You’ll probably never hear it put quite this way, but the fact is a fuzzy product idea with a clear market and a well thought out marketing plan is far more likely to succeed than an exquisitely defined product with a fuzzy market and no marketing plan.

Engineers, academics,and enthusiastic entrepreneurs are prone to come up with great product or service ideas without giving a thought to whether there’s a market need, how they are going to promote it, whether people can or will buy, and whether the product will be competitive.

Back in the old days, when people actually left their houses to shop, merchants would spend big bucks developing beautiful shops. All too often though, come time for the grand opening and marketing roll-out, they’d be out of money and the shop would try to survive on the occasional passersby. If the shop was located in a particularly busy place (location, location, location), this sometimes even worked. But more often, the owner had to go out and beat the bushes or die a slow agonizing, expensive death.

With more than 100 million websites online now, internet businesses can’t hope for the occasional passerby. So, more than ever, your real business is marketing. You can have the greatest web site in the world, but if no one knows it exists, you’ll be just another ‘404 error, site not found’ in no time.

With a small marketing budget you really can’t afford to make mistakes—which basically means you can’t afford to experiment. We tried a small ad in a major metropolitan magazine, to the tune of $6,000, and didn’t get one response. Not one! We might just as well have flushed the money down the toilet.

So here are some ideas for no-cost marketing:

1) Be sure the major search engines know you exist. Our flying business generated almost two thirds of it’s revenue from the web. Of the search engine generated traffic, Google accounted for 60% of it, Yahoo 20%, MSN 10%, and all the rest added up to another 10%. In other words, make sure Google and Yahoo know you exist and don’t waste time and money on others.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a whole new industry, demanding both art and science to be effective. Rummage around the web and read all you can and what others are doing, then do it too. One of our favorite blogs on the topic is here. His SEO book is quite good, but the blog offers lots of free advice as well.

2) Make sure your meta tags are well thought out and done properly. Some search engines use spiders that search your whole web site to create their own indexes, and some just use your meta tags. Google tends to focus on the extent to which other sites link to you.

3) Read up on how to write web page copy. What you say, and in particular how you keywords occur throughout your text, makes a big difference in your Google Page Rank. If you’re not familiar with Google Page Rank, read up on it here and here.

4) Don’t forget to add alt tags to all your images. These can also make a big difference in Page Rank.

5) Go to the owners of complementary web sites—even folks that would otherwise be competitors if they were inside your market area–and offer to exchange links. Focus on those sites with Google Page Ranks higher than your own. If you can, try to get a link from one or more organizations with a .edu and .org URL.

6) Write articles about what you know and submit them to free PR wires and article marketings services that will propagate them across the web with your URL in them, of course.

7) Being involved and networking is nothing new to marketing. They say that word of mouth is the best way to go. In the cyberspace that means comment in blogs, post on message boards, and every time you do, make sure you leave people a way to check out your website.

8) Do something newsworthy (e.g. low cost product or gift certificates for a charity) and when you do, send press releases to newspapers/magazines. Make sure your website is the focus of the ’stunt’ and make sure your URL is prominently part of the releases you send out.

9) If you have a MySpace account, announce URL through a bulletin. This is a fairly passive, non-offensive way to let all your contacts know that you’re online.

10) Craigslist.org is a great place to post a free classified ad if you’re selling a product. Announce that you are selling art, and let potential customers know where they can see your art online, for example.

11) If you have a MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, or any other type of social networking account, make sure to post your URL.

12) Email signatures, and instant messenger profiles are the modern day equivalent of a business card. Include your URL in your email signatures.

13) You need customers before you need business cards. That said, while business cards might seem old fashion to some people, a lot of people still use them. These card board rectangles hold information like your name, phone number, and address. You might as well include your URL on there when and if you print some.

14) Friends and family always want to know what you are up to, so send them an email. Let them know that you’ve opened an online business, and ask them to brag to their friends. It’s usually not the friends and family who make the purchases, but more so their friends and family.

15) Talk about your website on your blog. You do have a blog, right? Everything here applies to promoting your blog too.

We hate to be cynics, but we’ve found an awful lot of work-at-home deals that turn out be scams—legal perhaps, but scams none the less. If you went to make money—if you need to earn a living—Mary Kay, Amway and others like them are not the answer.

Multi-level-marketing (MLM) for example, sounds like a great way to make money and meet new people. But over and over they’ve been shown to only make money for a few people at the top of the pyramid. Their ads sound great, but when you read the fine print, there’s a fee to join, inventory to buy, or lots of other out-of-pocket expenses—which, of course, is how the company or person promoting the “opportunity” really makes money.

Unfortunately, the people who run these scams often target people who desperately want a better income, but can least afford to gamble. The most common scams we’ve seen include telephone services, envelope stuffing, home and beauty products, jewelry, business and consumer loans, and toys. They sound great on the surface, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who can show you proof that it’s worked for them. Oh, sure, there’ll be a few people that did okay (and they’ll no doubt be filling the comments section with screams of protest), but most people don’t.

Unlike franchises, which are required to jump through all kinds of legal hoops, business opportunities, as they’re called, are largely unregulated. Their ads claim you can add $3,000 to your monthly income while you sleep, for example. Yeah, right.

Unfortunately, the Better Business Bureau won’t be much help because the worst ones frequently change their name and address. So no one’s really watching out for your interests. And the fact is some of the Better Business Bureau practices should be reported to the Even Better Business Bureau (but that’s a topic we’ll have to remember for another post).

Actually, things got so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) put up it’s own web page warning about MLM scams.

Our advice to anyone thinking about any work-at-home program, or any other business opportunity that claims you can make an easy buck, check your state business opportunity laws and seek advice from an attorney or accountant before you sign anything. After all, if was all that easy and lucrative everyone would be doing it, now wouldn’t they?

If you can’t afford to hire an adviser, check with a local college and university. They often have free clinics and other resources for small businesses. At the very least do a good online search, and stop by your local library and ask the reference desk to find you what they can on the industry and company that will help you make a decision.

Sorry if we sound unusually cynical on these subjects, but Kate used to run an award-winning non-profit program aimed at helping low income single mothers start their own businesses, and she saw too many women disappointed by the false claims of business, loan, and grant promoters.

Once again, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

Do you work from home or telecommute? Here’s a technique that’s guaranteed to impress the folks back at the office.

No matter how good your business plan and projections are, there’s always something that makes that first dollar take longer to appear in your deposit slips: that DSL line they installed turns out to be flaky and you have to call the cable company for broadband instead, the guy who said he’d take anything you produce says it’ll be at least 90 days before he can buy, the training took longer than you expected . . . the list is endless. You’ll feel like you’re walking a tightrope.

As a rule of thumb, when your starting a new business, plan for 6 to 12 months of expenses including your own living expenses. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to find other home based business owners or telecommuters and ask them about their start-up experience. If you’re starting up a home-based business, as long as you’re not a potential competitor, fellow entrepreneurs are often very willing to help. You can even go so far as to ask another owner to look at your projections and see what they think. They often will reciprocate and offer to show you theirs. Also track down one or more business associations that you might join. Whether or not you join, the bigger associations are often a goldmine of useful information on topics like: typical financial ratios, vendors, specialized attorneys and accountants, tips and tidbits about how to succeed, etc.

If you have an existing job you can save every penny to build up a war chest for that first year of expenses. If you need to raise money, keep it simple. You don’t want a bunch of angry investors driving you crazy with well-intentioned suggestions (a.k.a. their half-baked, wanna-be ideas) while you’re struggling to make things work. Money from friends, family, and people who know you, like you, or love you, is probably your best bet. After that, assuming you qualify, a loan is your next likely source.

Above all, make sure your credit card debt is under control. And if it is, get a bunch of them and use them all just a little and pay on time every time. Build up the limit on those cards so that if you suddenly find yourself in crunch you have an alternative. But think of it this way, if you’re going to walk out on a tree limb, it’s nice to have another one to hang on to. If you break the limb off to use for balance like a tightrope walker, you can’t lean on it anymore . . . and there’s no net.

For more help on small business loans, angels and other private investors, venture capital, government loans and grants, preparing a business plan or financing application, and other money management advice, check out our all new, fully revised eBook, Finding Money—Secrets of a Former Banker.