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

These sites are known as FFA pages and often have members in the millions. They look very exciting because you can blast your advertisement to millions of people with one click. They make it easy to submit your site.

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.

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.

Free 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.

Writing Articles

Article marketing is arguably the number one way to promote your home based business. Best of all it is very cost affective. Most articles can be written and submitted in a couple hours. Because one article written making use of keywords can be published for many years it makes it the purest form of viral marketing there is. Despite the misconception that you must have a lot of writing skills to affectively write an article the fact is you don’t. You do need to have factual information concerning the articles subject so that you can build your reputation on the subject over time but no great skills are required. Most of us can carry on a conversation about subjects of interest and we all write emails to our friends and often personal letters to those we know. If you can do that you can write an article.

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.