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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.