Last week we showed you how to prepare for traffic. Basically you were getting your “shelves” lined and ready. Otherwise you would have nowhere to invite people to introduce yourself and the value you have to share.

Now you are ready to send out the “invitations.” These invitations are more commonly known as advertising in business. How will people know your website exists? There are many options for putting the word out about your home based business.

Let’s begin with free ways of letting people know about your business. There are several ways to do this both online and off.

Business networking locally is a fabulous way to create a buzz about your business or a specific product you want to focus on. This technique is powerful and can be done free or can be done by joining business networking groups for a fee.

To network for free will involve a lot of patience. This type of networking is done wherever you go when you have mastered the skill of allowing others to do most of the talking. For example, when you are watching your child’s soccer practice with other parents the conversation may turn to a topic that perfectly matches what you offer in your business. You might casually mention that you offer a solution to the problem being discussed and give your card with your website url on it.

This technique may seem slow at first but in the long run it is one of the most powerful ways of driving traffic to your home based business. You will be building long term credibility and relationships with both casual networking and business networking in groups.

When driving traffic through membership in a business networking group it’s easy to have the appropriate opportunity to share about your business and what you offer. Word gets around when you have maintained your membership and established yourself as a long term, credible business owner.

A faster, easier way to drive traffic to your home based business website is free and is the technique of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To use this technique you would need to be sure your website pages were optimized with specific keywords that relate to your product. When people search online for that product or service, your website will be listed in the search engine. The goal with this technique is to make sure you know how to have your website listed in the top ten listings for the keyword of your niche focus.

The main keyword of your niche may have as many as millions of websites listed in the search engines. The best way to be sure your website is found is to drill down through your main niche to specific areas of interest within the main niche. For example, if your main niche is photography where there are millions of sites listed, you might optimize your website for portrait photography or pet photography. Then it will be easier for your website to be found when people type in those specific keywords since fewer websites will be listed. The more specific you are, the better.

Another free way to drive traffic to you home base business website is a technique which can be used both online and off. Write a press release to announce a difference your business has made in the community or a benchmark you have reached. The press release will not be about your business or product specifically but about something of interest to the community. You website can be given at the end when you are mentioned as the key contact person regarding the announcement. When submitting your press release to newspapers the editor will have the final decision as to whether it is put in the paper.

Online a press release is easier to have publicized. A good resource for putting your press release online is at http://www.prweb.com. There you can list your press release for free or pay to have it higher in the listings of press releases about your niche. This technique can result in thousands of visitors to your website.

A fabulous way to drive free traffic to your home based business website is to write articles of interest on the topic of your niche. These articles can be as short as 250 words or as long as 2000 words. Articles give people value before they have spent any money. At the end of your article, you can tell a little about yourself and give your website url. This url can be a specific one that goes to a specific web page in your website. After reading your article people will want to know more about your or the topic about which they were reading. They will click through to your website. You can submit your article for free to hundreds of online article directories for almost instant traffic.

Submit your articles to magazines offline as well as to article directories online. Magazine editors will often pay if they like your article enough. When you have written articles published in national magazines that are relevant to your home based business niche your credibility will soar. At the end of your article your website can be mentioned. Sometimes a url can be given within the body of the article as long as it is not mentioned as if trying to drive traffic to it.

There are many other free ways to drive traffic which we will go into further at a later time. Continue to visit often to discover more ideas for driving traffic including how to do it through social networking online through Facebook, Twitter, Joint Ventures, Affiliates, and other sources.

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What is social media? Social media is the newest trend on the Web, websites that allow those of us non-web designers to be able to post content, video, and other forms of information online. You may have heard it referred to in the press as Web 2.0.

Other terms used are social networks (MySpace, Facebook), bookmarking sites (Del.ici.ous, BackFlip), video/ photo sharing sites (YouTube, Flickr), blogs and blog communities (Blogger, MyBlogLog), and widgets / applications (Twitter, Digg).

Social media sites have the advantage of allowing businesses a better way of communicating with customers and prospects than ever before. No longer are business owners limited to advertisements in traditional media (newspapers, yellow pages, or magazines), or even on websites where we are unsure if anyone even looks at the ads.

Social Networks

A social network is a group of people who share a common interest or hobby that have come together online. They communicate through forums, email, or blogs to each other in the same network, as well as designing their own webpages (often with bizarre results) and posting photos and even videos.

Examples of these types of networks include the now infamous MySpace (mostly inhabited by pre-teens, teenagers, and musical bands), Facebook (which started out as a community for university students, but is now open to the general public), Marzar (a business network), and Last.Fm (music lovers).

Some companies have even created a place for other people to build their own networks. The best example of this is Ning.com where you can build your own social network using their basic framework. Ning has networks for firefighters, university alumni, wine lovers, movie buffs, archaeologists, beer nuts, Spanish speakers, and even pagans!

There are a number of business networks built along the same lines as the social networks, but they are designed for building your professional relationships. These business networks include: Marzar.com (a business resource portal), StartupNation.com (for small businesses, lot of great advice here), BizNik (a relative newcomer, but a tagline to die for, “Business Networking that doesn’t Suck”), Apsense.com (they include a business directory as well), and Zion5.com (which has a lot of network marketers onboard).

LinkedIn is an older business network, but it is not really built to be social. Both LI and Jigsaw.com are more of a network for making connections. This is good when you do not have a lot of time to be chatting online. If you do join LinkedIn, I suggest going over to Ning and joining in at http://mylinkingpowerforum.ning.com/ . Here you can talk to a lot of folks who value business relationships and referrals.

Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking services are a way for Web users to save, organize and search URLs of websites that they want to remember.

Bookmarks appear in Internet Explorer and called “Favorites”. It is a way to save web pages that you want to come back to at another time. The Firefox browser also allows you to save bookmarks. The drawback with these bookmarks is that they stay on your computer, and, if you switch computers, or are using a desktop somewhere else, you cannot get to those bookmarks again.

Bookmarking websites took care of this problem. This type of service allows you to keep your bookmarks on a specific server online, where you can access them from any online computer. In addition, you can share your bookmarks with other people, organize them into specific folders, or put your own tags on them. Or, you can keep your bookmarks private.

I use bookmarking sites to develop my personal brand and show my expertise. Another way of using them is to bookmark your websites so that they will show up on the search engines.

There are quite a few social bookmarking websites (it is known as “social” because you can share them with others). BackFlip.com (quite possibly the granddaddy of all the bookmarking sites) is a good place to start as it allows you to set up a daily routine of the websites that you visit most. My main bookmarking site is Yahoo’s Del.icio.us.com . Not only can you share and organize your bookmarks, but they also have a hot list on the home page, and if you have the Yahoo toolbar on your browser, you can save the bookmarks directly to your account. This has been a huge timesaver for me, especially when I find a great website and do not have the time to read all of it.

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Do you know your way around Web 2.0? We're hiring sharp people to work-at-home part-time doing social bookmarking and site creation for us. If you'd like to pick up some extra cash send us your "Web 2.0" resume with an introduction and some urls of sites that you have built. Send it to david(at)bigmoneyfreetime.com with "Social Media Maven" in the subject line. We'll be in touch!
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You must blog consistently if your business is to be successful. Are you resisting this? Let’s see if we can raise your belief in the power of blogging and as a result inspire you to commit to it consistently.

Only a few short years ago there was a constant “mantra” that stated, “If you don’t have a website, you are not in business.” Those who shrugged their shoulders at this notion are asking people "would you like fries with that?" today.

Think about it. When you meet an entrepreneur promoting his wares what is one of the first questions you ask? “Do you have a website I can check out?”

We have come to be conditioned that if a business owner does not have a website, she is not serious about her business. We look at the website to get a feel for the level of professionalism or commitment the owner has regarding the business.

Today you seldom see a business card, brochure, advertisement, television show, school system, anything that does not mention a website url on it. Even restaurants have websites and encourage people to sign up or register for topics of interest.

The same is now being said about blogs. Your blog can give you the credibility and visibility you need to maintain your “sticky-ness” in the marketplace. By that I mean to maintain long term loyal customers.

You are about to discover how easily you can create a blog if you don’t already have one and how to maintain consistency with it as well.

First let’s look at some benefits of having a blog from an organic traffic point of view:

1. Google and other search engines love to serve fresh content to searchers who use their search engines.
2. It’s easier to get a blog to a top position in the search engines than for a web page.
3. Many customers and potential customers check your blog daily since it is updated more often. They may see your website as static, much like a brick and mortar location that basically has the same “stuff” all the time.
4. From your blog you can prime people for a purchase and lead them right to the website page on your site to make the purchase while in the buying frame of mind.
5. It’s easy to create a blog and simply login and type up some information off the top of your head when you have been reading up on your industry.
6. You can lead people to other relevant products as an affiliate.
7. You may be discovered by a company that would invite you to lead a seminar for them.
8. The possibilities are endless.
9. Many of the free blogs available have a minimum of addons already installed in them. These addons automatically ping the search engines at the moment you publish a new post. The more often fresh content is placed on your blog, the more often the search engines are notified through this pinging. This helps the blog rise in interest and position.
10. It’s easy to have an RSS feed link on a blog also. This makes it simple for people to add your blog to a blog reader where they can be selective about the blogs they read daily. It keeps them from having to go to several different blogs as they are all showing updates at one location for the reader.

How to maintain your blog once you have it:

1. Some blogs allow for posts to be post dated so they automatically publish on the date you choose. This is a great feature when you want to have fresh posts daily and can only find one block of time to focus on writing for your blog. Write several post dated posts for the week and free yourself until the next week.
2. Write a review of what you have read on someone else’s blog that is relevant to your industry and put a link to their blog in your post.
3. When you read a magazine article that would be of interest to your audience share the information in your own words and how the information applies to your audience.
4. When a client or prospect asks you a question, answer it on your blog.
5. Make your blog your internet browser opening page so it’s easy to login and post effortlessly.

No blog yet?

Following are places where you can create your blog easily and quickly at no cost:

1. http://www.wordpress.com – Simply sign up and follow the instructions. There are countless stories of having thousands of visitors to blogs where the blogger simply posted new information daily without using any other technique for driving traffic. Wordpress blogs automatically ping search engines. They also have tags, keywords that are currently being blogged about so visitors to wordpress.com see and click on them.
2. http://www.blogger.com – This is a free google tool. Sign up and follow the instructions. It’s as easy as typing a document in Microsoft Word. Everything you need to make the font style, size, graphic, live links, adsense ads and more is right at your fingertips.

There are plenty of other places to create free blogs online as well, but this is a great start if you haven’t already put a business blog in motion. Are you still resisting? Still have complaints as to why it’s a problem? Let us know what they are. We will be happy to write out the solutions for you.

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The cool tools that I picked up in Connecticut:

1. The Brain.

Why would you ever use a normal mindmap again? Why would you ever use Power Point again? Mind blasting application

2. Jing

Think free Camtasia on the web…imagine having your staff, your customers or your suppliers creating instant screen capture videos that are stored online, emailing you videos for problems, questions, training, how-to, or examples.

How about experts you need to know?

Sherman Hu. The guy gave so much value, and is such a great guy. Add him to your rolodex of experts worth listening to. His experience with getting visibility with video blogging is exceptional.

I'm at Howie Schwartz's 7-Figure Sustainable Traffic Workshop in the wilds of Connecticut.

I'm sitting next to Sherman Hu. Sherman is the gold standard when it comes to blogging, especially with Wordpress.

More to come from Howie's bunker!

I looked at my logs this morning and noticed an increase in traffic for the phrase "make money online" from Google. I hesitated about writing about it because the organic results lately have been so volatile.

Anyhow, here's the link, not sure where I'll be when you look: Google Search For "Make Money Online".

It's a pretty competitive phrase, and it took me 11 months to get there. Though I must admit I didn't do anything except work on this blog a few hours a week, so its not like I'm an SEO Expert or anything. I didn't even use The Google Crush Method for the phrase "make money online".

Cool…isn't blogging fun?

Yes, I know. Exact phrase match vs. broad match. Still, it's pretty cool. Just for giggles type "make money online expert" into Google…

If you've read this far you should definitely be part of my exclusive new Internet Marketing Intern Program.

What's buzzing around internet marketing circles nowadays?

1. Having your own TV show

Some smart marketers like Ed Dale and Jason Moffatt are using Justin.tv. I've been using Ustream.tv for about a year now. Even hotter than Justin and Ustream is the new Qik. You can lifecast from your cellphone, getting you out of the house and into the world where humans live.

All of these service allow you to record on the fly, making it quite easy to create viral video content to do The Google Crush Method on.

2. Having your own Radio show

Paul Colligan is quickly becoming the alpha male in the internet marketing podcast niche. Nearly everyone has an MP3 player, whether its at home, in your cell phone, an Ipod or built into your post 2002 model car.

3. Having a huge Friends list.

Did you notice that John Reese, the inventor of the autoresponder, is now adding friends by the boatload on Facebook? Poor kid is getting arthritis while still in his late twenties (John Reese ages backwards, unlike a normal human). If you haven't added me to your friends list yet, ask yourself, "What the heck am I waiting for?

Add David Ledoux On Facebook

4. Twitter Madness

If you aren't building a twitter list, you're behind…way behind. I'll give you more dirt on Twitter next week, let's just for now, consider it mandatory for serious marketers, even more than Facebook.

Add David Ledoux on Twitter.

Look at the list. Of the 4, how many are you using in your business right now? Or are you still counting on that spiffy Yellow Pages ad that the sales rep told you looked great?

Email is dying. Oh and it's a slow, gruesome expiration, isn't it?

What's the next big thing?

Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and microblogs.

Are you using them yet?

Follow me on Twitter.

Follow me on Pownce.

5 years ago — "I have 15,000 on my email list".

Next year — "I have 15,000 on my Twitter friends list."

What comes after microblogging?

If Twitter and Pownce are too 2007 for you, here's the next "next big thing".

It's called Seesmic. Think of it as "Twitter-Meets-Youtube".

Ever see Star Trek? Member how Kirk left an audio-only "Captain's Log"? And how by the time Voyager was on Janeway left video "Captain's Log"? That's what Seesmic will be like.

We are looking for a paid search conversion specialist. You would be the kid in high school that was just a little different than the rest of the smart kids in math class…you were the uber-smart one that everyone was jealous of.

We are an internet marketing company that works with offline brick and mortar business owners. We are looking for a specialist in paid search to reach these entrepreneurs. That's where you come in.

You're a master of multivariate testing. Perhaps its clunky old Google Optimizer. We'll even give you a copy of Split Test Accelerator to play with as well. Never take a knife to a gun fight, right?

The sales copy is already done. Your job is to tweak headlines, colors, layout, graphics, fonts, margins, bullet points, any and all variable that can improve the conversion to the opt-in form. You'll track statistics obsessively. Google Adwords is your playground.

You'll be like Batman…a scientist of the human psyche. You'll get paid a tiny pittance on an hourly basis, barely enough for what you feel you're worth. But you'll get paid large cash bonuses when you hit targets that you and your team leader agree upon…PPC is your expertise, right?

You'll work at weird hours of the night, virtually unsupervised. You'll fill out a simple form once a week documenting your experiments and the results for the team leader. You'll be given carte blanche on most projects…all that matters to you is results, correct?

Does bending the web, controlling both Google and Micro-Hoo PPC traffic and working from the shadows sound like something you would be interested in? Sure, php and ajax web designers are everywhere…you're different.

Bottom line…we're looking for someone who knows how to run PPC campaigns and loves to grow the bottom line!

Should we talk? Tell us why. Fax your CV and personal message to our CEO (Mr. Ledoux) at (1)-416-352-5568.

Information Marketing Opportunity Of A Lifetime

INITIATIVE: Are you dependable, resourceful and a mature self-starter who never needs to be "mico-managed"? Do you possess lots of energy, marketing creativity, a good work ethic and the common sense to complete projects without a lot of supervision?

RELIABILITY: Do you have solid HTML experience publishing Web 2.0 style pages that utilize video, audio and written sales copy? Have you made over $125,000 on Clickbank during the past 18 months (as an Affiliate and/or Marketer) and understand Clickbank's systems inside and out?

VELOCITY: Can you "drive" projects with enough initiative, reliability and speed to make progress even if vendors and outsourcers fail to meet their deadlines? Are you willing to consistently report, question and update Team Members and the company's CEO on a daily basis?

WHO WE ARE: We are an educational company that train CEOs and owners of brick and mortar companies how to grow their businesses. We are a virtual company, with team members working from home around the globe.

CLICKBANK: To date we have not fully tapped the potential of Clickbank. That's why we're seeking a "Star" with "driver" potential. As a Team Leader you have proven initiative on Clickbank, reliability and speed to get the job done efficiently and maximize our product line on the Clickbank channel.

HOW YOU WILL BE PAID: If you're selected for this position, you will be compensated twice a month in an "Independent Contractor" capacity. Your pay will be based on a pre-negotiated arrangement with our CEO whom you will report to directly. No bureaucracy.

YOUR NEXT STEP: If you've read this far, you may be the right fit for this position. Please *re-read* this post and then fax your CV and personal message to our CEO (Mr. Ledoux) at (1)-416-352-5568. You'll be given explicit directions by telephone on how to arrange your first interview after your fax is reviewed. Why a fax and phone instead of email and Skype? Obviously we're testing you. Can you handle 20th century technology?