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

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.

I have sent many advertisements using FFA sites without any measurable results. I use specific URLs in all my advertisements so I track effectiveness of ads. When I receive the hundreds of advertisements right after I submit my ad I simply delete them all very quickly, often entire an entire at a time. I never read them and I'm sure others never read mine. In my opinion your time could be better spent using a different method of advertising.

Using Traffic Exchange Sites

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.

Using Articles For Site Promotion

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.

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.