When you start a home business, it is only natural to get excited about the marketing aspect of it. However, if you want your marketing efforts to be successful, you are going to want to make sure you do not accidentally come across as being obnoxious. Obnoxious marketing tactics are one of the biggest mistakes a home business can make and if you want your home business to thrive, here are some marketing rules to live by.

Know When to Back Off

When it comes to marketing your home business, persistence is a must. However, while you should definitely be perseverant, you should also know when to back off. If someone starts to sound annoyed with you, do not keep pushing them. If you push someone too far, you will gain negative word-of-mouth exposure for your home business rather than gaining a client or customer.

Avoid Car Lot Advertising 

You know those cheap car lot commercials where some cheesy guy is reading from some dreadful script? I do not care how comical you think those commercials are, you do not want to model your home business marketing tactics after them.  

Think about it, do you really take the car lots that use that type of advertising seriously? I don't and neither do millions of other rational consumers. If you want your home business advertising to make a good impression, do not go the route of shoddy for your advertising needs.  

Keep Clear of Pop-Ups and Spam 

Internet advertising is great, unless you are doing it in an obnoxious fashion. If you want to advertise your home business on the Internet, by all means go ahead. However, if you are thinking about utilizing marketing methods such as pop-up ads or spam email, you had better think twice. 

Imagine you are walking down the street and someone you do not even know shoves a flyer right in front of your face and screams about an offer from some business you have never even heard of. What are you going to think about that business? Probably nothing good. Well that is exactly what pop-up advertising does. It shoves something in someone's face when they are not expecting it and they definitely do not want it. 

As far as spam goes, you might as well send the recipient a message saying "I participate in substandard and unethical advertising practices" and hope for the best. I am not saying you should not utilize email advertising, but legitimate email advertising is a heck of a lot different than spam. With legitimate email advertising, you only send emails to people who have opted into your mailing list or to people who have requested information from you. With spam, anything goes.  

Keep It Above Board 

Feel free to be creative and unusual with your home business marketing campaigns, but make sure you keep everything above board. Advertising on the forehead of some bald guy is edgy, yet fun. However, try advertising on the belly of some bikini-clad babe and you are likely to offend a lot of potential customers.  

Do Not Use Misleading Advertising

When creating the marketing material for your home business, never do anything misleading. Nothing will demolish your reputation and your home business faster than deceitful advertising. For example, imagine your home business is holding a contest where the winner will receive a certificate for two nights of hotel accommodations that you paid twenty-five dollars for. Just because you think those hotel accommodations are worth $250 does not mean you should advertise the contest as having a $250 grand prize.  

Not only is it misleading, but the contest winner may create some seriously bad publicity for your home business if they choose to get loud about it and make the deception public knowledge. Nothing is worse for a home business than bad publicity from a consumer.  

Think First, Then Act 

Just remember, when creating your home business advertising, think about how people are going to respond to an ad and what they are going to think about it before you actually use it in your marketing campaign. If you think it is going to upset your target market, you probably want to opt for a different marketing tactic.