If you want to build your home based business you will have to promote it online. There are many ways to go about online promoting that are free or very low cost. Unfortunately many of the free advertising programs, the one’s that look and sound great, are the least productive. Building your home based business using the proper tools is key.
Using Free FFA pages
Free FFA sites also known as Free For All sites usually have members that range from hundreds of thousands into the millions. The thought of advertising to millions of people using a simple add form can be very tempting especially because it is free.
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.
Free Traffic Exchanges
To me these sites are actually fun to use. You start out by having a certain number of free advertising credits given to you when you join. To gain more credits you simply click on advertisements placed by site members, usually hundreds of them. You are put on a timer and must wait 10-20 seconds between clicks. The credits you gain can be from 1 credit to 5 per click. The key to using these is the page you are promoting. Many people will advertise their main sales page or their personal website. That will often be the least productive site to use. Because members are clicking for credits your page has to be easy to read quickly. The best page to use is a “Lead capture” page or a Splash page. The benefits of your program and what it will do for the reader must be main function. Using a sign up form is a must so you can capture the prospects name and email address, Requiring to much information will cause them to leave quickly. These sites can be productive but spending hours to click for credits can be a waste of truly productive time.
Article Marketing
The effects of writing just one article will be seen for years to come. When you submit your article to one of the major article sites that article will be made available for publishing on thousands of sites. With time your article will appear on hundreds of web sites all with a back link pointing to your web page. It is not a quick way to promote your home based business but it is the surest way to build your business for the long term. Not only does it promote your business through backlinks it can also build your reputation as the go to person on your subject. This will build not only your reputation but your site visitors as well. Because an article can be published years after it was written it have a long term affect.
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.