Are you running in circles trying to market your home business, but feel that you aren’t connecting with your ideal prospects? Take a deep breath, clear you mind and make room for a new approach to marketing.

Stimulate your mind to begin working in the right direction by asking yourself the following three questions:

1. Who is my target group, and what are their needs?

2. What am I marketing?

3. How am I marketing this?

The importance of Question 1 lies within a basic rule of human interaction. People like to be understood. You will get a lot further with people if you know who they are, where they’re coming from, and what they need. By first identifying your target group and then addressing their specific concerns, you can sell them something that will be relevant and beneficial to them.

It’s a good practice to put yourself in the place of your target market. What frustration have they met with? Try to empathize with what they might be feeling. Empathy is a wonderful tool, in life and in business.

Never undervalue the role that emotions play in buying and selling. Don’t worry that it is unethical to appeal to emotions in marketing. It is simply realistic. Actions almost always follow emotions.

In answer to Question 2, you probably said, “I’m marketing my company’s products and business opportunity.” That’s true, in a sense, but what you really need to focus on marketing is yourself. Some of my more scrupulous readers may be cringing at the though of “selling themselves”. However, we all market ourselves every day. You are your own priceless commodity, and your market yourself to friends, family and employers on a regular basis.

If you doubt that, consider that there are over 28.7-billion* people out there selling business opportunities right now. Your target market could just as easily go with any of them. So the important aspect in your marketing isn’t the product or the opportunity, but the why.

Give them a reason to trust you. Present yourself as the type of sponsor they would like to work with. Be the kind of leader who is knowledgeable, helpful, informative and approachable. Make your name and face as close to omnipresent on the web as you can. Familiarity breeds trust.

Lastly, consider the ways you’ve gone about trying to reach your ideal prospects. I could write many articles on that subject, but I’ll include a few pointers here.

First of all, make use of all the free advertising space on the Internet. YouTube and Squidoo are just a couple of the avenues you can use to make your face, your name and your business familiar on the web. You could also invest in banner ads that appear on certain sites, or use a pay-per-click service, such as Google Adwords.

Articles are a great way to promote your home based business. Write on topics of interest to your target market, and keep in mind the kinds of things they might be typing into the search engine boxes. Those things are the keywords that you need to incorporate into your title and text.

If article writing reminds you too much of those college term papers, you can outsource your writing projects using a service like Elance that can connect you with thousands of freelancers.

Use online article directories, such as EzineArticles and GoArticles, to spread your information throughout the Internet. Remember to update your content frequently, so that the search engines will continue to scan your material.

Reassess your marketing techniques frequently to keep your approach fresh and your name in Google’s sights.

*Statistic from the Direct Selling Association.