Aside from all those home business basics, do you know what could really make your home business known? Get help from the online world.

Here are some online marketing tips for your home business:

1. Well-SEO'ed Website

If you are not a nerdy one yourself when it comes to web development, hiring an expert to create a website for you can do the trick. And make sure that it's not just any website. It needs to be search engine optimized. What? You don't want any of that gibberish? SEO or search engine optimization is tweaking your website off-site or on-site for it to be found easily when people looking for services, products or just about any info related to what your business offers use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and God forbid, AOL.

One way to get the on-site SEO done is to provide keyword optimized content for your website. This is the strategical mentioning of keywords that are again related to your products or services. If you can learn this SEO technique yourself, then, good for you. If not, web content writers abound. Just specify the keywords you'd like to work on. SEO experts suggest many other tricks such as tagging, tagline optimization, meta tag optimization, submitting to search engines, etc. But for me, quality and well-optimized content is still the king.

A good resource is searchengine-weblog.com

2. Blogging

From being an online journal, a blog has become one of the major online marketing tools that many well-earning firms are already exploiting (corporate blogging.)

How can your home business benefit from it? Tip no. 1 will tell you. As your readership base increase, your bottomline will follow. One tip though is to never forget to include a lead generation system through your blog.

You can also use your website for this endeavor, but blogs are starting to gain more popularity as lead generation venues because of their easy-to-update nature. You can either put an e-mail list subscription section or an RSS feed subscription link.

Offer newsletter or some freebies to improve your lead generation results. Participate with other blogs by leaving sensible comments to help more people know about your blog.

3. viral Marketing

Offering useful information that can't be found anywhere else is the key to your success if you want to employ viral marketing. Free how-to e-books or reports are the mainstays with this method. Offering controversial information that can be easily relayed to others is a surefire viral marketing vehicle, too. Think video tutorials.

4. Press Releases

Old news. But the Internet makes press release distribution easier. Making sure that your press releases don't sound like sales pitch will help your press releases more attention-worthy.

5. Article Marketing

It is the use of articles to get the word about your home business out. Write or get someone to write articles that are related to your services and products but are not directly selling or advertising them. Provide how-to's or special information about your industry that can benefit average readers. Then, submit them to article directories. Article directories that are subject-specific or those that cater to your field readily will be of greater help than general article directories.

Don't forget to include substantial but brief information about your website or blog or wherever you'd like readers to know about your business. And you can only provide that information with the use of a resource box, the last part of an article wherein you can include your name and your business and a link to website or blog.

One way to ensure that you benefit from article marketing is to impose that the article can be republished or reprinted as long as the resource box is in tact and will remain unchanged. Website owners, bloggers or publishers will then re-publish your articles. It's also another form of off-site SEO as it can help build links for your website or blog. Your site's popularity helps search engines rank your site better in terms of searchability.

Whew! Those are just some of the "in" home business marketing techniques that you can use. If you have made use of any of them, which do you find most effective? Did I forget anything? Well, til next blog post then.