Marketing your UK Home Based Business Online for Free

Online Marketing techniques for a UK home based business can be dramatically different to those used for other countries.

Network marketing in the UK is becoming a popular way of starting up a new venture from home. Start up costs are minimal, the parent company usually has a proven business model and quite often a proven business brand, which all go to limiting the risk of failure.

However, as with every business, whether traditional office based, online, or work from home, it will need some form of advertising to attract customers, and advertising can of course take many forms. But if you want to market your UK business online, you will need to be aware that many of the suggestions you can find online are directed mainly at the US market.

As a first step, make sure your website is listed on the three main search engines Google, Yahoo & MSN by logging onto http://google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl, http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx & https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Next, register your website with some Free UK business directories. There are lots of these, but a few suggestions are: http://www.hotfrog.co.uk/, http://www.freeindex.co.uk/, http://www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk/, http://www.scoot.co.uk/, http://www.thompsonlocal.co.uk/ & http://www.yelldirect.com/

Also, register your site and post ads with some free classified directories such as http://www.gumtree.com/, http://www.ukclassifieds.co.uk/ & http://www.freeukclassifieds.co.uk/ . You could try posting on http://london.craigslist.co.uk/ which, although a predominantly U.S. site, does allow you to post ads in major UK cities.

Then, build your site on http://www.bttradespace.com/ - this can take a little while, but it's worth completing the profile, adding photos and even creating blog posts. Google seems to like the BT Tradespace site and constantly changing the content will keep the site fresh.

Finally, make sure you have a google profile. You will see more information for this at

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=97703 where you can also create your profile.

Whilst there are also many paid-for ways to advertise your business, all the above are free to register, so why not take advantage of these UK specific tools, and give your new UK home based business a head start?