, PRWeb, PRLog, and so on. You generally do not have to worry about posting it to Twitter or Facebook. When you submit the article form to Hubpages, they provide a couple buttons to have the article automatically post to both your Twitter and Facebook accounts.
You have a plan and you have an awesome video submission source that also allows you to submit your article content as well, including video transcript that they produce automatically. Not kidding. The only non-obvious piece to the puzzle is your own list account, like AWeber or ConstantContact. I prefer AWeber since it plugs right in to my main internet business system's autoresponder campaigns, and I can use it as well for my real estate business. One account, many lists. Profiting in internet marketing comes when you both own a list and monetize it.
So to sum things up, if you add up Traffic Geyser, AWeber, web hosting, and your merchant account, you should be able to effectively run your business for under $200 per month outside your monthly business membership dues. I suggest you knock out the daily action plan as I described until you have 50 videos, 50 articles, and 50 press releases. At that time, you should be generating enough revenue to fund your Google AdWords campaigns. Then you will watch your business take off like crazy. I hope this information has been helpful to you. Take care and I look forward to meeting you at one of our events, like next month's master marketing event in Las Vegas. I'll be there and I hope to see you there as well.

Article Source: ABC Article Directory

About The Author: This article was written by Jasper Silvis, M2 Master Consultant and internet marketing success coach based out of Springfield, PA, USA (southwestern suburb of Philadelphia, PA). Jasper offers a free video training series on personal branding through social media marketing at TheSocialMediaMarketingGuide.com, which is also his main blog site.