There’s a new trend in home based business opportunities, and it’ completely changing the way people fill their pipelines. The old MLM marketing model relied heavily on print classified ads, phone calls and face to face meetings. Today’s home-based businesses are focused almost exclusively on the internet.

Setting up a website today is easy and inexpensive. But then what? The best website in the world is useless if people can’t find it, or don’t visit it. Successful web marketers realize that the bulk of their time-and resources-are best spent driving traffic to their website.

Even if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on promoting your website, don’t despair. Here are 5 absolutely free and proven methods of generating traffic. The only things you’ll need to invest are your time and effort.

1. Article Writing – Sometimes referred to as “thought leadership” writing an article does several things for you. It positions you as an expert, and it gets you recognition. If the article is published, it will essentially serve as a free ad. If you simply place the article on your website, the search engines will voraciously consume the content, and using embedded keywords, move you up in search rankings.

2. Press Releases – It’s been said that any publicity is good publicity. Perhaps, but negative press can hurt. Issuing press releases about your business is a great way to get positive publicity, for free. Just make sure the releases are newsworthy, and well written.

3. Blogs – A blog is your public forum. Keep blog entries to about 100 words, and post regularly. If this is a business blog though, don’t forget the purpose-to drive traffic to your website. Your content should be about business-not personal trivia-and useful.

4. Free Classified Ads – There are many websites that allow you to post a free classified ad. To be effective, it needs to be short and interesting enough so people will go to your website after reading it.

5. MySpace and FaceBook – Social networking is at the heart of a comprehensive new Web 2.0 marketing strategy. These are wide open forums, and very few marketers are using them effectively. Take time to learn how social networks function, and then incorporate them into your marketing mix.

Free website marketing works. But a word of caution. There’s an information overload out there. People are bombarded daily, and simply can’t consume everything thrown at them. Make sure your content is well written. Otherwise it will simply be ignored.

Article marketing is a simple, low-cost way to drive tons of qualified, pre-sold traffic to your website. Not only will you improve your search engine results, you will also be building back-links to your site and increasing your online exposure and credibility.

When you have an article published, you immediately create a back-link to your website. If your article is then picked up and published by a blog, website or ezine, more links are created, the more back-links that are created the more popular the search engines consider your site to be and this will move you up in the search engine results.

Here are 7 Tips to help you get the most out of article marketing for generating traffic.

1. Write articles on a consistent basis, 2 to 3 articles per week or more. This will allow you to build your online exposure, backlinks and search engine ranking consistently over time.

2. Write a compelling title. You have 5 seconds to grab the attention of your reader. Having trouble coming up with a title? Just look at the titles of other articles and see which ones grab your attention. Don’t copy them, but use them as examples to help you in constructing a title for your article.

3. Spell check! I cannot emphasize this enough; I can’t believe how many times I’ve read an article with spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and incorrect word usage. Ezinearticles has a free training series to help with common mistakes in article writing.

4. Include keywords in your article and your title. Do some research on keywords that your readers are likely to type in when searching for the information that you are writing about. Ideally, you want to use keywords in your title and sprinkled throughout your article, but do not go overboard with them.

5. Content is King. Make sure you are providing relevant, quality content and not using your article to promote your business, you can do that in the resource or About the Author Box. The idea here is to build trust, provide help or information (value), and position yourself as an expert or a leader.

6. Write a problem/solution driven article. When you provide your readers with a solution to their problem they will be drawn to you and they will be more likely to join your mailing list, subscribe to your newsletter, or buy from you. You have pre-sold your visitors by providing them value and increased your credibility factor, which in turn will be a tremendous factor in converting traffic to sales.

7. If you plan to make a serious effort at using article marketing for generating traffic you may want to consider using an article submission service such as ArticleMarketer, it will save you a good deal of the time that it takes to manually submit articles.

Now all you need to do is write an artice and submit it to some of the top article directories, here are a couple of the best to get started with…www.ezinearticles, www.goarticles.

Just about everybody that you talk to would say that they want to be successful. But a surprising number of those people can’t really define what success is. They may have a vague notion that success equates with money, power, or fame but they don’t really define what levels of money, power or fame that they seek. The notion of success is vague and the path towards it is ill defined.

Clearly, success is a relative thing. It depends on a person’s value system, beliefs, and tolerance level. Some things that make one person completely happy and satisfied may be completely untenable for someone else. For this reason, the first most fundamental step in achieving success is to define what success really is. This is not a process that should be taken lightly, because it will have a profound and long-lasting impact on a person’s life and career.

Because of the long-term implications that success and the pursuit of it have over a person’s life, the optimum time to define success is early in one’s life and career. In other words, by knowing at a young age what you want to achieve and then clearly defining how you intend to achieve it, the process of becoming successful becomes much more systematic. To not define success early in one’s life and career is tantamount to not defining a destination after already setting out on a journey.

Of course it is never too late to define success. Even if you are approaching middle age or are already into it, it is still critically important for you to define what success means to you. In fact, defining success later in life benefits from the acquired wisdom and experience that the years have already yielded. Regardless of when the definition of success happens in a person’s life, it is a critical and valuable exercise.

The value lies in the overall process. By forcing yourself to sit down and clearly articulate what is important to you, and then understanding why, actually achieving it becomes much easier. When you have clearly defined goals in place as well as the compelling reasons why you want to achieve these goals, the likelihood of becoming successful is much greater than if your motivations are fuzzy and ill defined.

Clearly defining success is even more important if you are already unhappy with your life. For example, if you are looking for long-term financial security but are not certain how to achieve it, define what that security would mean to you. Once it’s defined you can implement a financial plan to achieve it.