For this week’s Entrepreneur University we turn to Cynthia Minnaar. Cynthia lives in South Africa and runs her own online home business. She is the proud owner of www.cyns-home-biz.com, the online home business site for online home based business start-up ideas, extra income opportunities, internet marketing training, affiliate marketing solutions and resources.
Cynthia shares with us how online entrepreneurs can get started on a shoestring budget:
“The secret to start making money online with your own internet home business is in the actual marketing of your business and there are many methods of internet marketing that are highly effective and will cost absolutely nothing if you give yourself time to learn the ropes and apply them.
In actual fact, the running costs of an internet home business can reduce every month as you learn how to market effectively at no cost at all.
If you are serious about building an online home business income from a real internet home business then at the outset you need to be sure that you select a reputable hosting company for your website. This is one area where it is not advisable to opt for free hosting.
Your aim is to drive targeted traffic to your website and if you are on a budget this just may take a little longer than someone who has spare dollars to purchase targeted leads. But, rest assured you will gain a great deal of knowledge as well as achieve huge personal success if you learn the methods that drive targeted traffic to your site at no or very little cost at all.
Here are some highly effective internet marketing methods that you can start working on immediately to drive targeted traffic to your home internet business website and start making money online.
Choosing Relevant Keywords
This is the foundation of your business and you need to establish what keywords or keyword phrases people will type into the search engines to locate your website. There are many free keyword selector tools available on the internet to help you with this, for example you could use the free version of Wordtracker or the Google keyword tool or the Overture keyword selector tool.
Search Engine Optimization
Once you have established what keywords you are going to use then you need to optimize your website for those keywords. You can also obtain free software on the internet to help you optimize your website, for example WebCEO can be downloaded free. Once you have completed optimizing your website, open a Google Webmasters account for free, create a sitemap and submit it to Google. Keep your sitemap current by submitting a new sitemap whenever you make changes to your website. Also submit your website to the search engines and it is advisable to submit to the major search engines manually.
Blog, Tag and Ping
Ideally you need to post on your blog at least once a day and be sure to hyperlink your keyword into the post so that it points back to your website in order to build back-links to your website that will help you rank higher in the search engine results. You need to aim to continually build back-links to your website. Be sure to tag your posts and then ping your blog to announce to the blogging community that you have just added a new post. There are many free pinging services available on the internet. Add your Blog RSS url to your My Yahoo account as well, which will ensure the indexing of the links on your blog posts.
Post in Forums
Forums are another free method of not only advertising your internet home business, but where you can also gain a tremendous amount of knowledge and assistance. Set up your signature with your keyword linked to your website and this will be free advertising for you as well as adding back-links to your site. Get involved and constructively post and contribute 3 to 5 times a day.
Article Marketing
This is a very highly effective method of gathering back-links to your site and securing high positions in the search engine results. If you write an article or two every week and distribute it to as many article directories as possible you will notice a massive change in your rankings weekly. Be sure to write articles based on the theme of your website and use the keywords you have selected and hyperlink the keyword to your url in the author resource box. You may at a later stage want to spend a portion of your budget to pay to have your articles distributed or purchase an Article Submitter.
Directories
Search the internet for seo friendly directories and start submitting your website to them, try and submit to 5 directories a day.
In Conclusion If you get involved in learning these free very effective methods of driving targeted traffic to your website, you will not only start making money online but you will automatically find that you start learning and getting involved in other marketing methods such as RSS, Social Bookmarking, etc., which will take your internet home business to the next level.”
Very good article for newbie internet marketers. Worth more than $167 ebooks sold over internet about internet marketing.
It would be more beneficial if more about keyword research, like how to find niche long tail keywords. Expecting more about long tail keyword research in your blog soon, Thanks, Peterson
What is an SEO friendly directory? People should be extremely careful about submitting their site to too many directories. The best include dmoz, yahoo and botw.org as well as a couple of others. Google will penalize if you have too many backlinks to generic directories. Generic directories will have copied and pasted descriptions, hardly any entries under each respective category, and they will accept any site or take payment for links instead of taking payment for doing a REVIEW of the site and rejecting or accepting based on certain criteria. Google does penalize directories who take payment for placement or any site who is intentionally trying to manipulate their page rank using tons of directories. So, the long and short of it is to be careful about this particular strategy.
Also, if you intend to use articles on your website… DO NOT distribute them to 50 million other places because when Google spiders crawl your site, it will think it is finding copied information and not unique information if your articles are posted in tons of other places.
SEOBook absolutely rocks for accurate SEO info. http://www.seobook.com/
Hope this helps an aspiring young entrepreneur. Let no man despise your youth!
Another way of marketing is to write occasionally about other websites (preferably not your competitors) who you think may link back to your article/website. Most website owners are courteous enough to do that.
Awesome article with some really good insights. You should also leverage all the other social apps your part of with links/information on your venture. For example, start a group or business page at Facebook and invite all your friends, insert your business in your AIM profile, talk about it on twitter, etc… There’s alot you can do with real life connections, rather than hoping for arbitrary visitors.
Oh and the comment up top is on point!
-cheapreneur.com
Or if you have some budget, you can outsource all of these traffic-building processes.
Could someone give me a example of hyperlinking a keyword back to your blog. I’m assuming she means highlighting a word such as hypnosis and having the word hypnosis link back to my actually blog? Correct?
Joshua Houghton
Certified Hypnotist
I found out that Organic SE traffic is the best traffic you can get. when you have at least 3000 back links to your site you can easily get some traffic from low trend long tail keywords.
and article marketing can easily bring you to 3000 back links
The thing with outsourcing is that you have to be careful who you outsource too. Lots of places inflate their price, so make sure you shop around.
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks
You’ve got a great blog here, and I love your post. Thanks, keep it up!
Your blog has some great information for small businesses. Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge!