Building Traffic for Your Home Business Opportunity

Many newcomers to running a home based business rush to get their website set up. You've got that perfect domain name, the hosting company is all set up and working, you've put up your first few picture perfect web pages. Then all anxious and ready you wait, and wait, and wait…..no traffic. While it might seem to be a minor thing at first, no matter how great your website looks, unless you get visitors to your web pages, brother, you are not in business!How then does a new or existing internet business opportunity seeker get visitors and traffic to find you amongst literally millions of other similar sites? That my friend "is what it is all about"! In all honesty, it is not as complicated or complex as savvy marketing website owners might lead you to think. Also, in spite of what you might hear, it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg either. However, it does require that you understand "how" and "where" to go. This article is intended to help you along the way in providing some insights to both of these.

First and foremost is to submit your website for inclusion into the various search engines and web directories throughout the internet. These indexes provide listings of millions of websites returned as a result of searches by users seeking various topics, data, and information. Yours should be included in as many of these as possible.

The variations of search engines and directories continue to expand beyond belief. Some require payment under pay per click (PPC) advertising arrangements. These include such stalwarts as Google, Overture, MSN, etc.

You must be very wary and engage in PPC advertising with a great amount of caution. The cost of this type of advertising can quickly balloon to huge amounts if fail to carefully monitor and control your ads. If you are not convinced of this, there are countless forums and forum message threads about this topic.

The good news is that there are also numerous methods for generating traffic to your website which are free (or minimal cost). The "catch" is that they require your time, energy and effort. These include link exchanges, article writing, and participation in online forums, to name a few.

Link exchanges are a method of free exchange of "links" with other website owners. The method basically requires that you contact other website owners, allow them to list a small advertisement on your website, in exchange for a similar ad and link on their website back to yours. In fact, the major search engines, such as Google, give significant credibility to websites based on how many other websites link or refer to your web pages.

Although article writing is not for everyone, it can be fun and most certainly rewarding as a method for bringing free web traffic to your website. Website owners use these articles for "page content" to fill their websites with updated and current material. They gladly allow you to include your website link with your articles, in exchange for high quality content for their websites. The more articles you have published throughout the internet, the greater the amount of traffic your website will receive over time.

Participating in online forums and blog sites can be rewarding and fun. Not only will you have the opportunity to gain and share information with other website owners, you have the opportunity to build credibility for yourself, your expertise, and your websites. Over time, this method also greatly increases your website traffic.

My preference is to focus my time and energies on a combination or hybrid approach. That is, I have found success with using some PPC advertising with Google and Overture, combined with free promotion of article writing and online forum participation.

While these are not all encompassing and not guaranteed to bring traffic to your websites, employing these methods, over time, will help you establish a solid foundation in building your home based business opportunities and web traffic. Once these are established, the revenues and profits will follow naturally.