If you’re just starting out online with your home business your top priority should be getting your website noticed. In order to drive traffic and create sales people have to know you are on the Internet and how to find you. The best way to achieve this is to get your home business noticed. Here are ten ways you can get the word out that you’re open for business.
1. Always try to create relationships with your website visitors. You can do this in a variety of ways including creating a chat room or an ezine. Once you capture their contact information follow up with your potential customers on a regular basis. However, there’s a fine line between attempting to create a bond with people and pushing yourself on them. Therefore, don’t inundate them with email follow-up messages. This will only turn them off and before you know it they’ll be unsubscribing from your list. A message every three or four days should suffice.
2. Remind your customers and potential customers to promote your home business website. Offer incentives for referring friends and family as well as other business owners. You can give them free e-books, software, reports or discounts on future purchases.
3. Create back links by writing articles on a topic related to your content or business model and post your editorials at the top article directories online. Also, join or create a link exchange whereby you post a link to a similar but non-competing website on your home business page and they post your link on their site.
4. Update your website on a regular basis with fresh content. The search engines love sites rich in content and they like to be fed fresh information on a timely basis. This is a great way to get your business ranked high with the major search engines.
5. Write a testimonial for a product you’ve used or a business site you’ve had experience with and in return they place a link to your offer on their site.
6. Operate a monthly contest or drawing for a free gift. This will bring people back just to see if they’ve won anything. People love free stuff and this is a great way to get word of mouth advertising because your regular visitors may spread the word about your business site to their friends.
7. Speaking of free stuff, include a page with free downloads for your guests and update it on a regular basis. This is also a great way to get return traffic and as we all know the more often someone visits the more likely they are to become paying customers.
8. Publish testimonials from satisfied customers on your home business page. This gives your potential customers confidence that this is a reputable business which provides good service and an excellent product or service. This also helps build trust which is a very important building block on the road to getting a commitment from your visitors.
9. Set up an affiliate program and encourage people to resell your product for a commission on every sale if they first purchase your offer. Provide your affiliates with proper marketing materials and training on how to promote your product.
10. Offer a money back guarantee and the longer the better. For example a 60 day warranty is more effective then a 30 day guarantee. This gives people the satisfaction of knowing there money isn’t gone forever if they purchase because if they change their mind for any reason they just have to call or email for a full refund, no questions asked.
These are ten very effective ways to get your home business recognized on the web and to help drive traffic to your website.