Marketing is the process of attracting attention, raising the interest of your target market, and influencing their decision-making process. It is the tool that educates and prepares your prospects and then compels them to respond. Your marketing gives your sales team the opportunity to close sales rather than chasing them down.

Marketing includes identifying unmet needs; producing products and services to meet those needs: and pricing, distributing, and promoting those products and services to produce a profit. For more information, see our “Marketing In The New Millennium” page.

Selling is the process of closing (selling and getting the order) prospects that you have “pre-conditioned” with your marketing messages to contact you and purchase your product. The critical element of sales is having prospects contact you who want to talk to you, and want to hear how you can benefit them. For more information, see our “Sales Systems” page.

Something that can be done to entice people to sign up are offer rewards for those that sign up. You can also have a posting contest by giving away something to the first person to reach a certain number of posts. Another thing is to start a controversial thread that will force people to sign up and participate in the discussions. No matter what you decide to do to get people to sign up try and make sure that it is planned out before starting the forum. If you think about that after the forums have been started it may be too late.

Human nature is such that people will tend to buy and give business to persons who they are familiar with. For this reason you will have to be very careful about the kind of image that you portray at these message boards and discussion forums. The fact that you are already running a home business qualifies you to be called an expert to a certain degree and you are well able to answer many questions related to home businesses. It is important that you are very specific to avoid confusion make it very clear what your specialty is. This should be based on what you are really good at. For instance your strength in the home business may be o the technical end including building and designing home business web sites. Or it could be in marketing and advertising home business sites. Actually the more specific you are by limiting your expertise to a certain niche, the more impressive the image you will build at the site.