There are many people every day jumping into the online world. 
With more and more people using the internet the floodgates of 
internet users are opening wider everyday. But how, as a home 
business owner, can you expect to compete with the "big dogs" 
of the internet and dip your cup into the profits as well?

There are a ton of tips and tricks that people will tell you 
are the "best" way to advertise your home business... But do 
them incorrectly or choose the wrong methods and all you’ll 
really end up doing is increasing your frustration, not your 
traffic or your sales.

I remember back when I started my first business (not online) 
it seemed like almost everyday someone was willing to offer me 
a great deal to advertise my business. Of course with all these 
different resources out there some of them had to be more 
effective than others. The only problem was .... HOW Do I Tell 
Which Ones? I had limited resources and certainly couldn’t 
afford to give them all a try, unless I just wanted to cross my 
fingers and hope they worked so I wouldn’t go out of business!

Thankfully, today’s online world provides home business owners 
with a variety of different marketing techniques, and each can 
be as profitable as the next. As a business owner you simply 
have to decide what you are willing to invest in your business, 
and which will have the best return on your investment

Let’s run through a few of the most popular types.


Paid Banner (CPM + CPC) and Paid Text -

Banner ads you can pay for as CPC(cost per click) or CPM(cost 
per every thousand times banner is displayed) usually placed 
in a high traffic area on a site that causes visitors of that 
site to see it and visit your site.

Paid Text advertising is similar only the ad is in the form of 
a text link usually off to the sides (or at the top in search 
engines like Yahoo! And Google) If you are going to use this 
kind of advertising make sure you pick the sites you place 
your ads on carefully (popular sites will be expensive but you 
should get more clicks and smaller sites will be cheaper, but 
often with little or no results)


E-mail lists –

Programs or services that will get your link out to many 
different internet users. These can be good if you have a very 
widely used type of product. The negative to these lists is 
that with new e-mail features often these types of messages get 
marked as spam and are disregarded by the intended recipient.


Free Traffic Generators –

Traffic generators like Traffic Swarm can be a great way of 
just getting people to go to your site. There are some that 
you can pay for that will guarantee you a certain number of 
visitors for a set price. Problem is that most of the people 
that are now visiting your site aren’t really interested in 
your product or service. You might get one or two sales from 
extremely impulsive buyers but the rest only visit to earn 
credits or something of the sort from the home site. If you’re 
going to rely on this type of advertising make sure your 
visitor/buyer ratio is already high for your site.


Link Exchange –

This is by far the best way of driving quality traffic to your 
site... if you do it right! Before you even THINK about trying 
to exchange links with other sites there’s a few things you 
should know...

1. Download the Google toolbar – This way you will be able to 
   tell the page rank of any pages you want to exchange links 
   with (higher the PR the higher in the search ranking which 
   means more traffic)

2. Exchange links with only pages of PR 4 or higher. It will 
   help your page more by having a few PR4+ pages linking to 
   you than 10000 pages with no page rank.

3. Build your content FIRST! Don’t expect E-Bay to display your 
   link just because you asked them nicely! Webmasters want to 
   know they are linking to a quality site with a good amount 
   of substance. Focus on building your site before you ask 
   people to link to it.

4. Try to exchange links with other sites that have the same 
   key words as yours. Ie: There’s no reason to exchange links 
   with a flower web site if you sell telephone service

The only thing this type of advertising will cost you is a 
little effort. The greatest part of it is that the people that 
visit your site are people that are actually interested in 
your product or service, not just people stopping by to earn 
credits... and you don’t pay a cent. There are many books and 
sites on the web that can give you more details on how to 
effectively exchange links to your benefit.

Hopefully these tips have helped you narrow down the best type 
of advertising for your site. The one thing that hasn’t changed 
in the transition from regular to internet marketing is that 
you never really know what will work best for you until you 
try. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet and see what you 
like!

GOOD LUCK!