No matter how small or new your home business, it is never too soon to start thinking about your brand image.

Brand image?

You may think that brand image is something that matters for consumer products like Coke or Chevrolet. What does it have to do with a small -- maybe one person -- real world or internet business operating off a kitchen table or out of a spare bedroom?

Pretty much everything.

About time my brothers and I hit high school, my mother came up with a new catch phrase.

¨Remember who you are and what you stand for,¨ she would tell us as we would head out door.

Good advice for a teenager.

Good advice for a business.

Your brand image is what your company means in customer´s mind -- what it can, and cannot, do for them.

It is who you are and what you stand for, as understood by your customers.

Especially for a small business, it is critically important that that image be razor sharp and crystal clear in customers´minds.

You cannot do everything. You cannot even do a lot of things. If you are lucky, you can do one or two things really, really well.

You want potential customers to think of you -- and think of you first -- when they need someone to do those one or two things.

So eliminate from your image, from how you present yourself, all those things you do not do. Present for customer´s consideration only those things you do do, and do especially well.

But that is only start. The next key is consistency -- staying on message.

There is a tremendous temptation for a small business to wander in way it presents itself, testing out a new marketing proposition, or marketing a little bit in a lot of different places.

Huge mistake.

You need to be one thing, and to be that one thing over and over and over again -- to point of numbing repetition.

One effective way that I have found in doing this is by using an alert box. When a visitor happens on to your site a box will pop up with a text message and an option(s) for your prospects. They can then choose to accept or cancel.

Some people may find alert boxes annoying but from an internet marketing stand point it is a dream come true! I have more than doubled my subscriptions just by using an alert box on my sites.

The key is to offer something for free and of value to your prospect in alert box to capture their email address.

Here is a simple script (put it between your head tags) that I use on one of my websites that has more than doubled my opt in subscribers: