No matter what you read in textbooks, online or hear from anyone else, you need to realise that traditional mainstream media advertising doesn’t work. I mean, it can work if you have millions of dollars worth of advertising budget, but for most businesses it is not an effective tool.Public relations techniques become the best option for home-based business owners, especially when you consider the possibilities presented from using both online and offline techniques.The purpose of this article is to share with home-based business owners 5 tips that you can utilise relatively quickly.Learn to write a basic press release- The press release follows a basic template that almost any business owner will be able to fulfill. You need to learn to write a basic press release so that every time your business does something newsworthy you can send off a press release to try and get some media coverage.Start a blog and utilise social media- I definitely think that you cannot overlook mainstream media coverage but you should also start your own blog, set up a Facebook page and set up a Twitter account so you can reach out to your audience directly without having to worry about your message being mediated.Join an online networking forum- You should also look at joining an online networking forum. There are plenty of online groups that you can join and there is bound to be one that is related to you your niche. You should join one or more of these forums in order to build your reputation as a respectable business owner.Referral marketing is the best way to grow your business- Going out and getting a sale can be tough. It is much better to make referral marketing a large part of your business plan. You need to aim to get as much as possible of your business through referrals. My personal preference would be for 100% of business through referrals.Credibility is more important than visibility- As a home-based business owner credibility is much more important than visibility. It is now much more about what you say and what others say about you then how many times people see your name.The old rules of advertising no longer apply. You need to make sure that you utilise the PR tips that I mentioned above so that you can grow your business effectively in this new economy. Otherwise you will find that you are doomed to failure.

Home based business leads are of utmost importance when it comes to successfully running and growing your own business, and there are a variety of ways that one can go about in getting these leads, ranging from purchasing the leads themselves to the actual self marketing and acquisition thereof.So many of us dream of the possibility of starting and running our own home based business, and although it may well be somewhat of a challenge, it is far from being impossible or unachievable. The level of desire and commitment that one has to achieve this goal or objective will in all likelihood determine the success or failure of such a venture. Within this process of growing the home business is one of the most important aspects of home based business leads, or otherwise referred to as prospects. These are the individuals or companies that one would normally target in terms of presenting your product or service to and aiming to close a sale with these folks to ensure that you are meeting your sales and revenue targets. Without customers and sales where applicable, a business whether it be home based or not is literally dead in the water.Going about getting the home based business leads for someone operating from home may at first prove to be a little more challenging, largely due to the fact that there is less interaction with others when working from the isolation of one’s home. But this can be changed, and is totally within the home based entrepreneur’s control, as he or she can choose to get out into the market place via networking opportunities and build up from there. Often times the fledgling business may fail because of the lack of such social and professional interaction and therefore the importance thereof is vital. This interaction can take the form of social get-togethers, local business member meetings such as Chambers of Commerce, associations and societies, as well as through local sports clubs. These places are normally teaming with prospects, especially like minded business people and owners that are also looking to expand their businesses.Alternatively the telephone book has often been used as a source for all types of leads, so why not give the local book a try to acquire some of your own home based business leads, it is at the very least a starting point and may lead onto bigger customers and contracts too. By establishing a solid base or foundation within your business, albeit from a cold calling perspective you will place yourself in a position to succeed, whilst growing your confidence during this phase. The most important point here is that you cannot let yourself get down and continue to seek out those valid and qualified leads on a daily basis.Making it a daily habit will make it easier, and you will soon come to realize that it is a numbers game in terms of getting the leads, and then closing the sale. Home based business leads will ensure your ultimate success and you can literally never have enough of these valuable ‘commodities’ in your own business.

Everyday people flock to the Internet to look for their perfect internet based business for various reasons.

Some end up worse off than they first started. Why? many are not prepared to start a home based business.

Before you start, ask yourself these questions?

1. Is it Internet based? You can leverage on the internet to communicate, do business plan presentation,
automate service delivery etc. With the advancement of the technology, Internet based type of business become more and more popular.

2. What business model do I use? If you want cut short the product creation time, you can use other people’s business model. Find a business model that is already working and proven. This will save you time and money.

3. Do I get strong support? A perfect Internet home based business should also work life a brick and mortal
business in terms of support and training. Except the delivery of support is via phone, email or the Internet.

4. What marketing strategies do I use? Every body know marketing is the key to doing any business. The difference is in the strategy. Some strategies work, some don’t.

5. Do I have the tools available? Tools can save you time but not necessary save you money. There are numerous of tools which help you from doing competition research to product creation and delivery tracking, use tools to save your time. You have only 24 hours a day, anyway.

I find that a perfect Home based business, it must first meet the “home based” criteria, meaning you literally need not go out for a single meeting or even deliver a single piece of good. If you find one that meets the above criteria, you can start fast and earn money from home.

Now that you know how to start a home based business, there are other factors that may help you how to start a home base business.

Know Your Strength

Knowing what you are good at may help you to choose a home business that you will enjoy and do well. Knowing your strength will increase your chance of success. For example if you are a very organized person and love to write, you can be a good article write.

Choose Your Business Models

There are various internet home based business models which you can model after. These models varies from email marketer, which need no website to super stores with very fanciful web storefront.

Know Your Product and Services

For most if us, we are not super sales person. If you know your products and services well, you are going to tell your customer from your own experience. People can tell if you believe in your products. Many a time people buy you first before buying your products. If you are familiar with your products and services, you will sell more.

Your Business Needs Time to Grow

Remember that most home businesses take at least months
before you really start seeing the return of your investment. It is important to track the growth month by month and you are able to project your break even period.

Stay Within Budget

As tools are necessary to help you save time, plan carefully your initial investment and monthly expenditure. Plan and get the most needed business tools first. Defer the other to later.

Treat It Like A Business

Running a home based business can be more difficult than running a traditional business. Many distractions: Kids, TV , your bed, etc.

Be discipline to work on your home based business and be enthusiastic about it. Motivation is the key for you to keep going on and stay on course.

If you treat your home based business like a hobby, it will pay you like a hobby. Treat it like a real business, it you pay you like one.

Marketing

Marketing is how you get your customers. Now there are many forms of marketing such as newspaper ads, flyers, TV ads, mailing lists, pay-per-click ads, power-linking, and many others. How you market your business is up to you. Each technique has its own strengths and weaknesses. Obviously you will want to keep your budget in mind when picking a method of marketing.

Diversify your marketing as much as possible, and remember… the more people that see and know your business the more business you will do.

Use Tools

There are numerous of tools which help you from doing competition research to product creation and delivery tracking, use tools to save your time. You have only 24 hours a day, anyway.

With the pointers above, you now know how to start a home based business more confidently and chance for your success is now dramatically increase.

We expect a fair degree of corruption, arrogance and drooling self-interest from our elected officials. After all, in the last 206 years, we have fallen a great distance from the days of the “virtuous republic” that existed-or was thought to exist-in that first decade after the Revolution. Yes, we expect it, but I would have more respect for the operatives, the party-men and the politicos themselves if they could be just a little intelligent about it. The current issue with the Bush Administration, Congress, the SBA and the awarding of a great deal of money earmarked for small business, is a case in point.

When Big Business Seems Small

It is illegal, a felony that comes with fines and a prison term, to try to pass your big business off as a small business to get one of the 23% of Federal contracts reserved for small businesses. Yet, it happens all the time. According to the American Small Business League, a non-partisan watchdog group, some $60 billion in Federal contracts go to major corporations each year. How it happens brings us to the question of how you decide that a business is truly small.

Counting Heads

What is a small business? How do you measure it? Is it revenue? Sales? Staff size? Any one of these could be a viable measure, but for the most part the matter is decided with staff size. Depending on the industry, you can have a maximum of 1,500 employees and still be considered a small business! (Federal Regulations Title 13, Part 121, Section 201)

These larger “small businesses,” with 1,000 to 1,500 employees, deal in oil, aerospace, rail transportation, textiles, and chemical and rubber products. Wholesalers, regardless of their products, are capped at 100; information technology value-added resellers are capped at 150 (a very recent change) while the rest are capped at either 500 or 750. In 2005 (the most recent data available), there were 5,966,069 firms in the U.S. with 500 or fewer employees and they employed 58,644,585 people out of a total employment of 116,373,003. That is 50.3% of the working population working in what could easily be described as legitimately small businesses. If you add up the firms with larger numbers of employees, you find that there are 11,546 of them and that they employ 9,475,180 people, 8.14% of the workforce.

Call me crazy, but a firm with 1,000 employees doesn’t seem to be very small to me! It may be small when compared to the giants in its industry, but it is a giant compared with the vast majority of small businesses. In 2004, there was an effort to bring the number of employees down from 500 to 100 for a business to be classified as small. In spite of a great deal of support for the measure-including U.S. Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), who said: “By working to change the definition of a small business for government contracts from 500 to 100 employees, federal contracts specifically designed to ensure the success of American small business would go where they belong – to support Americans, not big companies dressed in sheep’s clothing.”-the effort was killed by the SBA itself. That, however, is only the beginning. Another has to do with how small businesses are certified.

Finding a Certified Small Business

The question of how many employees a small business can have is complicated even further when we see that the government has been rather lax in enforcing the contract award rules for small business. In fact, in 2005, some $49 billion in Federal contracts that were set aside for small business were actually awarded to the 13 largest government contractors. This lax enforcement has led to cases where the small business in question is actually a subsidiary of a much larger company, where businesses have outgrown their small business status, where big business misrepresents itself as a small business and where government procurement offices, such as with the military, simply disregard the rules and do business with who they like.

The Small Business Front

Two of the most prevalent ways that large companies can maintain a small business front are through the legal loopholes that allow a small business to retain its status throughout the life of its original contract-and bid on new business as a small business-no matter how large it grows and even after it is bought out by a large company.

In either case, what the company in question is doing is, in fact, legal. Their actions are also limited by the fact that the loophole is based on the length of the small business’ initial contract. For example, if a small business wins a 10-year contract to provide computer hardware, it maintains its small business status for the full 10 years of the contract regardless of how large it grows or if some huge conglomerate buys it. This has been an issue for some time. Consider the following:

According to a 2006 report on the U.S. Government Accountability Office: Commerce Information Technology Solutions (COMMITS) Next Generation Governmentwide Acquisition Contract, “We found that many of the 55 COMMITS NexGen contractors have grown significantly or have been acquired by larger businesses and may no longer meet small business size standards. We also found that a significant portion of the task orders intended for the smallest contractors were issued to larger, incumbent contractors.”

Incumbent contractors tend to get the lion’s share of the government’s business. A 2004 SBA Office of Advocacy: Eagle Eye Publishers’ Report said that: “Of the top 1,000 small business contractors in FY 2002, Eagle Eye Publishers’ analysis found 44 parent companies it identified as either large firms or ‘other’. Contracts to these two groups taken together had a total value of $2 billion.” The report continued, saying that: “The Department of Defense and the General Services Administration accounted for 79 percent of the contract awards found to have gone to large businesses.” One of the conclusions drawn from the report was: “As a result of this lack of transparency, many awards that should be reserved for small firms go to large firms unchallenged.”

Disregarding the Rules

Rules can be broken either directly, by a willful disregard on the part of those the rules were intended to regulate, such as a company that purposefully misidentifies itself as a small business in order to get a contract; or they can be broken indirectly by a lack of oversight and enforcement that creates an atmosphere in which the rules can be ignored. One of the problems sited against the SBA is oversight. “SBA did not review the majority of reported bundled contracts that we identified, though procuring activities must provide, and SBA must review proposed bundled acquisitions. As a result, 192 contracts identified by procuring agencies as bundled were awarded without SBA’s review. If all of these are actually bundled contracts, a minimum of $384 million would be potentially lost to eligible small businesses, based on minimum dollar reporting requirements of $2 million.” (SBA Office of Inspector General: Audit of the Contract Bundling Process, May 2005) And consider this from the SBA Office of Inspector General: Audit of Monitoring Compliance with 8(a) Business Development Contract Performance, March 2006:

“Though SBA delegated 8(a) BD contract execution authority to 26 procuring agencies, SBA did not ensure that procuring agencies monitored whether companies complied with 8(a) BD regulations when completing 8(a) BD contracts . . . SBA has ultimate responsibility for ensuring that companies comply with 8(a) BD regulations”

The SBA is the final oversight authority for these contract awards and yet through their lack of enforcement efforts, it is easy for large businesses to slip through. Why is this? There are two likely reasons. The first is that the Bush Administration, when it came into office, cut funding for the SBA. At the end of the Clinton Administration, the budget for the SBA was about $1.1 billion. By 2006 it was down to $456.5 million. Funding has increased since the 2006 low; for 2009, that number has increased to $657 million, mostly due to funding for disaster relief loans; but the agency has nowhere near the budget it used to have. Generally speaking, if you cut funds to an agency, certain things start to slip and that is not a message that the SBA, or the Bush Administration for that matter, want going public.

However, it already has.

An audit by the American Small Business League (ASBL) and two independent experts showed that even while the SBA was saying that it is a “myth that large companies, including large, multi-national corporations are taking away federal contracts specifically intended for small businesses,” it was discovered that the Bush Administration had in fact included billions of dollars in awards to Fortune 500 corporations and other large businesses in the United States and Europe in its small business contracting statistics. Also, the Bush Administration failed to comply with the congressionally mandated 23% small business contracting goal by including such corporate giants as:

Dyncorp
Battelle Memorial Institute
Hewlett Packard
Government Technology Services Inc (GTSI),
Bechtel
Lockheed Martin
General Dynamics
General Electric
Northstar Aerospace
Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
Raytheon.
British Aerospace Engineering Systems
Buhrmann NV (Dutch)
Thales (French)
More than that, ASBL’s research also found that the government was forced to systematically increase the volume of contracts awarded to small businesses in order to balance out those that were going to inappropriately large companies. In addition, awards to legitimate small businesses were systematically inflated to equalize the reduction of small business contract dollars awarded to Fortune 500 corporations. The ASBL found that according to SBA numbers, Circle B Enterprises Inc. received $887.5 million during 2005. However, the government’s own figures indicate that Circle B Enterprises Inc. received $287.5 million during 2005, which represents a discrepancy of $600 million. The ASBL audit found several other instances where the contracting numbers of legitimate small businesses were also significantly inflated.

The Bottom Line

The government decided to play fast and loose with small business contract money and they got caught siphoning it off to some of the largest companies on Earth. There are those that will only see the damage that this will do to McCain in the fall, yet another Bush Administration failure/debacle/betrayal-whatever you like best. That, however, is not the point. The point is why was the SBA hamstrung and placed in the position it has been in by the Bush Administration? More than that, why has this abuse been allowed to go on for so long? Call me a political cynic-I am from Chicago so I come by it honestly-but the only thing that makes sense to me is that government officials are paying back the people with deep pockets who helped to get them elected and they are doing it at the expense of, well, YOU. True, paybacks are a time-honored political tradition, but by stealing the money from small business, the U.S. Government as a whole turned its back on the overwhelming number of U.S. employers and employees in favor of a handful of major corporations. I urge you, as a small business owner; and you as an employee of a small business, to write your senators and congressmen, and to write to each of the presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, and their respective party chairmen-Republican and Democrat alike, and tell them that you want this to stop. Remember, small business contract set-asides are for YOU, not major corporations. It is time to remind Washington of that.