Welcome to home based business. How to start? First and foremost you need to have a website to start with. Then comes a smart marketing plan otherwise, it would resemble a store about which no one would know. So, the real catch is in making your site popular.

1. Write good articles

Yes, content is the king. It's the content of your website that would draw in traffic. Make your articles be original, informative and rich with keywords. Post your articles in various blogs, popular directories and ezines and get those linked to your site.

2. Pay per Click (PPC)

This is another way through which you can get the traffic. By this method, the chance of your success is almost a surefire. Google Ad Words, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter are some of the popular Pay per Click schemes. In this method, you got to pay in advance and your pre-paid balance is debited every time your ad is clicked. Your advertisements also appear in the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engine listings. In addition, sponsored results appear over natural search results.

3. Viral marketing

As on today, this is the most economical and tested strategy of internet marketing. The name "viral" is quite suggestive here. It has been derived from the study of the multiplication of the virus. As you might know, a virus divides from 1 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 8, 8 to 16 and so on.
The basic idea about this style of marketing is to give out attractive & exciting things to people free of cost. Now whatever you give out will bear the name of your site inscribed in it. And people will gladly pass them to others. In this way, the name of your site will spread like wildfire.

4. Describe your product/ service

In your online campaign, make it sure you put in some good descriptions about your product or service. Remember that the description you give holds the key to create an interest among your customers. Ideally, you should portray your product or service within 150 words. If you feel, you can take the help of professionals. If you are trying to sell an e-book or some course through your site, you can get the sales copy made which may contain of 3000-5000 words in length. To add feedbacks from your clients can also be a good idea.

5. Use pictures

Remember, sometimes pictures offer the best details ever. So, to create the impression on your customers, you've to put pictures of the products/ services on the net. But don't put untidy images. Always remember to keep the cover pages of the e-books of high quality, cost of which is $30 upwards.

6. Go for cross advertising

You can string your other items just below the product/ service description so that people who want to purchase your product/ service can also look out for other related products. This way can help you to enhance your sales up to 30%.

7. Dish out free gifts to visitors to get their email address

Free gifts can help you in creating your own database of visitors. For example, dole out free e-books from your squeeze page to any visitor who gives you his/her email address. Once you have it, you can keep them updated about your latest product or services through your newsletters.

8. Send newsletters

Newsletters give your customers some really useful information. Remember that newsletter is not a "spam" and can be one of your powerful tools to keep the update on the new products and plans. It's surely a superior method compared to spam mails as promotional tools.

9. Give discounts

You can offer a range of discounts throughout the year like 'winter bonanza: 25% off' or 'Spring Festival-up to 50% discount'. This can really boost up your sales.

10. Earn from Google AdSense

Google AdSense (adsense.google.com) is an advertisement program run by Google. It's also one of the top three Pay-per-click programs available on the internet. As the owner of a website you can apply to enroll with AdSense and allow advertisements to appear on your web page. The advertisements that appear are managed by Google and you profit from the income on the per click basis. You also need to know that the advertisements that would appear will be somewhere connected to the content on your website.

11. Affiliate marketing

This happens to be one of the oldest and extensively practiced systems of selling and getting clients by recommendation in exchange of payment. For instance, if Mr. X sends a positive client to you, you won't mind paying him a cut of the payment that you get from the client.
As I sit and write this article today, there are probably a few more home based business opportunities being created. The internet is full of opportunities and it is up to you to decide how you benefit from them. And by no means is there any limit to how many you embark on from the five listed above, or any others out there.

12. Use social networking sites

Here let's take the instance of MySpace (myspace.com), perhaps the most popular social networking site having more than 80 million users. Further, Myspace has 240,000 new sign-ups each day and 30 billion page views ever month. So, you can imagine how popular it is. In case you too happen to be a MySpace user and still do not know the secrets of how to use it to earn a wealth, you are simply wasting your time.

13. Write thrilling sales pages/letters

Remember that as disclosed by renowned internet marketing Gurus, an internet-based business depends 60% on the sales page and 40% on the product itself. A bad sales page is like a death knell for your site, though it sells good.