Most Home Business Owners realize that once they have created their website, the real work then begins. It is one thing to build a website ot hire a designer to do it for you, it is quite another thing to bring traffic to it on a consistent basis. This can be a tricky task. This is not to say that building, tweaking, tracking visitors and otherwise testing your website is not very important, because it is. In fact it is essential, because the amount of quality content that your website contains will be a significant factor in how many sites link to your site and how much traffic you recieve (also known as the stickiness factor of your site). But ultimately, the job of consistently promoting your home business website will almost certainly be the more challenging side of the coin for you, so this is where you will need to concentrate much of your efforts. Of course the easiest way to achieve your traffic goals is to hire an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Firm to do the bulk if the work for you. But you will still have to monitor their progress intensely to make sure you are getting your money's worth. And speaking of that, SEO Firms are usually relatively expensive for the home business owner and small business entrepreneur because they are primarily geared toward the the large and midsize firms which are generally better funded. Most home business owners I know cannot afford to pay $1500 a month for a typical service. Therefore most of you (and myself as well) will have to accept the fact that the marketing burden will fall on our shoulders. The good news is that you can probably generate adequate traffic to your website on your own with little investment. But it will cost you some time and effort. I recommend that you submit your site to directories first since they will take the most time to approve you. While you are waiting for their approval begin lurking and then posting to relative forums with your signature line (which contains your website url, of course). Only post if appropriate but if the forums are relevant to your business then there should be plenty to talk about. The forums will give your site instant links, which will not only provide traffic but also help your site get indexed in the major search engines faster. If you post to at least several forums you will not have to even submit your website to the search engines. In short, posting to forums will provide the initial thrust that will help you with the visibility of your site. The next thing you will probably want to do is get blogging. You can get a free blog with no ads at places such as blogurple dot com. Set your website as the permalink and every time you post to your blog you will be creating a new backlink to your site, even if it is just a short post. This will work even better toward your website's relevency if you post about subject matter related to the general theme of your site. Now you will want to repeat the process as time allows. Just was, rinse and repeat. Every time you do, you will increase your home business website's pagerank and link popularity that much more. |
