In this article I will share a lot of links with you that I found helpful because for me finding the links and sorting through them is the most time consuming project in setting up an online business.

The first step is setting up your Web site. If you are in Multi-Level-Marketing, A lot of companies provide you with an affiliate Web site. If this option is not available to you, you must find a Web site that that will sell you a domain name and host your domain. I recommend www.doteasy.com for very reasonable rates. When choosing your domain name pick something easy to remember that says a lot about what you do right away. Next you can find free templates for you site at www.freesitetemplates.com and you can’t save more money than that! If you need help setting that up, I recommend my favorite Webmaster, Linda, whom you can contact at www.paolicchi.com or find your own through a search engine.

So now you have a website. The next step is promoting your website so that people will know about it. You can use traditional methods to start with. Get business cards printed with your website on them and give everyone. You can do this for free at www.vistaprint.com and choose from a color printed card selection and only pay for shipping and handling. Why not save money where you can? You can create flyers about your product and/or services and create tearoffs with your website on them. Of course, you can also call all of your friends and family and tell them to visit your Web site or better yet send or give them all cards.

These traditional methods only get you so far. So now it is time to hop online and sort through the vast sources of promoting your site over the internet. The bad news is that it can be time consuming. The good news is that I will help you sort through all the options. The really good news is how very rewarding it is when you get your online promotion running. So if you get on a search engine like www.google.com and type in traffic or advertising you will be overflowed with links. First let me tell you what I avoid. To me all the promises of guaranteed traffic are a waste of time. A lot of those companies just use pop ups or other methods of getting the visitors but since they are not really trying to reach your site, they probably won’t stay there. Also, email blasting is useless due to the same principle.

Submitting your site to search engine, on the other hand, is invaluable because the traffic that lands on your site really wants to have your service or product. You can submit to 40 search engines for free with www.submitexpress.com. You will also want to submit to Yahoo when you get serious about your business. I say when you get serious because it costs $299 but you get serious results too. I also recommend you get traffic by signing up at http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?222965 for a free account. It is a search engine of members who can place up to ten advertisements on the engine for one or ten different URLs and it is free.

Now you are off to a good start and I say start because there is so much more to learn if you want to be a huge success on the internet. I will cover more of these promotional winners for you in my next article, “You Can Do Business on the Internet 201.”