It’s every salaried man and woman’s dream and probably more than a few self employed people who work from an office too. The benefits of running your own business, being your own boss, keeping your own hours and all this from the comfort of your own home. It just sounds too good to be true. Well, the reality of running a home based business isn’t always that rosy. As a matter a fact it can be a right royal pain in the behind at best or fail miserably at worst.Working from home is not exactly a new or unique concept. In the past most business was done from a shop or small factory or workshop that was part of the family home. In many parts of the world today it is still the norm. The practice of living and working in the same place does make a lot of sense and holds many benefits. It is great not having to pay rent on a building, living 30 seconds from work, not having to sit for hours in traffic and being able to get up and have a sandwich and a cup of coffee whenever you feel like it. Nirvana indeed.There are several pitfalls in this idyllic wonderland though, pitfalls that are generally only discovered when one starts working from home. The exponential increase in self discipline that is required, constant distractions and the stigma that often surrounds the “one man band” or home based business are just a few of the problems that one has to contend with. You need to be dedicated, driven and passionate about what you do to work from home. A simple desire to stop working “for the man” is just not going to cut it.To make a success of a home based business you have to be a far stricter boss than “the man” ever was. You need to set a rigid and uncompromising work schedule for yourself and adhere to it religiously. You also need to set yourself up in a place in your home where you will not be bombarded with distractions all day (and more likely all night). It just doesn’t work sitting and trying to be productive while little Johnny beats the stuffing out of his brother or his drum set in the room next door. Family members need to buy into this process unconditionally as well. Work times have to be off limits to all but 3 alarm fires or the discovery of a winning lottery ticket.One of the problems often encountered by work-at-homers is the misconception that a small business is small time. The absence of a penthouse suite is deemed to be a sign of mediocrity and lack of success. This is a problem that can be alleviated only by making a name for yourself and building trust among your clients. You can cure cancer but there just are no pills for a snob.The good news is that not only is a successful home based business possible, but it can be the most rewarding thing you will ever do. It is cheap, convenient, flexible and rewarding. If you can exercise the required amount of discipline and fulfil the basic business needs of supply and demand then it can and does work. Good luck!

If you are serious about making money without having to go to a job everyday, you can start to build your own home-based business today and break-free from the shackles of having a boss, having no free time, and having to be somewhere when you would rather be at home with your friends and family.When you are someone else’s employee, you have a boss to tell you exactly what to do and when to do it, but if you want to be your own boss, you will have to have the ability to initiate your work and stick to it everyday so that you can get things done. That brings us to the first thing you should know before starting your own home-based business:#1 – Self-starterIf you want to start your own business, you have to be someone who is willing to take action. Not only do you have to take action to get it start, but you have to take action every single day so that you can take your business to the next step. If you have the ability to be a “self-starter”, you will be able to take initiative to get things going.#2 – Hard workerSomeone who hopes to achieve any success with their own home-based business has to be a very hard worker. Not everyone can work hard continually even when they are getting no immediate rewards, so be sure that you know you can keep working hard even when you run into roadblocks and things that seem to slow down your progress.#3 – DedicatedYou cannot expect to achieve success if you aren’t fully committed and dedicated to growing your business and sticking with it for the long-haul. Business is like raising a child, you have to nurture it daily and only then will it slowly grow into something that will be fully functional on its own.#4 – Time factorsStarting and building a business takes plenty of time, both at the beginning and at the latter stages of your business. In order to get it off the ground, you should expect to take hundreds of hours of time, so if you are starting it as a part-time project, expect it to take a year or so before you start to see any substantial income. On the other hand, should you be doing this full-time, you may only need a couple months before you see any returns.#5 – You have to enjoy your businessNo matter what your goals may be, you won’t be able to stick with something long-term if you don’t enjoy what you do, so be sure to pick something that you enjoy and can see yourself doing for the rest of your working life.

Should you start your own home based business? This is a question that I often hear people talking about. Parents talk about it while dropping their children off at school, families talk about it when picking up groceries. It seems like there are people from every road in life thinking about starting a home based business. I would like to talk about the benefits of being a business owner so let’s dive right in.There are tax advantagesThere are tax advantages to starting and running a business. Running a business from home can usually be done for significantly less than if you were to purchase a store front business. There is also no rule against turning a home based business into a store front business in the future but for the sake of this discussion we are going to assume that you work from home. A lot of your expenses are tax deductible. I would strongly encourage you to hire an accountant and a lawyer once you have made enough in your business to warrant the expense because these can be valuable assets to your company and ensuring that you are remaining compliant with your obligations.The freedom of being home with your familyThe other clear and obvious benefit of having a business is being able to work from the comfort of your home. This means you can spend more time with your family and that is a freedom that is often difficult to come by.The freedom of a recurring incomeWith some businesses that are run for home examples are those in network or referral marketing, they pay you monthly a commission percentage for sales you receive. As long as you have active referrals purchase the product you receive a check. During the first two years you will most likely spend those years building your organization but once it is build and you have a solid team in place you will be able to work less and still make a nice income from commissions. This is the part of the home based business that most people find very appealing.You can help a lot of peopleIf you choose a home based business that offers a product or service that provides “value” you can feel good about the work that you are doing and know that you are helping a lot of people while you build your business. This is one of the reasons that more and more people are starting to explore home based businesses for their future.

As a marketing manager or CFO of a healthcare organization, it is your responsibility to determine the most economic use of your healthcare marketing dollars. With an overwhelming set of tactical options and media choices, developing a strategy is a critical first step before spending a single penny of your media budget. In short, you need to have a road map that outlines your marketing goals before you set out to invest. The planning process should be a formal and thorough part of any marketing campaign. As the old adage aptly states, ‘Failure to plan is planning to fail.’ An old marketing joke quips that 50% of any marketing campaign is a waste of money. The difficulty is knowing which 50%. In short, it takes years of marketing experience to understand the best paths to market any product, service or organization. Not knowing your market or starting a campaign with unclear goals often results in costly inefficiencies and a waste of time and money. This article is geared to help you get it right the first time by outlining the importance of proper planning when budgeting your healthcare marketing dollars.

How to Achieve ROI in Healthcare Marketing

ROI often gets lost in the clamor of a product rollout, or the launch of a new service or brand. Thanks to increasing media fragmentation, healthcare marketing decision makers have a myriad of choices when it comes to channeling healthcare marketing dollars. This can be overwhelming for even seasoned marketing pros. Unless you have unlimited dollars and a marketing team of thousands of staff members, it is simply not possible to target everyone. It’s easy to leap onto the latest trend, whether it is social media, video, or the hottest fad in internet marketing. But, without proper planning, you’re doing little more than blindly spending money and hoping for results. Proper research and planning helps us understand how to invest to get the best bang for our marketing buck.

The first stage of planning should define the target audience and build consensus with regard to tactics and strategy. A free exchange of ideas is crucial to the process. Brainstorming sessions among professionals coupled with real demographics and metrics will ultimately lead to an informed decision about who exactly you are trying to reach with your healthcare marketing budget. Don’t try to reach everyone. Pick 3-5 key target markets that represent your core revenue streams or promising new markets. All marketing and media opportunities should target these core markets. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by deals and discounts. It’s not a deal if it doesn’t reach your core target markets.

Defining Your Target Audience

Customer Base

The first and most obvious step is to look at your customer base and pick out significant common threads among them. What are they buying from you and why? Similar companies and firms could benefit from the same services. Additionally, it’s wise to consider possible upsell opportunities to current clients. It’s always easier to sell to existing customer than to find new ones. Take care of your customers and they will return time and again.

Look Closely at the Competition

Study your top competitors and determine who they are targeting. Whether you decide to compete head to head or discover new niche markets that warrant further study, it’s always wise to know and understand your competitors. To underestimate your competition is to miss an opportunity to learn from those that share your goals.

Try to understand target market basics like demographics that include location, income, and gender and psychographics such as behavior, personality, and values. The more you are able to target your audience carefully in the early planning stages, the greater the success you will achieve. Other resources include Pew Internet which outlines internet use among a variety of demographics as well as Scarborough which is a press room full of marketing and other trends that are useful for healthcare marketing professionals.

However all the planning in the world is useless without the means to measure success. With multiple strategies and tactics making up any coherent marketing plan, determining predefined metrics of what constitutes success is the only way to truly understand what works. Defining these metrics is not an easy task. Many abstract and difficult questions beg to be answered. How do you measure awareness? What is the time frame for effectiveness? Will I wait a year before seeing the results of my efforts? Defining your target audience is the key to successfully answering these questions. Knowing the habits of your target audience, knowing which publications they read, knowing where they congregate on social media, and then monitoring these channels is the key to taking the pulse of your audience.

A Word about Metrics & ROI

No manager or CEO wants to get buried in the details of the thousands of potential measurements possible when rolling out a multi-faceted marketing strategy. Without putting some measure or weight on the statistics, you risk becoming a collector of thousands of useless data points. Most prefer to see a big picture snapshot of your marketing efforts or “Macro Metrics.” The easiest definition of a good macro metric is usefulness. Everything from web site content, social media strategies, and brand rollouts should address the question of “is it useful? ” The next question is “who is it useful for?” If your marketing is not useful to your target audience, it’s time to start over. The most important measure after planning and audience targeting becomes ROI.

In summation key points here for healthcare marketing professionals include undertaking a formal and thorough planning process prior to reaching out with creative product and resources. Principal to planning includes defining your target audience and the metrics that play to your strengths as a company. The types of analysis you focus on will be different depending on the strengths and focus individual to your firm. Most importantly is to know where you are positioned today, where you wish to go tomorrow, and the strategies, tools and tactics that will take you there.

Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising is one type of online advertising available today. With the growing popularity of the Internet, Cost Per Click advertising is a great way for you to put your business name is in front of millions of people. There are several online advertising businesses, and Google AdSense is the most popular.

CPC is a keyword-based advertising system. This means your advertisement is connected to searches containing the same keywords that you have chosen as your advertising keywords. You are charged a certain amount, usually anywhere from 5 cents to $5.00 every time someone clicks on your advertisement.

Even though your advertisement may be shown many times, you are only charged for the number of times visitors actually click on your advertisement for more information. If your Cost Per Click advertisement is text-based, it will be placed in an advertising unit with between one and three other advertisements.

Before you start your Cost Per Click advertising campaign, you must place a maximum CPC bid. This bid will indicate the highest amount you are willing to pay for the CPC advertising. You must take into consideration that you will be expected to pay more for the more popular keywords and for advertisement placement in locations with higher visibility.

Even though you set your own maximum CPC bid, your actual advertising cost will usually be one cent above the minimum charge required to keep your advertisement placement in its current Web page location.

Google uses your quality score and rank number to determine your CPC charge and advertisement placement. Your quality score is determined by how closely related your selected keywords are to the actual advertisement wording.

The score also considers the quality of your landing page and your click through rate. Your landing page is the Web page your visitors are directed to once they click on your advertisement, and your click through rate is the percentage of viewers that click on your ad out of the total number of viewers that see your advertisement.

Your advertisement’s placement is determined by its rank number. A higher rank number indicates a higher quality advertisement and this will place your advertisement in the more desirable advertising locations. The higher your quality score is, the lower your Cost Per Click advertising costs will be and the better your advertisement location will be.

Cost Per Click advertising allows you to set and control your advertising budget. You are able to set a daily budget for your CPC charges. Each day, if the number of click throughs reaches your set maximum daily budget, the ads will stop appearing until the next day.

You can increase or decrease your daily maximum CPC charges as needed, and you will never be surprised at how much your are charged for your Charge Per Click advertising. Keep in mind that if your advertisement does not generate a minimum amount of daily click throughs, your ad will be discontinued.