Tips for Promoting Your Home Business Web Site
Sure, you have a Web site. But is anyone going there? Probably not if you haven’t done a good job marketing it. Time to step up and start generating some traffic. With Industry experts predicting that over 500 million domains will be active within the next 10 years, you need a solid strategy for steering customers to your home business web site. Here’s a quick how-to for getting noticed and driving much-needed traffic to your site.
First, you need to look good. Your home business web site can be simple or complex, but more than anything it has to be functional and clean. Make sure your site does what it is supposed to do - provide customers with concise, useful information about your product or service.
Once you have that covered, get in with search engines. They’re the yellow pages for a home business web site. To get the most traffic to your site, list with the big search engines Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Smaller search engines also get results from the big three so you’ll be covered in case customers visit less popular engines.
You should also try online ads. There’s no shortage of sites that will list your home business opportunity web site for free. To get the best exposure, place your ad on several (20 or more) sites and then repeat, repeat, repeat. Keep posting your ad every single month.
The main goal is to get links to your site out there. Try partnering with an affiliate business that will post links to your web page on their sites. Typically, you’ll pay them a commission or set fee based on the amount of traffic sent to your web site. Pay arrangements vary and can be based on the number of people who visit your site or the number of customers who purchase your product.
Another free way to get noticed is to have a blogger write about your home business. Don’t know what a blog is? Now’s the time to learn. Basically, a it’s a web log of information on a particular subject. Topics vary widely, so it’s important that you put in a little leg work and research the blogs to determine which ones might be interested in writing about your home based business. Send a short, personal e-mail to a few blog writers describing your web site and asking the blogger to write about it. Go to Technorati Blog Directory – it provides a listing of blogs by industry.
With all this new-media, we tend to forget about the old ways. Regardless of what internet editors say, people still read newspaper. Run ads in the classifieds of large and small newspapers, trade magazines and free weeklies. You can run locally or nationwide, depending on your needs.
Whatever avenue you choose, stick with it. One round of advertising isn’t enough. Keep checking to make sure you’re listed with search engines, keep emailing those bloggers and keep placing classifieds. Eventually, your web site traffic will soar.