I am one of the owners of an internet business. This comment is about “things I learned from making marketing mistakes in my home businesses.” Or maybe I should say it’s about “how not to be successful in marketing.” After five years and $10,000 with no return trying to market home based businesses, I think I’ve learned all there is to know about what “not” to do if you want to be successful in a home based business. home. Of course, in the process I also learned a few things you need to do before starting your own business from home or from a store.

My husband and I’s first company was in Cheney, Washington. We opened a small Christian bookstore. Cheney was a university town, with about 8,000 inhabitants, with many small towns around it. Spokane was 15 miles from Cheney. We thought we would get a lot of traffic from Cheney and the surrounding towns. That was not the case. We discovered that people were driving to Spokane to do their major shopping and while there they would visit the huge Christian bookstore. Needless to say, we closed the shop at a loss after a year.

My mistake: Not doing market research or analysis for the need of a Christian bookstore in the area.

Our second major venture was selling real estate houses in a depressed area. My husband and daughter did this as a joint venture. Learning from our first mistake, my husband researched the market, lined up an investor ahead of time who agreed to work with us, and printed the necessary business forms. This business actually generated good income for one person, but barely enough for two. Unfortunately, the state decided to redevelop the area and offered thousands more for the houses than would have been profitable for us.

No mistake here – the only cost involved was fuel for the car to check out the houses. My suggestion on this would be to always line up an investor before trying to sell houses in any area.

At this point, we decided to work online. We attended a workshop on working from home. The presenters were excellent and we spent $6000 on 6 online store type website licenses. This turned out to be a total disaster. We didn’t know anything about online advertising. I chose my template for my site and located the products I wanted to sell from seven different vendors. I made a sale in a year. Fortunately, I had a full-time job, so our only loss was the investment of time and money. At least we weren’t on the streets.

My mistakes: Not learning what goes into starting an online business, such as: researching marketing, advertising, having a web presence, comparing hosting providers, and not writing a business plan with goals and a budget.

While it’s embarrassing to admit, I’ve tried several other online businesses that failed. I finally began to learn that if I wanted to be successful I needed to do my research. The first thing I did was write my business plan. I chose a nutrition company that had been in business for 10 years and had a good compensation plan, offered a second source of income, no side work, and offered lots of bonuses. Through trial and effort, little by little I built my business. I really enjoyed educating my downline leaders on how to train their people in the business. Unfortunately, my downline slowly quit, and when the second stream company made a major revision to their compensation plan, my team builders quit too.

My mistakes: Instead of going into extensive detail, I’ll summarize them as follows:
1. Attract people through the business of the second source of income, instead of the nutritional business.
2. Spending my entire annual advertising budget in the first two months of business to buy leads. (Buying leads is the same as flushing money down the toilet.)
3. Buy a 4 Gig laptop, when I had a desktop.
4. Not doing a Google search for free advertising and leads.

My husband and I are currently doing an online business together. Through my mistakes, I’ve discovered that I hate having to do anything technical with the computer, like setting up websites and capturing pages. I like talking to people and writing blogs and articles. My husband enjoys the technical components and he is very good at it. But to me, if it was just me, he would never be successful in online business, because he wouldn’t do the technical things necessary to be profitable online or even break even.

So, in summary, we have finally found a home business that allows my husband and me to use our particular talents in the area that we are good at. He does all the promotion and design and we both do sales. We’ve learned how to rank with Google for free, advertise for free, and get leads for free. We have learned that the biggest secret is not just knowing your strengths, but having a team of mentors, who are doing well with their business. By learning all of this, we are finally on our way to retirement and helping others do the same.