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When you start out a home based business it's a common mistake to start off advertising your website. If you have a website with lots of things for sale on it you'll probably just end up confusing your potential customer. They may or may not be able to determine what it is that's for sale. Here are a few reasons why it's better to advertise a Splash Page/Squeeze Page vs. a Website.

1. If you're using Google Adwords to drive people to your site then you'll want to get sales for your advertising dollar. If you're paying for people to come to your website and they are confused about what it is that's for sale, chances are that they will click on through. If a splash/squeeze page is used then you can capture names, email addresses and a whole lot more useful information. By using the splash page/squeeze page you will at least get some information in which you can use for a sale down the road. Having a newsletter sign up on the splash page/squeeze Page will accomplish this.

2. If your using Traffic Exchanges for your advertising then you'll want to make sure that your surfing is all for not. Using a Splash/Squeeze Page to capture leads for your business is what people are doing more and more now. The splash/squeeze Page forces the surfer to put in info by using a method like: "If you join now I'll give you this free.....", or "Join up now before it's too late". By using this method the seller accomplishes two things; they obtain info on the potential customer and give away probably some sort of viral e-book/software etc... This method of advertising is becoming more and more popular. Why? Because it produces results.

3. Joining Ad forums/groups is another yet not as effective way to advertise yet the same thing applies here as well. By using a well thought out ad and using a splash page/squeeze page to obtain information you will accomplish some results. If you just advertise your website, again people will tend not to take your offer up because they get confused about what's for sale.

By using a splash/squeeze page you will obtain very important information on your potential customer which will give you an opportunity to repeatedly give you chances to sell what ever it is you're selling. The whole idea of Internet Marketing is to have buyers for your products and to be able to have repeat customers is what the splash page/squeeze page is all about. If you just advertise your website then you risk the customer clicking through and not ever seeing them again.

About the Author

To find the Best Home Based Business Ideas and Opportunities Visit: http://www.siriusfreehomebiz.com/blog

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.

Myth #1 - "It's easy, just put up a website and you're set for success"

Many perceive the sheer numbers of people online equates to enough of them coming to your site and making it consistently profitable. It doesn't quite work that way because if your site is out of sight, out of mind, then nobody knows it even exists.

Remember, when you search for something online, you go to a search engine, type in your phrase and you get pages of results. This is exactly what your customers do! Not only do you need to register on search engines, you need to be prominently registered - aiming for top ranking or at the least, second page results. Anything less will considerably diminish your chances of being found.

Now if you don't even register on the search engine radar, how will your customers find you?

Myth #2 - "Anybody can do it"

Very few people can do it right.

Attempting website promotion services on your own is disastrous. It is extremely time consuming and will greatly frustrate and disappoint if not done correctly. A lot is involved - the entire website promotion process is composed of several components that must fit together in a synchronised way in order for it to work properly.

Let's take just three of the many aspects of website promotion to illustrate this myth:

1. Keyword research
2. Copywriting
3. SEO Marketing

These form the backbone of any website promotion strategy, but how will you devise effective techniques for each of these when this area is not your company's expertise? Where will your company begin to research for keywords? Are they the correct ones? At what optimum density levels should they be used?

Your copywriting is crucial as is your SEO marketing. Who will write compelling and effective content to capture search engines, rankings and sales?

These are just three of the many components. All it takes is just one aspect to be done incorrectly and it can retard the whole process.

Myth #3 - "Presentation Is Everything"

In website promotion services, this couldn't be further from the truth. Content is what makes or breaks a site's effectiveness. If you put up a site with nothing except amazing graphics and flash, you have zero chance of selling anything. But if you put up a site with nothing but sales-pulling copy and rich content, you have every chance of securing business.

Presentation is part of the process; it's not the process itself. There's a fine balance that must be struck between visual appeal and effective copy. Professionals know how to integrate the two at just the right levels.

Myth #4 - "Sending Your URL to Thousands of Search Engines Is A Good Way To Get Business"

It's actually a good way to have your site banned or de-listed from search engines. Any company that offers to blast your site to thousands of search engines is a company worth putting on your blacklist. Unfortunately many businesses register thinking this technique works. All you are doing is spamming the search engines and they don't like it at all.

The best way to get business is having a results proven company put together a well planned website promotion campaign using the best experts available.

Myth #5 - "Website promotion is fast and yields quick results"

Whilst some aspects of website promotion are relatively quick, most of it is an extended process that takes time to research, develop, test and implement. It's not about getting a quick sale. Building trust and credibility with your customers takes time and often results in longer term relationships. Results are always contingent on the quality of the website promotion program. Naturally, profitable programs will yield much higher results over the same time period as mediocre programs.

The Author has put together a resource website strictly to educate potential and current business owners about website promotion. You can visit it at http://www.1web-site-promotion.com.

I love my RSS reader. I have a gazillion website, blog and news feeds set up in there, and I get the latest information from all of my favorite sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it with you. And RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect that rings when there are new feed entries to read. So wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I also get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to announce the new feed entries.

As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because of my RSS reader I was one of the first to cover adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that will help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was on it first, I popped up in the first five Google search results for this keyword for a while, which drove traffic to this site. So watch your RSS reader.

All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as auto update feature for websites and blogs. The first application was RSS feeds that automagically update your site with articles in your subject area from a free article site. The rationale is that this will give you fresh content that search engines will eat right up. They call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read some of these articles? There's a wide disparity in quality from one to another, and I would never allow articles to be put blindly on my web site without my approval. For crying out loud...you spend hours and hours of time getting your site to a certain level of quality to build a certain level of trust with your visitors, and then you're going to allow some hack to put his content on your site without your approval, just so maybe a search engine will come a few extra times? That's just stupid.

Need more content? Turn off the football game and write some.

Seriously...if you want to use articles as supplemental content, hand pick them. Just like famous Internet marketer Wille Crawford did on his blog when he picked my article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there). I have at least 20 - 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that I'm going to post on the site as soon as a I get a chance. That's the good news - the bad news is I went through 500 or so articles to get those.

Closer to home, affiliate merchants are starting to get into datafeeds, which are sort of like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access to merchant products using text files. The file contains a list of products, services, special offers, coupons or other information that you can display on your site. You then upload that information to your server and use some kind of tool or script to display the different items in that file. There are programs on CJ, LinkShare and Shareasale that have datafeeds.

While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it with the same jaundiced eye as the whole article thing - it all depends on your niche, the level of trust you want to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want to get.

If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate program, you might try a product feed. If you want to put up an occasional coupon or special offer, you can probably do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo jumbo.

We are starting to see products that convert merchant datafeeds to RSS, allowing you to auto-display products from affiiliate programs. Again, if you can maintain relevance across the entire affiliate line, it's a good idea. If not, you're not going to get conversion anyway, so you're wasting your time. Personally I want everything including the advertising, to have relevance to my visitors.

There's always a shortcut - in this case you're shortcutting the time and effort involved in finding relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some sites.

If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some resources:

1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I think they're plugging their own tool.

2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh...they also have a tool.

One last thing - while I was out looking for links and information, this is what someone said about using datafeeds:

Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot and never have to think about the blog again after I spend a few hours setting it up!

How do you think that blog is doing?

About the Author

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com - A resource for Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.

AffiliateBlog is his latest venture, and was started as a resource to help site owners and bloggers get more revenue from their sites.