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?

Using Free FFA pages

These sites are known as FFA pages and often have members in the millions. They look very exciting because you can blast your advertisement to millions of people with one click. They make it easy to submit your site.

Adding your site to their add pages is very simple. You will have a 5 box submission form that ask for you Name, Email (not published in advertisement), Headline with limited number of words. Text box with limited number of words and a box for the URL you are promoting. Never use your main email client when submitting to the sites to avoid cluttering your normal email usage. Once you submit your add you can expect to receive hundreds to literally thousands of emails from members over the next few days.

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.

Using Traffic Exchange Sites

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.

Article Marketing

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.