Top Home Business Professionals all have one thing in common and that is they know how to promote their business. Regardless of what product or service you sell if you learn a few simple steps, you too will have great success.It all starts with how to promote your home based small business — it takes just three simple steps. You need to get the right message, to the right market using the right medium.Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can slack off on any of these three steps even if you are part time trying to earn extra money from home. You could have the best message in the world, but if you didn’t deliver it to the right market with the right media — you are sunk!Think about it — if you had killer copy for a product that would enable any golfer to drive 300 yards, if you put it in a scrap-booking magazine — you probably are only going to reach a VERY small portion of your audience — if any! This is a classic example of submitting to the wrong market, (tiny potential audience for your work from home company), and media, (again, tiny potential audience).The first step is to understand your market. Who are they, what do they want from life, what are their hopes, dreams and fears? Where do they shop, what kind of car do they drive, what sports do they play, what is their socio-economic situation? The more information you can imagine and research about your market, the more likely it is that you will be able to create copy that arouses their desire to purchase what you’re selling.Second, you need to craft a message. Your message should address what you KNOW you market wants but right now they don’t have it. If your golfer who wants to hit his drive 300 yards every time, right now he probably hooks or slices it 200 yards and is embarrassed by ending up on the wrong fairway. He is tired of searching for lost balls and wants to “drive like a “macho” man!” Your message needs to uncover his current “pain”, then show a way your product will provide the solution. Finally, your message needs to provide the security of some type of guarantee.Third, you you need the right media. You probably are not going to want to use Ladies Home Journal as the media to deliver the message to your “manly” golfer. He probably reads Golf Digest and wouldn’t be caught dead looking at Ladies Home Journal. He probably reads the sports pages in the newspaper. He probably watches golf on ESPN. Yes, some of the media I just mentioned would be pricey, but there are great ways to use social media and blogs to reach people just in that target market.Whatever your top home based business is trying to sell, you would use the same three step method every time. At home based business professionals take the time to really work on their promotions because if you’ve got wimpy promotions your sales are probably not doing anything close to what you projected. But if your home based small business has Ferocious Promotions, you’ll be doing just fine.There you have it — market, media, message. Get them all right and you’ll hit a home run…. or a three hundred yard drive!

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.