Promoting Your Home Based Business Web Site

Promoting Your Home Based Business Web Site

Industry experts are predicting 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, make sure you look good. Your home business web site can be simple or complex, but it must be functional and attractive. Make sure your site does what it is supposed to do - provide customers with concise, useful information about your product or service. Be wary of making things too complicated. The site should be easy to navigate or customers will look elsewhere. Your home business web site should also look professional. If you aren't design savvy, get some help and spend money on a good web designer.

Once you have that covered, get in with search engines. They're the yellow pages for a home business Web site. More than 80 percent of Internet surfers use search engines to find information on the web. 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.

Another good idea is online ads. There's no shortage of sites that will list your home business web site for free. To guarantee the greatest exposure, place your ad on several (20 or more) sites and repeat the process every month. Also, banner advertisements can be as effective as TV spots in increasing customer awareness of your business. First-timers may want to try participating in a banner exchange program such as LinkExchange. It connects your home business Web site to other company sites that have similar customer bases.

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.

Maybe you've heard of a blog but don't really know what one is. Now's the time to learn - bloggers are the hot new information medium. Basically, a blog is a web log of information on a particular subject. Their 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 business. Send a short, personal e-mail to a few blog writers describing your Web site and asking the blogger to write about it. Offer the writer something in return, for example, free product or a link back to his blog on your web site. Technorati Blog Directory 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 in 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.