Are you all but ready to start your own online home based business, but have no idea on how to market it on the Internet? I was just like you six months ago, wondering how on earth I could afford to pay for all the Pay Per Click advertising I thought I had to do. But then I realized that even the so-called Internet marketing 'gurus' used totally free resources to promote their websites and products. So if it was good enough for them, it had to be good enough for me!

Resource #1 - Wordpress:

Wordpress started life as a blogging platform, but has since developed into one of, if not the best Content Management Systems (CMS) there is. Wordpress is a collaboration of hundreds of programmers worldwide, with no one person actually owning it, which is why it's so good. However many internet marketers use it because it fully complies with what's known as Web 2.0, and that means that visitors to your site should benefit from an enhanced, interactive experience by being able to vote in a poll or leave feedback on a post...

Wordpress can easily be enhanced by plug-ins, which can add the functionality of a professional looking contact form, advertising manager, search engine optimization program, subscription form and much, much more, with most simply requiring you to fill in a few boxes with your website information, then click OK, and the plug-in does everything it needs to automatically. And, as I said previously, by using Wordpress' own hosting, it's free.

Better still, if you've ever had your own website before and decided it needed freshening up, or you simply had enough of it, then you'll remember how arduous it could be to change it all. Not a problem with Wordpress as you just pick a new theme and change your entire web site automatically!

Resource #2 - Forum Posting:

For the major search engines to rank your website high, you need to get one-way backward links to your website. One of the best and quickest ways is to participate in forums related to your web site topic. Try to find quality forums to post your questions or comments. Look for sites with a minimum Pagerank of 3 if possible. So-called authority sites with a Google Pagerank of 5 plus are the forum sites to go for if you can. Any backlinks from these sites will add more weight!

Resource #3 - Article Writing:

Even better than forum posting is article writing. You see the search engines don't like stale, old content. What they do want, is high quality, up-to-date information that is highly relevant to a searcher's query. The more relevant content a search engine provides, the more people will use it and the more advertising revenue the search engine can generate - and you thought you were simply writing an article!

If you are able to author a document that is relevant to your chosen topic, and then publish the document with a reputable article directory, the chances are that not only will it rank in search engine results way ahead of your own website, but actually persuade the reader to click on your resource box to visit your website or sign-up for your newsletter. Not forgetting that's on top of building good links back to your web site. In most cases, article writing is totally free and is one of the best ways to market any online business.

You may think that all of this is too much hard work and why bother when you could use Pay Per Click. Well, unless your web site conforms to Google's idea of a good site, you will pay more and get listed below ad's that do conform. Publishing articles, using Wordpress will please the search engines and keep you ahead of the game. Bottom line - your PPC costs will be lower and you may well rank higher than your competition for less cost.