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?
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.
The submission form has a top box for your “Headline” a second box for your text and a third box for the URL of the site you are promoting. They ask for your name and email address but your email address is not published in your advertisement. It is though given to the other members of the FFA site to use for advertising their product. You can expect to get hundreds and thousands of emails from site members all promoting what they have to offer. If you use these sites use an email address that is not your main email, gmail and others are good for this.
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.
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
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.
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.
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