Tuesday, April 29, 2008

How To Market Your Home Based Business Online

By Stephen Meyer

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 advertising control panel will have a series of boxes. You will input your name, email address, Ad title, ad text and URL you are promoting. Remember to use another email address other than your main email client because you will get hundreds and often thousands of advertisements sent you by site members. The ad submission form will limit the number of words you can use so give it some thought before submitting.

When I first started advertising online I used FFA sites very often. I was excited over sending my advertisement to 10 million people or more. After a short time I realized it wasn't benefitting me at all. When I received hundreds of emails through my alternate email server I never read them. I deleted them as quickly as possible. I realized the other members were simply doing the same thing and the effort was nearly pointless.

Free Traffic Exchanges

Traffic Exchanges offer the member a way to advertise for free to hundreds of people. They can be enjoyable to use because of the way they are setup. You must surf for advertising credits and each site is on a timer. You can't go to the next site until the time is up or risk not gaining any credits. Many advertisements I've seen are nearly pointless because the advertiser has sent the visitors to a long sales page or a web site filled with to much information. Because the visitor is doing exactly what you are doing, surfing for credits they will not be on your page very long. They key to using these sites is first to have an attention grabbing headline and then the use of a Lead capture Page. The page has to have one focus, to gain the persons email address and name. Sell them on your idea as briefly as possible so that you can use your email program to actually sell the product. These pages are fun too use but there are more productive ways to spend your time.

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.

When you are finished writing your article you simply submit it to Article Directories who then publish it on their site and offer it to their members to use. This can be thousands of site publishers and if you have used Keywords in your article it will be found by those publishers whose site relate to those words. It is true Viral marketing because your article can be found on may sites and used by publishers. It takes a little time, often a month and longer, but one article can provide hundreds of backlinks pointing to your site. These links are more valuable than all the site optimization you could do.

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