An entrepreneur usually begins the home-based business online as a small one-person operation, but with hopes of transmuting the hobby or lifestyle choices into a functional and profitable business. In order for the business to grow, the business owner must increase the number of customers served, or the intensity of the order stream must be increased. A third option is to add new products or services that appeal to more potential customers. Here are some tips you can use that will allow you to increase your customer base while you make money online.

Narrow your focus

Surprisingly enough, one way to increase your customer base and make money online is to narrow the scope of your advertising and marketing efforts. If you’ve been using a scattergun approach, your marketing campaigns may not always reach the people who are most likely to purchase your product or service. In the world of marketing, more is not necessarily better. By choosing your product characteristics and matching your marketing efforts to the people who are most likely to use your product, you will have more targeted advertising and you are much more likely to be in contact with the individuals who are going to use your service.

Know your market

Before you can increase your customer base, you must understand who your customers are. If you approach marketing without understanding the dynamics of your customers, much of your advertising efforts will be wasted. You may think that you want to sell to everyone who gets on the Internet, but your customer base is more likely to increase if you are aiming your marketing efforts at the characteristics of the people who are going to have an interest in your product or service already. In other words, if you are marketing sheet music for the dulcimer, you probably won’t find too many customers in the bass guitar music web sites, so if your advertising is limited to the wrong site, you are less likely to make money online.

Price it right

Related to the advice to know your market is the idea of pricing your product correctly. You don’t want customers to look at the product or scroll to the bottom of the web page to check the price and go on to another page. You won’t commonly get into a price discussion if the customer believes it is way too high for the item or service. The customer wants to get the best possible price on the product and so does the seller, usually there is a significant difference between the want of the customer and the price of the product. You can’t make money online if the customer is not willing to pay the price you set.

Ask them again

Repetition is often the only way to turn a visitor into a purchaser and make money online. When a customer sees a business name several times, they are more likely to gain name recognition through consistent viewing of your company name or logo. When it comes time to purchase the product in the normal course of living; the effective advertising plan will make sure to ask the targeted consumer to purchase the product using more than one means of expression.

1. Flipping Websites – Also called as Virtual Real Estate. You buy websites that are being sold at a cheaper price and revamp the site to maximize its potential. The main goal here to work on improving the site and then sell it for a quick cash.

2. Squidoo Lenses – Creating lenses or pages at squidoo is fairly easy and should take about 30 minutes or so. After that, you simply start adding and promoting your affiliate products. Since Squidoo lenses rank higher in google, it brings in more traffic and more chances for people to purchase items using your squidoo pages.

3. Image Hosting Site – Bandwidths are getting cheaper these days.. so you can just set-up an image hosting site. Lots of people would want most of their images hosted on other servers (think myspace images being used on commenting) .. high traffic would do wonders on CPM ads.

4. Get Paid to Blog- Try Smorty-Get Paid to Blog or similar programs. You do not need to promote anything or wait for anyone to click on any link for you to earn something. Once your post has been approved, you get paid right away.

5. Sell links at Tnx.Net – take advantage of your high ranking PR site or your average rate of site visitors by selling text links on your site. This is a good opportunity for publishers to monetize their sites and for advertisers to drive more traffic to their sites, as well as improving search engine listings.

6. Blog Network – Most of us already have about more than 5 blogs at the moment.. but did you know that this is also a good way to earn money online by selling text links on your blog network? There are registrars that gives a huge discount when buying bulk domains plus everything can be done automatically when you use a script.

7. Proxy Sites – no maintenance needed. The simpler the lay-out the better.. just make sure you do get to blend your ads well. Most Schools and workplaces don’t allow leisure internet surfing anymore thus there is a continuous demand for new proxies each day.

8. YouTube Videos – Make a channel related to your sites content then upload YouTube video units with embedded Google adsense ads.

9. Advertising on your Site – Earn extra by looking for advertisers on your site. Look for advertisers who have the same niche as yours as they would most likely be willing to gain extra exposure this way.

10. Sponsored Reviews – All you have to do is to write reviews about products and services being offered to the public. Most companies are taking this route since this would greatly leverage targeted traffic.