The Real Cost of Promoting a Home-Based Business

Don’t listen to what they tell you: running an online business isn’t free.

Sure, if you have a laptop and a spare corner on your kitchen table you can operate a little company. You spare yourself the expense of an office, you don’t have anyone on payroll, and you can use “free” marketing tactics to promote your company, like blogging and social media.

You can save a lot of money working from home in your PJ’s…but what you don’t spend, you more than make up for in time.

Let me explain.

Online marketing is (mostly) free to use. You can tweet and Facebook and Pin to your heart’s content. If you spend two hours a day on these “free” marketing tactics and your goal is to earn $50 per hour from your business, you’re spending the time equivalent of $100 per day on marketing, or about $3,000 a month.

Sounds pretty expensive, right? I mean, you’d probably never pay a marketer or advertiser that much to promote your business. At the start, your company might not even be earning that much!

So what can you do? Right now – as in today, as soon as you finish this article – start tracking how much time you’re spending on marketing and assign a dollar value to it. Your goal is to only focus on marketing that actually brings in business – so you have to start tracking where every lead comes from, too. Once you know what works best, you simply do more of it. Sooner than you think, the income your “free” marketing brings in will surpass the value of your time spent to acquire it, and that’s when you start to profit.

That’s also when you might be able to start paying someone else to do that marketing. And by then, you’ll know exactly what that’s worth to your home business, and how much value you get out of hiring someone to help you.

If you’ve been trying to make it as an online or home-based entrepreneur for a few months now and you’re earning money, but you somehow have nothing left to pay yourself at the end of the month, there’s a good chance the free marketing vortex has sucked you in.

Instead of drowning in it, start valuing your own time. You’ll quickly see that free marketing isn’t really free, and that if you really want to build that 6-figure business from home, you need to know what you’re actually spending to grow it.

How much virtual money are you spending to market your business – and is it paying you back?

The Real Cost of Promoting a Home-Based Business