The 9th Rule

Opportunity plus instinct equals profit. - The 9th Rule of Acquisition

On the path to success, the humble become roadkill.  You have to promote yourself early, often, and to the right people if you want to succeed.  Sure, that's an obvious truth, but it bears repeating because it's also a fundamental truth.

Promotion can be somewhat problematic when you're first starting out, though.  Home-based business owners usually don't have a very large budget for advertising.  Fortunately, we have the Internet.

Whether you have a website that promotes your business or your business is entirely web-based, the Holy Grail of promotion on the Internet is search engine ranking.  If you sell left-handed wangdoodles, you want to see your site at the top of the list when you type "wangdoodles" into your favorite search engine.

Whole volumes have been written on SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, and it's far too big a subject to address here.  However, there are a few simple and generally free things that anyone can do which will help get your site noticed & listed in the major search engines.

One of the keys to search engine ranking is the number of sites the engine finds which have links pointing to your website.  One site with 10 links isn't significant, but ten sites with one link each is.  That tells the engine that people are interested in your site, which results in a higher ranking and an earlier appearance in a list of search results. 

Another factor is the amount of traffic the linking site gets.  Popular sites get indexed more often, as do the sites they link to.  Site owners can help themselves in this area by adding new content to their site as often as possible.  When a search engine determines that a site is active and changing, it's going to get more weight than a site which stays static for long periods of time.

One of the best ways to get exposure to your site is active participation on discussion forums.  Most forums allow members to create a signature for their posts.  Most people put witty sayings or cute graphics in their sigs; you can put a link to your website or perhaps a small banner into yours.  Some forums, like Gather, explicitly prohibit advertising, but most only prohibit spamming commercial posts.  A link in your sig is likely to be ignored.  Every time you post something to that forum, you're not only reaching potential customers, but you're also leading the search engines right to you.

You don't have to limit your activity to forums related to your product, either.  The more forums you are active on, the more distinct linking sites the search engines will see.

The advantage of being active on related forums is that you're addressing your target market.  The other posters are already interested in the products you are offering.  It can also lead to other opportunities for exposure - which is where the 9^th Rule comes in to play.

A few weeks ago, I was reading WoWInsider.com, a blog site for World of Warcraft players, when I saw an article on a player who makes plush dolls of the characters people play.  The article ended with an invitation to tell the editors about your own WoW-themed crafts.  While my CafePress shop offers WoW-themed items, they aren't crafts.  I decided to email the editors anyway, hoping that they were using a very broad definition of ‘crafts'.  As it turned out, they were, and a few days later Amanda Rivera, one of the staff writers, did a nice article on my shop.      

Within an hour of posting, the article had generated a few thousand hits on my shop's main page.  Over the next four days I counted around 15,000 hits and even now, almost a month later, hits are still coming in showing that one article as the referring source.  And yes, those hits resulted in a nice number of sales.

You have to be prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities, but those are rare and you can't depend on them.  You need to make your own opportunities and be ready to take advantage of them, even the small ones; you never know how big a door they are going to open for you.