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Some unique sales and marketing techniques for your Home Business websiteBeing a home business entrepreneur you presumably do not have a large advertisement budget set aside for the online promotion of your website. In fact the majority of home business owners have no budget at all of this kind set aside for online marketing activities. With that in mind, you will want to use the built in advantages of the internet that can provide a relatively level playing field to the "little guy". It is when you start to promote your home business online that you need to activate that guerrila marketers instinct and take advantage of many of some of the free methods of bringing eyeballs to your website. As you well know, your home business website is basically useless untill potential customers see it so this is the area you need to give particular attention. The internet is getting more competitive every day so it is important to utilize it's unique low cost marketing advantages. I mean, if you were to attempt to market your home business in print magazines ot Television commercials the cost would probably be in the tens of thousands of dollars. Compare that to the web where so many promotional activities are either free or very low cost. As someone who has experience in promoting a home business website with a virtually non-existent budget, I can say that the thing that has worked best for me is to spend extra time preparing my pages for the search engine robots. This process, which is given the fancy term "search engine optimization" is simply a mateer of making sure that the keywords that you are trying to rank high for are in your title, meta tags, and body of your website, as well as in your domain if possible. There are also free resources on the web that allow you to research keyword searches (overture tools and keywordcount dot com to name two) to help you in deciding which ones are best for you. This area of research is free, except for your time, so you can get a leg up on your competitors by spending time in targeting your keywords. Once you have your site optimized you can also spend time on free activities that can help your site rank high on the search engines, such as swapping links with other sites and submitting your site to the may general and niche directories and other link sites that exist on the internet. Exchanging links in particular is a time intensive activity that many of you better financed competitors will neglect to fully take advantage of. You simply need to seek out other related but non-competing websites that are willing to trade links and contact them with your reciprical link offer. You will have to sift through a number of uninterested sites to fing ones that will link to you but it is worth your time. The more links you have pointed to your home business site the more "link popularity" you have in the eyes of the search engines and therefore the higher your ranking will be on these engines. Since your own pages that link back to your homepage also count for link popularity, you can also spend time creating original content pages for your site and then make sure that they link back to your home page. The more you do this, then obviously the more "backlinks" you will have. It is also advisable to spend extra time submitting not just to the major Directories of the web such as Yahoo and Open Directory (DMOZ), but also to the samller niche directories, since these can also help build the vital link popularity you will need to climb the Search Engines. It would also be a good idea to write an article or two and submit it to the many content and article banks on the internet. Permission is granted to post these articles anywhere so long as the "resource box", which has a link back to your site, is included. This is also a very effective free method that will often be overlooked by your competitors. Posting to newsgroups, message boards, free-for-alls, free classifieds and other free link sites is time consuming but again, this can give you an edge. Also use the "signature file" in your e-0mail to promote your URL. These are jsut a handful of the techniques that can be effective in promoting your home business website for free. To go into more detail in this area, I have included an article by home business writer Vishal P. Rao of home-based-business opportunities.com. His article is entitled "5 Ideas for Unique (and Cheap) Marketing". More information is available about Vishal and his site in the bio at the end of this article: Home-based businesses generally lack the large marketing budgets of bigger companies, but a smaller budget doesn't have to stop you from engaging in clever and effective campaigns. When marketing on a budget, you need to "think outside the box" and go beyond the obvious marketing approaches. Direct mail and banner ads, for example, are one way to go, but if your competition is using similar methods, you need to differentiate yourself. |