How To Market Your Home Based Business Online

Promoting your home based business online is the number one way to build your business quickly. That is if you do it productively using the correct tools. Many online advertisements may appear to be terrific when in reality they are not the most productive. You want your efforts to always do the most good with the least amount of effort.

Free FFA Pages

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.

Adding your site to their add pages is very simple. You will have a 5 box submission form that ask for your 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.

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.

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.

Using Articles For Site Promotion

Article marketing is arguably the number one way to promote your home based business. Best of all it is very cost affective. Most articles can be written and submitted in a couple hours.

Because one article written making use of keywords can be published for many years it makes it the purest form of viral marketing there is. Despite the misconception that you must have a lot of writing skills to affectively write an article the fact is you don't.

You do need to have factual information concerning the articles subject so that you can build your reputation on the subject over time but no great skills are required. Most of us can carry on a conversation about subjects of interest and we all write emails to our friends and often personal letters to those we know. If you can do that you can write an article.

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.

Stephen Meyer provides many Internet Based Affiliate marketing programs and proudly helps New online marketers build their own home based business. To see his many marketing programs and small business ideas please visit Internet Based Affiliate Marketing