How To Market Your Home Based Business Online
In order to build your home based business you will need to market it both online and offline. Here I will discuss marketing it online and what can produce the greatest benefit with the least cost. While there are many ways to promote your home based business through free advertising not all of those ways will be productive. Sometimes what looks to be the most productive way is actually the least productive?
Free For All Sites
Free For All sites known as FFA sites can appear to be very productive. Most have extremely large user bases, often with millions of members. Nothing sounds better than advertising your Home based business to 1 million people and more for free. It is simple to submit to these sites.
The submission form has a top box for your “Headline” a second box for your text and a third box for the URL of the site you are promoting. They ask for your name and email address but your email address is not published in your advertisement. It is though given to the other members of the FFA site to use for advertising their product. You can expect to get hundreds and thousands of emails from site members all promoting what they have to offer. If you use these sites use an email address that is not your main email, gmail and others are good for this.
The problem I see with this type of advertising comes from my own behavior when receiving the hundreds of emails. I often just highlight as many emails as possible and delete them all very quickly. I don’t bother trying to read them because of the sheer numbers I receive. I am sure most members do the same thing. Also, I track all my advertisements using specific URLs and I have not once had a response even when sending many advertisements. In my opinion it is a waste of time.
Traffic Exchanges
I enjoy using Traffic exchanges because of the variety of advertisements I can see and learn from. You can advertise for free using the sign up credits and then clicking ads for even more credits. The time you must visit a site is put on a timer and you have to wait to click another ad. To use these sites affectively you must use a Splash page otherwise known as a Lead Capture page. The point of your page is to get the visitors name and email address. You do not want to try and sell them here. You only want to gain enough interest to get their information so you can sell them through your email or news letter campaign. Using your main sales page or web site will give you little benefit because the visitor will not be there long. Like you they are surfing for credits. These sites can be productive if used correctly but they can also be a waste of time you could otherwise use with better tactics.
Using Articles For Site Promotion
Article marketing is by far the number one way to promote your home based business. The good part is it can be done for free. Many people believe you must have a lot of skills to affectively write an article but that couldn’t further from the truth. It simply involves having knowledge about the subject you are writing about. If you can talk about a subject with your family and friends or can write an email you can also write an article. The benefits of Article writing are very long lasting. It’s common for website publishers to add articles to their web sites that were written many years earlier if the information is still applicable as it often is.
After you have written you submit your article to Article directories. There are some free tools available that can be found by doing a web search that make it easier to submit to multiple sites. Your submission is not the end of it. The Article directories will take your article and make it available to their members to publish on their sites. As time goes by your article can be found on hundreds of sites because directories will pass it on to other directories that in turn pass it on to their members. This creates valuable backlinks pointing to your web site that are used by search engines in evaluating your sites importance. The more back links the more importance and the greater your page rank. In building a home based business online this is the single most important factor you must have. Site rank means visitors and visitors mean sales.
