Looking for ways to stretch your small business marketing budget? Simple and affordable ideas on ways to market your home business, including free and paid online advertising. The Internet is teeming with marketing platforms that don't cost a dime—you just need to know where to look.
 
In the last 5 years, there is a huge growth in the number of people who are quitting their 9 to 5 job & going to start their own work from home business. Even many of the companies are hiring their staff as sub-contractors or freelancers so that they can pass on less benefits to them.
 

The economic downturn & recession affected everyone. The result is many people are now looking to start their own work from home business.

In this internet era, there are enormous opportunities waiting for everyone & there was no better time than this to start a home based business. One can have endless possibilities. Street shops are becoming very costly & there importance is decreasing. Not any more they are needed unless you deal with huge quantities.

And now because you are operating from home, you can save thousands of rupees each month.

No matter, what’s the nature of your home business, you will deal with either a physical product or some services. But in any case, you will come across one of major factor and that is marketing & promotion. Without that you can’t run your home business. Marketing plays a very important role in your home business & it decides the failure or success of your home business.

So here we are going to learn the quick promotional ideas & techniques that you can use to promote your home business.

PPC Advertising

There are dozens of sites where you can place your PPC ads but 3 sites are most popular & they are Google AdWords, Yahoo search marketing & MSN adCenter. But more specifically its Google AdWords, where your business can get the best exposure. (Read tips on Choosing right advertising network for your business)

For every visitor Google sends to your business page, they will charge you some amount. This amount may be anything depending on your keywords.

You need to do a lot of research on the right keywords that can drive you potential customers. Useless keywords can increase your advertising budget. Refer these AdWords tips for small budget.

Use the three big local listing services

Registering your business with Google Places allows it to be found more easily on Google searches and it shows up on Google Maps. All you have to do is fill out the form and register, then get your business verified through their confirmation process, which can be done either with a phone call or snail mail. Yahoo! also has a big database of businesses called Yahoo! Local. It's free, and is certainly worth the few minutes it takes to set up. Microsoft's Bing has a similar service that's easy to sign up for.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Its one of my favorite way of doing promotion. It takes time but its cheaper & much better than Google AdWords. I target most of my small business sites using SEO techniques only.

Either you can get training for SEO from some good institute or hire some SEO company for your business. Its a good idea to do SEO on your own until your business get a boost.

There are many websites like SEOMoz where you can learn quality SEO & you can keep yourself updated with the changing trend.

Put up multimedia on YouTube and Flickr

YouTube provides a free way to distribute creative promotional videos, but in order to succeed you must put up content that people want to view and are relevant to your business—a simple ad will not work. A Flickr profile can also help by giving you one place to compile all the photos for your business, and allows you to link back to your website.

Social Media Marketing

Its one of the hottest place to advertise your website & create your brand. If used properly, it can drive immense traffic & targeted customers to your business.

You can use Facebook, you can use Twitter or you can use sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. to attract targeted traffic.

Its not possible to make all the promotional strategies yourself. Either you need to hire a social media manager or you can outsource this to some expert in this field.

Join a relevant online community and contribute

Every niche has communities online that you can get involved in. But just signing up for a forum and posting every once in a while about your business isn't beneficial for anyone, and will likely just annoy people. Actively contribute and build a rapport with the community, while keeping your business out of it. Passively promote your business by putting a link in your signature or mentioning it only when the context is appropriate.

Write Guest Articles

Its becoming one of best way for home business owners to get exposure & traffic. There are millions of bloggers worldwide. You can search for some of the popular bloggers in your industry & write guest articles on their blogs.

You can include your details in the author biography where their readers can notice you & your business. You need to very unique in your approach if you want to publish your articles on popular blogs otherwise your articles will not get approved.

There are many other ways than explained above for promoting your home based business on internet. Apart from this, you can also consider promoting your business offline through traditional methods like giving ads in newspaper, distribute pamphlets etc.
You can start from this blog, Try "Write for us".

I am sure you will appreciate the potential of advertising & put more efforts in promoting your work from home business.