Freelance to earn money on the side

The key to making money on the side as a freelancer is to offer your customers something that they dearly want, whether it’s to gain some great pleasure or to escape some great pain. If you don’t, you’re not going to make any money. It’s a customer-centric approach. You are solving your customers’ problems to make money for yourself.

Be aware that you are not going to make a decent full-time living from some of the money-making ideas and strategies like filling online surveys or being a mystery shopper. It’s a start as you overcome your fears of starting a business on the side and gain confidence in doing bigger projects.

Deciding to go freelance either part-time or full-time is a big decision and commitment. It takes confidence. It takes guts. It takes perseverance.

Your chosen freelance job should be the combination of:

things you can personally find some purpose (your purpose);
things you are good at or do well (your talent); and
things you can get paid for (what people want and are willing to pay you for).

You need more than passion

Remember this classic advice: follow your passion and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. Following your passion doesn’t change the fact that there will always be parts of your job that don’t make you excited to get out of bed.

You may have a passion for singing. But your passion isn’t guaranteed to put food on the table if you can’t sing in tune and won’t be able to make a living as a performer.

Time to make good decisions

The decisions you make affect the quality of your life. Poor decisions affect your life negatively. Good decisions affect your life in a positive way.

In order to guarantee that your decisions are good ones, it’s critical to make those decisions when your willpower is at its highest point. That is, at the beginning of the day – during the first two hours after waking from sleep, after a mid-day power nap, eating a low-carbohydrate meal, or exercising aerobically.

Timing is everything

Know when to quit something that’s not right. When you don’t quit a career or job that you know do not suit your strengths, skills, or priorities, you’re less likely to excel and be a top performer.

There will be seasons in your life that will drive your personal and work life. There will be specific seasons for different things.

Two things people will only pay you for

If you are willing, able and knowledgeable to provide the required products and services to people, you must also understand that your potential customers must have the ABILITY and WILLINGNESS to pay you for one of two things:

The RESULT you promised. The result or outcome is something that people can’t do for themselves. For example, you can help people reduce 10 kg or lbs of weight. That’s why they are looking to you for solutions.
The CONVENIENCE you promised. It’s the convenience that you do for people who don’t want to or can’t do for themselves, or you make something difficult easier for people to do. Busy lifestyles have presented opportunities for freelancers. For example, busy people will pay you for the convenience of walking their pets as they have one less task to do.

Be mindful that whilst some people may be willing to pay you, they may not have the ability to do so.

Ask yourself these questions: Do they have money? Do they want to spend it on your product or service? Are they willing and able to pay you?

For example, parents wanting to give the best education to their children are most likely to be willing and able to pay for your service. But an unemployed person may not be able to pay you even if they are willing to do so.

**How to get started with a full-time freelancing business**

If you’re considering going fulltime on freelancing, there are a number of things to consider.

This section uses an online business as an example.

Businesses exist to solve a problem

Do you just want to be your own boss or do you have a desire to solve real problems faced by others?

Do you want to make a lot of money or give value or experience to your customers?

All businesses, services or products, online or offline, are formed or exist as direct responses to solving customer problems.

The purpose of a business and the only reason it exists is to solve a problem or pain point for the customer. In doing so, it charges customers money and you make a profit from your product or service.

Before you start freelancing, ask yourself what your reasons are for having your own business.

Are you providing a unique solution to a big problem where there is no current or limited solution for the problem? Have you identified a problem, asked the right questions and listened to people experiencing this problem? This could be the very best reason you are starting your own business.
Do you have the desire to create or improve an existing service or product? This is as valid a reason as any to start your own business.
Are you desperate due to one of the following reasons: (1) you are unemployed or retrenched; (2) lack suitable employment possibilities; or (3) personal reasons? Desperation can be the father of motivation.
Do you come from a family of entrepreneurs? Do you know all the ins and outs of entrepreneurship? If entrepreneurship blood is in your veins, you should start your own business.
You become aware of a business opportunity and it is just too good to ignore? When opportunity knocks at your door, you can either; (i) start a part-time business to test the waters, or (ii) jump in and go full-time.

Starting a business is not a sprint, it’s a marathon

There will always be obstacles to overcome and problems to find solutions to. The path to making money will never be straight. It’s not going to be easy. It will take hard work, perseverance, and commitment.

The key is to keep your enthusiasm bubbling away over a period of several years. Yes, several years. You need to keep going for the long haul. For at least two years, give your business a chance to grow and succeed. Don’t run the risk of burning out before the business has time to become established.

Define and write down your long-terms goals down. These goals will keep you focused on your why and to motivate you.

You need to continuously work on it over a long-term in order to see the fruits of your labor. If you are not prepared to be committed for the long-period, there is no point in starting.

Don’t despair or be overwhelmed.

If you do decide to start this long journey, there are people who can help you and resources that can help you succeed and make money.

Explore your ideas fully to know whether they are sustainable

Find out what pain or urgency your prospective customer is experiencing. Confirm whether these customers are proactively looking for a solution to their problem. Investigate whether these customers have few or no other options to solve their problem.

Take time and effort to fully explore the potential of your ideas to meet your customers’ requirements. Share your ideas and concepts with trusted people to get continuous feedback for improvements.

Whilst there are risks associated with sharing your ideas, there are also advantages. If these people whom you have shared your ideas with have your best interests at heart, they can spot angles, connections, and new potential that you might have overlooked.

The three ‘why’ questions to start with

Start with asking yourself three why questions with respect to your idea: Why you? Why now? Why at all?

Validate your business idea before you invest in it

Before you start putting your time and money into developing your business idea further, it’s good to confirm and validate its potential.

This doesn’t need to be a long, drawn-out process that keeps you from starting and getting overwhelmed. It’s simply about ensuring you’ve gone through the process of proving that there is a real audience and market for what you want to do to make money for yourself.

If you have a clear idea of what you want to sell and who your target audience is, you can quickly test your hypothesis by setting up an Internet landing page and driving traffic to it if you want to start an online business later on. Even if your service or product isn’t fully ready, you can gauge the level of interest.

From keyword research to getting feedback on Reddit or forums, there’s a lot of other ways you can go about validating your business idea.

Visit websites like KickStarter, Springwise, TrendHunter, and Uncrate for ideas.

Analyse your competition

You’re in all likelihood, not the first person selling a particular service or product. A good first step is to look to your competition to better understand demand and potential appeal to your prospective customers.

Although you’ll probably never know exactly how well your competition is doing, there are things you can uncover that can give some indication and competitive information.

The first step is to determine who is currently selling the potential product or service. The easiest way to discover your competitors is to do some simple Google searches. It’s important to think like a potential customer and search for terms that your potential customers would actually use.

Once you uncover a few key competitors, you can use free online tools like SimilarWeb and SEMrush to uncover others and do a bit more research.

As an example, when you type the word “hair” in Google Search, the auto-fill function will come up with various suggestions that include “hair salons near me”.

If you want to start a hair salon, select this long-tail search term and see who is listed on the first page of Google. Before you do so, enable the location finder so that Google knows your current location.

If you want to sell “hair shampoo for oily hair” online, type in the specific search term in Google preferably in quotation marks. The more specific the search term, the better your search results will be.

Uncovering your competitors

SimilarWeb and SEMrush provide a wealth of additional details about your potential competitors including:

Traffic overview
Geography of traffic
Referring websites
Search keywords (organic and paid)
Social referrals
Competitors’ traffic, traffic sources, and backlinks.

Reviewing the information using these online tools is a good place to understand all your competitors and to get a good overview of what you’re up against.

The number of search results (i.e., 2,570,000) will give you the level of interest and competition.

Some additional things to look at about your competitors:

How long have they been in business? Businesses that don’t make money don’t stay in business for long. You can use a service like Who Is to look up information on a particular website domain and see when it was registered. Both Twitter and Facebook will show you the creation dates of accounts. Knowing how long a business has been around can better help you understand it’s success (and yours too).
What does their social following or interaction look like? Social following and interaction don’t necessarily correlate to sales. It could be a good indicator of market interest. One of the most important things to remember is that you can’t take the number of social media followers at face value. It’s easy to purchase thousands or even tens of thousands of fake followers and likes inexpensively. Look past just social following. Look at how much interaction they actually receive on their posts. Check-out the sentiment of responses.
Traffic and backlinks can be an indicator of overall competitive strength and success in your target market. Although it’s not possible to know the exact amount of traffic a particular website receives, there are tools that can help you gauge the approximate amount of traffic a website gets, along with the number of backlinks pointing to it.

Understand the market

With a better understanding of your competitors and some indications of how well they are doing, it’s time to look a little closer at your target market and direct interest from potential consumers.

A great place to begin is to see what your potential customers are saying about your idea as well as their sentiment around it.

Go to marketplaces like eBay and Amazon to search for the product you want to sell and look at the customer reviews, especially the 5-star ratings and the 1-star to 2-star ratings.

Learn more about what your potential customers are talking about in relation to your product idea. It is important to improve the design and customer experience based on feedback, comments, and responses.

Market trends

The last thing you want is to jump head first into a declining market. Google Trends is a really simple and free Internet application that will allow you to search for keywords related to your chosen product or service to better understand the trend based on Google searches over time and specific locations.

If you want to offer the services of a tax agent, you could find out the market trend for “tax agent”.

You can also search for country-specific trends over different periods.

Is your business idea trending up, trending down, or is it trending level or stagnant? Knowing where the market trend is moving can help you make informed decisions on whether to proceed with your idea or not.

Keyword analysis

Understanding your service or product’s trend is a good start.

It’s also important to know how many people are currently searching for the idea each month. That’s where Google’s Keyword Planner Tool comes into play. The tool allows you to search for keywords and phrases related to your business idea and displays the total number of searches each month for the chosen terms.

Using the example of the ‘tax agent’, you know that it is trending upwards because of the increasing searches for this term. Now, you want to know the level of profitability and competition.

The tool will also display the level of competition in paid search for the term. This allows you to better understand how lucrative ‘tax agents’ are, which can be an indication of its profitability.

In this example, there are 1,000 to 10,000 monthly searches for the term ‘tax agent’ and the competition is ‘medium’.

Survey your target market

After completing your secondary research, it’s important to gather specific information based on your exact service or product and customer demographic. There are multiple ways to approach this.

The quickest and cheapest way is to create an online survey using a simple survey tool like Survey Monkey and send it out to friends and family. Survey Monkey has an expert engineered product survey template to get you started.

If you don’t know anyone in your target market there are other paid services that can help. Services like Survata or Google Customer Surveys allow you to create surveys and they distribute the surveys to people you defined as target audience to gather responses.

Get to market quickly with a prototype or a minimum viable product

Prototyping is a useful concept because it gives you an opportunity to test the market and demand for your service or product.

It involves setting up an online store with your service or product and driving traffic to it to test consumer interest. This can be done by either pre-selling services or products, or even simpler, gauging interest by collecting email address when people sign-up for more information.

When you have the email addresses, you can email them asking for any valuable feedback about your service or product.

If you are selling services, marketplace platform like Fiverr gives you the opportunity to test the market as to whether there is actual demand for your services. Lots of people use these online marketplaces to search for services. There’s already a ready-made target audience you can quickly market your service to and test the demand for your services.

Likewise, if you want to sell products, use marketplace platforms like eBay, Amazon or Etsy to test the market, pricing, and demand for your products. Order a small quantity.

If successful, order larger quantities in a stepped approach. Learn the processes and systems as you go along.

Move from version 1 to version 3 as quickly as possible

During the prototyping phase, you will make mistakes. Learn from them.

Always expect problems.

Always analyse your ideas from different perspectives. Be prepared to change and reiterate your approach.

The key is to gain hands-on experience on what works and does not work, before spending loads of time and effort on something that will not take off in the future.

Determine what’s your minimum viable service or product is and work out how to get there as quickly as possible. It’s a proof of concept.

You learn how to price your minimum viable service and product, deliver your service and product, and understand what it takes to run an online business. There is virtually very little set-up cost when compared to building your own website.

If you decide that an online business is not for you, you can walk away without incurring much expense.

If you did try and cannot make enough profit (income minus expense), try out another service or product idea until one works.

If you decide that this is a business you want to continue with, you can scale up your operations slowly as you build your confidence. The data gathered about your customers and their buying preference will be invaluable for you to scale or commercialise your business in a stepped approach.

Try for at least one year, giving it all your best. Like wine, you want to stay focus and give your business time to bear fruit. You are laying the foundation for generating passive income.

In the meantime, do as much testing, learning, tweaking, and improving as you go. Look at it as a learning and improvement period. This will set you up for success in the future.

The key thing is that you will slowly build up your confidence to try bigger and better things. This will significantly reduce any risk and fears you may initially have.

Build relationships with product suppliers

Meet the companies and people you need to get started with. Find and build relationships with manufacturers. Find out where your warehouse or factory is going to be located. Speak to people. Build alliances.

Potential partners can often provide helpful information, insight and new opportunities. They bring real-world advice from people who are already working in the industry.

Early stage customers often provide the most useful advice and feedback on your offering

Always find a way to make money quickly by monetising your efforts

If you are supplementing your side business with money earned from your job or employment, you are running a charity.

Always remember that businesses make money. Profits put food on your table.

Get your service or product in front of your customers quickly, even if it involves some level of scrappiness. It will reduce the financial burden of starting up.

There is no such thing as a perfect product or service. If Microsoft waited for one, we would be using a typewriter!

Adopt a good enough mindset for creating a great service or product. Good enough does not mean providing poor quality service or product. It needs to be of some quality to keep your customers happy.

Be aware that making a sale is something that requires a lot of moving parts that work together behind the scenes.

This ultimate how-to guide seeks to paint a picture of these moving parts. This guide provides you with the basic knowledge to kick-start your money-making adventure or journey.

Adapt to what the market wants, not what you think the market may need

Be prepared to pivot and change. Be agile. Be flexible.

It’s quite likely that your customers will want to take you in strange new directions. Remember that it’s not about you. Don’t be sentimental about the direction your business takes.

It’s really about your customers and their willingness and ability to pay you.

You might have a viable service or product but have yet to fully explore all possible markets and business ideas. You might have a service or product that needs tweaking and improvements before it can fully take off.

Your service or product might be ready for the market, but you may be in need of a different business model.

Note that you are not aiming for a perfect service or product.

The only way you’ll work out all the kinks is to be open to new ideas and information, make a big effort or commitment to interact with a diverse range of people and customers, and be dedicated and persistent in your efforts.

Spend 80% of the time marketing yourself, and your service or product

The #1 reason most businesses fail is that they lack VISIBILITY.

If no one knows you and your products or services, you don’t exist. People buy from organisations or websites that they are AWARE of.

If people are unaware that you hold the unique solution to their problem, they’ll NEVER benefit from any of your offerings. Most likely, you’ll be out of business.

Remember this: marketing is something we do for people, not something we do to people.

Marketing is some we naturally do all the time

As long as you are providing products and services to meet people’s needs, you are doing marketing. You need to market yourself and your products and services to your customers.

When you write a resume, a cover letter or attend a job interview, you are ‘selling’ your skills and experience. You are trying to convince the recruiter (your customer) that you are the best candidate.

As part of your overall marketing strategy, job sites like Fiverr and Upwork connect you to your customers.

Protect your customer list

Your customer list should contain email addresses, personal information, and contact preferences of your current and previous customers.

Consider using customer relationship management (CRM) tools for customer lifecycle tracking.

Hubspot CRM is a popular free option for freelancers and small businesses. You can integrate it with your email to track conversations, see details about your contacts, and make notes of where they are in the customer cycle: lead, prospect, customer, etc.

Network with other professionals

You need to view other freelancers as colleagues rather than competitors.

Get to know your local and national freelancer groups to build your peer network. Learn more about the business of freelancing, exchange leads, and finding mentors.

You’ll also want to connect with industry veterans and experts in your field.

Explore all your free marketing options

You’ve probably heard it said that you need to “spend money to make money”. That’s not always true.

There’s a ton of free marketing you can and should explore, from social media to press mentions.

Here are just some of those marketing strategies:

Public relations outreach — press mentions can be highly valuable if you can win them with a good story.
Guerrilla marketing — getting out there into the world can help you get some free, early offline exposure for your products and services. Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics that yield maximum results.
Partnerships — sharing marketing resources and audiences with other similar-sized companies can be a great way for bootstrapped businesses to help each other out.
Content marketing — if you have the time and talent, you can create videos or articles yourself that can help drive traffic and educate your customers.
Organic social media — while paid advertising through social media is something you may want to explore, there’s a lot of ways to drive unpaid, organic social traffic as well. If you can’t pay with money, you will pay it with time. It usually takes a longer time to get free advertisement.

Keep a close eye on your cash flow

In the pursuit of being profitable, bootstrapped businesses need to keep an even closer eye on their cash flow and finances. If you’re not paying attention to your cash flow, your expenses can catch up to you, especially when they hit you at a bad time.

Small business owners usually struggle with cash flow problems. In turn, these cash flow problems can have a serious impact on you financially, emotionally, and administratively.

The following tips can help you get a grip on your cash flow:

Monitor your cash flow weekly using an accounting software. You could even outsource this task.
Invoice customers as soon as possible when the product or service is delivered. Instead of waiting until the end of the month.
Follow up on outstanding invoices promptly.
Issue invoices and accept customer payments online.

You can set money aside from your employment salary into your business account for your start-up costs and to cover ongoing expenses until your business is self-sustaining. Your expenses won’t be the same each month. It’s important to plan month by month to see when you can expect to earn and spend more (or less).

Monitor your bank account

At the very least, you’ll need a business checking account with your local bank or credit union to avoid a tax-time nightmare of mixing personal and business funds. A separate business bank account makes bookkeeping and taxes easier.

It also makes it easy to set aside money for your quarterly estimated income tax payments.

Don’t forget about administration tasks

Form a limited liability company

A sole proprietorship a legal form most new businesses take if the business doesn’t involve a lot of financial risk or liability exposure. Other business structure options include partnerships, limited liability companies, corporations, and cooperatives.

If you want to protect your personal assets and have tax treatment flexibility, consider forming a limited liability company (LLC).

Just because you are a one-person business doesn’t mean that you don’t share some of the same challenges, liabilities, and risks that owners of larger businesses do.

A limited liability company business structure offers you several advantages, including:

Reduced personal legal liability via the separation of business and personal assets.
Flexibility in being taxed as a sole proprietor or an S Corporation.
Uncomplicated compliance requirements.

Six basic steps to form a limited liability company.

Choose your business name. Conduct a business name search to make sure it’s available.
File the required documentation to form the legal structure (e.g., articles of organisation or association).
Create your operating agreement or internal ground rules for how you’ll operate your business. There are online templates available.
In the US, apply for a federal EIN (Employer Identification Number). Even if you already have one for your sole proprietorship, you will need to request a new one as a limited liability company.
Open an entirely new bank account for your limited liability company even if you had a business bank account as a sole proprietor.
Check your business license and permit obligations and requirements to legally conduct business under your limited liability company.

Understand all licensing requirements

Business licensing requirements for freelancers vary by location, by industry, by state, and by country.

Your city or county may require you to get a permit to operate your business. Your state may also require a license too.

Find out whether you need a permit to start a home-based business. Understand the guidelines to avoid possible fines later on.

City or local councils may have specific zoning codes or rules about home-based businesses.

Remember to minimise your tax obligations

Apply for a free employer identification or tax file number at any tax office.

Banks and credit unions may want to see this tax number before you open a business account.

Employees and sole traders or sole proprietors pay the highest income tax rate. In comparison, companies and investors pay a much lower income tax rate because of deductions. To minimise your tax liability, it is best to operate your side business in a company structure.

If you’re setting up a side business that’s run out of your house and you’re using part of your home exclusively for your business, you might be entitled to a home office deduction. Most tax offices allow you to claim a portion of your home expenses, such as rent, electricity, water, gas, internet and phone bills, for business purposes.

All these will be on the assumption that you also declare the profits you made as your personal income. Most tax laws require a matching of income and expenses. You cannot claim taxable expenses without declaring your income.

The home office deduction also might allow you to deduct a portion of your home maintenance and essential renovations, as long as they’re relevant to your side business. So you’ll get an extra pay boost on top of the other benefits of upgrading your home.

Protect yourself with insurance

Most freelancers work as sole proprietors. It will mean that you have assumed unlimited liability for your business debts including any legal judgments against you if you are negligent in performing your work.

If you face a lawsuit, you don’t want to lose all your personal assets including your family home.

Talk to your insurance agent about professional and product liability coverage. Find out if your business equipment, inventory stored at home, and anything else related to your new venture is covered under your current insurance policy.

If you offer services (such as web design, bookkeeping, or writing) you may want to look into professional liability insurance.

Protect yourself with asset protection arrangements

Your legal professional should be able to advise you on the best asset protection strategies to protect your personal assets and real estate properties from creditors and other third parties.

Manage your time for efficiencies

As the saying goes: time is money.

Stay on top of your assignments, due dates, marketing efforts, and interviews with a to-do list, an appointment reminder tool, and time tracking software.

Good To Do is an inexpensive paid service that integrates with your email. It lets you sort to-dos into categories, roll over an undone list of items to the next day, and lets you create recurring to-do items.

Google Calendar is invaluable for sending conference call and phone interview invitations and reminders to sources, customers, and yourself to keep projects on track.

A time tracking software is a must if you bill by the hour and it’s helpful even if you don’t. That’s because over time you can see a clear picture of how much time you spend on each project and get a sense of your “hourly wage” on flat fee projects. Top Tracker is a free option designed for freelancers.

Contracting and contracts

As a freelancer, you need a written contract that defines everyone’s expectations, responsibilities, rights, and payment terms.

You can use DIY legal or contracting templates from services like Rocket Lawyer and Law Depot. It’s always smart to have a trusted legal practitioner handy to review your contract before you use it.

Keeping your accounts in order

Fresh Books can be used for your bookkeeping, project recording, and invoice creation.

Printing materials

Online services like Vistaprint offer professionally printed business cards at budget prices, especially if you’re willing to wait a couple of weeks for delivery.

Where appropriate, outsource some administration and non-value adding tasks to an overseas virtual assistant who can do these tasks at a fraction of the cost.

Don’t stress over your logo in the beginning

A logo is the face of your business. Your logo is how people will remember your business.

It’s less important in the early stages of your business when there’s not a lot of people to see or remember it. It’s also something you can go down the road once your business finds its legs.

A unique, professionally designed logo can cost a few hundred dollars. That’s money you could easily invest elsewhere.

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How to promote your business offline

Promoting offline is all about marketing your freelance services to customers using a range of options they can touch, feel and experience. This includes everything from your business card and letterhead through to brochures, flyers, posters, and banners.

When you have a presence in the real world, it can help build and strengthen relationships as well as get people talking about your products or services.

Have a great business card

Business cards are a MUST for any offline business owner. Don’t limit yourself to just handing them out when you first meet someone new.

Use your business card as an effective marketing tool. Remember to leave them anywhere and everywhere you go.

If you go to a coffee shop or restaurant, leave your business card with your tip or drop them into the fishbowl for business cards.

If you see a public notice board, pin your business card up there too.

Invest in print collaterals

Well-designed business stationery and collaterals help promote a professional look and feel for your company, products, and services.

Brochures and flyers are perfect options for businesses looking to attract local customers. Branded postcards can also be effective for successful direct mail campaigns. Include a simple message and clear call to action and send them to a targeted mailing list.

If you have specific keywords you’re already using on your website, try using the same keywords in your print promotional materials to ensure consistent messaging across your business and promotional efforts.

Posters, banners, and stickers

Posters and banners offer the perfect tools for promoting your business to your customers and prospects.

Add a QR code to your poster or banner and all your customers have to do is scan this code.

Place a large branded sticker on the side of your car or bike and you instantly create a mobile advertisement for your business.

Branded merchandise

Branded merchandise that your customers and prospects will find useful is a great offline promotional tool. Include your business logo and URL, where possible.

Try choosing products that you would be happy to receive yourself.

USB sticks, pens, coffee mugs, water bottles, magnets, key rings, stickers, and sweats are all popular gifts.

Local sponsorship

Sponsoring a local community event that you feel is closely aligned with your own brand values helps raise the profile of your business. It not only creates recognition but helps develop trust and awareness in your brand.

Look for suitable opportunities that allow you to donate a gift certificate, products or services to a charity, school or community event being held in your area. This helps gain familiarity as well as show your commitment to your local community.

Networking events

A networking event can be particularly effective for promoting your business offline if you put yourself forward as a presenter. If there is a local event with a topic you feel confident to speak about, don’t hesitate to volunteer.

Events in your local business community are a great way to network and meet new people and customers.

Create a local presence

Partner with other businesses in your local area and make sure that your business is listed in local directories, especially in free listings.

Set aside time to issue media releases about your business on a regular basis to help drum up publicity in your local newspapers.

Host an open house

Hosting an open house is another low-cost approach to marketing your business and creating a strong local presence.

A business open house is a great way to both strengthen relationships with your customers and introduce your products and services to new customers. Once you have people through the door it is an opportunity for them to learn more about you, your company, and your products and services.

Keep the event low-key or make your products available for viewing. Add an element of fun, or offer discounts and promotions during the day.

Word of mouth works

Increase the conversation you have with family and friends about your business, products, and services. This helps them become actively engaged with your brand and help promote it for you.

Let your staff or employees understand the importance of customers becoming fans and referral partners. Make sure that every member of your team understands the importance of customer service and the value a loyal customer has to your business.

Capture images of everything

Take photos and videos of your products and services as well as business activities and events to give your target market a closer insight into your business and what you can do for them.

Showcase your brand personality.

Taking pictures and videos of everything is a simple way to use an offline method to boost your online presence. These pictures can also be used on your website and across social media platforms to help integrate offline and online promotion of your business, products, and services.