One of the most difficult challenges facing most internet marketers, especially if you are a newbie, is how to promote your home-based business website.
Some choose to try the “paid” route, but if you have no experience in internet marketing, how do you know which advertising program is the right one for your website? You could end up wasting money on advertising and just get a few sales, if any at all.
Others look for free or low-cost marketing methods to avoid over spending their budget. However, if you aren’t familiar with the ins and outs of internet marketing you may end up failing to generate any sales. True, you won’t have wasted any money, but you will have wasted a lot of time, which is more precious than money because it can never be redeemed.
So, let’s look at a few free and easy methods of promoting a home-based business website.
1. Set up blogs and feeder sites. Your best choice is free services such as Blogger, or WordPress to create one or more blogs that support your main website. This allows you to segment your niche market into sub niches and use each blog to promote one specific sub-niche. Whatever blogging strategy you adopt, join Technorati and register your blog with them. Technorati is the Internet’s biggest search engines for blogs.
2. Squidoo: This is a free resource where you can set up a single page site, called a “lens”. The idea here is to create a series of closely focused lenses on Squidoo, one for a different area of your market niche. Use the lenses to provide background information and advice relating to your niche market.
Squidoo lenses can be set up in ten minutes and will attract visits from other squidoo members. You can make an excellent lens in 40 minutes or less and they do quite well on the search engines.
3. Set up a Twitter account for your business. Then search for Twitter users who may be interested in your market area and follow them. Some will follow you back. Offer value to your followers by tweeting tips and advice about your niche. Be nice to them by retweeting interesting tweets to generate goodwill. When you update your website, or blog, make a Squidoo lens, etc. post a link to it on Twitter.
4. Social Networking Sites: Apart from Twitter, make sure you have a business presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. If you already have a personal account on Facebook and want to keep personal and business activities separate, set up a Facebook business page and use the privacy settings to keep them apart.
5. Go Local: One of the great things about the Internet is that it gives you a worldwide market. Even so, you should not neglect your local community. It’s highly possible you may find it much easier to establish yourself as the local expert simply by ensuring that your web business is visible in the community. All you have to do is set up an account on Google Places and Yahoo Local.
6. Offer a Service: For example, if you enjoy writing you could offer this service on a site such as elance.com. This is a great way to build your reputation and your business, and generate some income at the same time. As you develop satisfied customers you will find that you have created a good lead in to introduce them to your major business services.
7. Write Articles: Make it a habit to write articles and distribute them to article directories such as EzineArticles. Post a link back to your website and offer an incentive for the reader to click through, such as a free report
8. Whenever you create a new product or service, publish a press release using a service such PRLeap or PRWeb.
9. Email Signature: Set up a signature file in your email account with a link back to your website with a brief, catchy, publicity phrase about what you do. Update it often and set it so it will appear on the bottom of you emails.
These are 9 free and easy ways to promote your home-based business website.
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