Well I have 2 side businesses. These are:

1) Graphic Design Services

2) Professional Magician and Entertainment Agency

Both businesses I have seen double in income this year based upon a new interest in marketing and a new understanding of active style marketing. I explain active style marketing in another post but can go back over it should you want me to.

In my graphic design business, the first step was making sure I had a quality product to offer and to establish a niche market or target market I was looking to work for. In my case I decided on 2 main target markets. This was entertainers and small businesses or start ups. The reason for the entertainers was because I am a magician and so i understand the marketing and design needs of the entertainers. I can not only speak the language but I understand their needs. This gives me the marketing advantage.

Small businesses became a target for me because i wanted to focus mainly on logo and identity creation. new businesses or start ups are the ones mostly in need of logo and identity creation and would have more of a need for what I could offer to them. Larger companies I would have a harder time getting into because they tend to go with well known larger design firms.

So the first step for me was to really understand who I wanted to target and why and figure out what aspects of myself I can offer. The next step was to get my materials in order. By this I mean you MUST have good marketing and promotional materials. keep in mind that often times, the first impression you make on anyone is the promotional materials you send out. Make sure they are top notch and reflect your business in the best fashion possible.

The next step was getting people to know who I was and learning all I could about marketing and applying it directly to my business. I also had to realize to NOT be afraid to try and fail. You will fail, but the success-minded person learns from failure and figures out why it fialed and tests an idea again and builds from it.

in my design business, it ment that I needed to create a lead generation list. This would be a list of all possible prospective clients I thought would meet my target market criteria set up for my business. In this case i searched for entertainers in my area. I searched for start up and small businesses in my area. I created this list of contacts ands names and made sure to enter this into a contact management software.

I use ACT and have found it works great for me., I enter every single contact information into ACT and can use it to keep track of sales, coorespondence and even do mail merging for marketing e-mails etc. It works great.

Now once I had this list, I could then begin marketing to these people. In active style marketing, you do not wait for the person to call you, you actively go and get them and let them know who you are and what you are all about. You build relationships with these people and in so doing your perceived value goes up as well.

I will leave it at this for now and can go on or answer any questions you may have on this. There is a lot to it but this gives you a general idea of how I started.