Being the boss of yourself is a dream for numerous people; it is though a big step, especially if you are used to work under someone else. However daunting it may sound, being self employed has many advantages.

Needless to say, you have more freedom and flexibility. You will not be working under the strict surveillance of your boss and you won’t have to put up with incompetent or annoying colleagues and supervisors. You can adjust your time schedule the way that suits you the best. If you are sick, you can stay in bed all day without feeling compelled to find someone else to replace you.  You can manage your time the way you want, adjusting the work to fit your life, rather than the opposite – which we need to do when working for normal companies and businesses. 

You can control and determine your personal and business development the way it suits you. You will not be obliged to follow your boss’s orders, or learn things that others want you to learn. You can do what you have always wanted to do: if your dream was to set up a particular kind of business, own a café, start an online business, or a home based business, you can actually do it.

You will have time to spend with your family. Being self employed doesn’t mean that you don’t have to work; on the contrary: the more you work the more you can potentially earn, but you can always determine when not to work. You can take off of work if it needed, so as to go to your kids’ game or theatrical show, spend some time with them while they are at home, and spend some quality time with your partner. You can also choose when to go on holidays or take some time off. You are the one who decides.  Being self employed you can keep all the money that you earn. You are not on a salary anymore, which means that you are more motivated to work harder, since the bigger amount will end up in your pocket. If you are working as a freelancer or you are producing some intellectual work you can keep the material, as your intellectual property.

Self employed people usually do not have a limit in their earnings, unless they decide to. If you want to set a monthly goal, which is realistic and can bring some good revenues, you are completely free to do so. 

A great step to consider when creating your advertising strategy and planning the extent of your advertising budget, is to learn what your competitors are doing.

Here are a few guidelines:

• Do you see ads of your competitors in the local newspaper regularly? If so, call the newspaper and ask for the retail display-ad rate in order to find how much the competition is spending in advertising.
• Do you hear competitor’s radio commercials frequently? Call the radio station’s sales department and ask about its ad rates. A salesperson will likely tell you accurately what your competition is spending so he can talk you into doing the same advertising effort.
• Does your weekly mail bring brochures or coupons from your competition? Again, visit the vendor of the mail pack and give her these coupons to learn what those ads cost.

Why should you need to know what your competition is spending in advertising? Because this information provides you some basis for planning your own advertising budget.  Forewarned is forearmed, which in this case also means that gathering information about the other competitors helps you make a measured judgement as to how much you have to spend in order to compete effectively with them. If you own a mom-and-pop diner, you may have a tough time gathering enough budgets that can compete equally with the monster-size restaurant – but don’t panic.  Simply outspending the other competitors (or even attempting to keep up with them) is not the complete answer.

You may be happy to know that you can spend a lot less in advertising than your competition and still make more of a lasting impact by being more imaginative and creative with both your media buying and your message. You can make up for a lack of capital with an abundance of diligent media negotiation and creativity. You can also make your usable advertising budget stretch if you don’t throw any of it away on irrelevant media platforms that brings you insignificant business opportunities.

Regardless of the limits of your advertising budget, and whether you are trying to reach broader audience and prospective buyers, accept this as a given: You can afford to advertise in mass media. The media may, initially, appear to be costly. But, regardless of the advertising expense (which may be a lot less than you think), when you want to reach many people, it’s the smartest way you may spend your money.  What you cannot afford to do is fritter away a small ad budget on refutable media, like the a bunch of ads you get in your mailbox each day, that are better suited for wrapping vegetables than they are for attracting new buyers to your business.

What you are currently selling helps you decide what media ads you should be getting.  Are you selling car tires? Then make printed ads your primary media, since you have to list all those different prices, sizes, and brands, in those tall columns. You can also call public attention to your printed ads with good radio spots. And, if you need to show how tidy and exquisite your shop is, buy some TV commercials. Use direct mail, if it’s a stand-alone and unique piece for you alone, can be reasonably effective as well.

On the other hand, if you are selling professional and expert serviced such as financial management, accounting, or consulting, then you should look at talk, news, or a specific radio format favored to by business society. If print is included in your ad planning, then buying ads in the local business section or the business journal or main news spots of your local newspapers are good investment.

If you are currently selling beauty and cosmetics products or run a nail or hair salon, you have to reach out your target market by purchasing on radio station that can prove accurately to you their audience segment includes mostly women. They also read the business and economy pages in great numbers, also the style, home, entertainment, society, and politic news sections. And numerous of television shows and even the whole cable stations, are aimed toward women – for example, the Women’s Entertainment (WE), Lifetime network, Oxygen, and many more. 

What I am getting at right now is that you need to narrow your marketing focus to get a good estimation on the effective amount you need to spend in advertising, by figuring out the primary market segment. There is no sense in seeking the shotgun approach when accurate sniper rifle shots can get more of who you are looking for and you can get that for less time and money. If you are selling female-oriented products, you do not want to waste too much money advertising to male consumers, and vice versa. Of course, you will get some spillovers, and you cannot do anything about it.  But targeting your media purchases as narrowly as possible, you may save some money in a big way.

This question is always a very tough one. A great place to start when you are setting a marketing budget is in examining your business goals.  If you seek to become the Big Dog Company – that is, if your driving aspiration is to elevate your business establishment into an industry-leadership spot and blow your competition away – It means you have to spend a lot more cash than if you’re content with just getting by. I make the assumption that you need to have more success than just getting by – you would not be advertising at all if you did not want your business to prosper and grow. But to achieve the kind of success and profit you are after, you need to make an ad budget. 

Over half of new companies fail within their first a couple of years. This gloomy statistic is probably caused by some factors, but a lack of cash (working capital) is usually the dominant factor. Most companies start out with great desires and limited capital, and it is the hand-to-mouth reality of start-up businesses that kills most of them. When fresh entrepreneurs open up new businesses, they frequently forget to set aside enough fund for an effective ad budget to get their brand and name out there. You can devise a better mousetrap, but not having adequate working capital to afford to tell the whole world about your product is like trying to tow a leaky boat with a rope.

A company may spend as much as ten percent of gross revenue on marketing and advertising. For many people, this percentage may seem too high, but some businesses must invest that amount for advertising purposes in order to compete in highly saturated market. On the other hand, some businesses spend two percent or even less on advertising and in the case of very small enterprises; some don’t even have that much on a sustained basis. Many small businesses spend between two and seven percent of their gross revenue on advertising, though some spend as much as ten percent.

Percent of gross revenue is a very handy budgeting tool, but it can leave a start-up business owner with inadequate exposure. Start-up business owners often must allocate a percentage of projected gross revenue and overspending in the introduction of their business to develop the business operation to a profitable level.

You may use the above figures as basic guidelines to help you allocate your own advertising budget, but do remember that each business is unique and different. What works for a company may not work well for another. When in doubt, abide this simple rule: Spend as much cash on advertising as it takes to create and sustain a lasting impact in the marketplace, but don’t invest so much that you put your business into financial jeopardy.  Begin the process of allocating a budget by trying to find some answers to these following questions:

• How large is your business?
• How much annual income does your business generate? 
• What do you seek to accomplish with your advertising efforts, and how much will that cost?
• What are your competition expenses?

If you are in a highly competitive market, such as clothing boutiques, cell phones, car sales and restaurants, you have to step up to the plate with really serious bucks in order to hit numerous homeruns in the market. Your competitor is spending their brains out, and you need to do the same. But then, if your company enjoys a niche status in the market, if you provide service or merchandise that people cannot get elsewhere, certainly you can get away with much lower advertising budget.

If your budget allocation is too limited to make a lasting impact in the market on a weekly basis pr monthly, stash your money until you are having some big and special sale or event and then assault the media vigorously. In advertising world, you are better off having a loud voice once in a while than a weak voice each day.