Internet Homeworking Directory - advertising your business online

Almost every business can be enhanced with a website - even if you only operate in a small area. Most Internet Service Providers include web space with your subscription but if yours doesn't there are many free sites out on the internet you can use. Your choice of company will be affected by the geographical area you wish to attract. If you are aiming at a UK audience you will want a UK domain (a web address ending in co.uk), if you are aiming at an American or worldwide audience you will be better with a US domain - e.g.www.abc.com .

Below I have listed a selection of companies providing web hosting for business use. Please note that many free web sites are for non-commercial purposes only. Most of the UK ISPs require you to sign up for their free internet access. You will need to access the site monthly to keep it active, but do not need to use the company as your provider unless you wish to.

For details of free and low cost ways of guaranteeing visitors to your site, visit our traffic page

For details of free and nearly free ways of getting referrals or promoting any online business, visit our downline page

Creating a website isn't as daunting a process as it used to be. Many companies now provide you with templates to create professional looking sites in minutes. Some packages, most notably Site Build It! are comprehensive packages including literally everything you will need for running a profitable, successful business.

Alternatively, get an expert to create a site for you. Visit the Site Build It! Certified Webmaster Directory to find a Webmaster with a history of success to build a professional and popular SBI! Web site for you. Site Build It! Certified Webmasters have all built successful SBI! sites and have all met a strict set of qualifications set by SiteSell.

The quality of their work is monitored to make sure they provide consistently high-quality service and high-performing sites.

Not sure how a web site will benefit you?
Take a look through the following articles, for the one that matches your existing business or business idea:

Or read the following case studies as told directly by small business people from around the globe -- people who "took a chance" and then realized...
Their worlds had changed just by creating a website, and with no previous experience.

One of the companies I use myself is oneandone.co.uk. With a wide range of hosting packages from just £1.99 a month they are easily affordable for everyone.

Despite the low costs this is one occasion when cutting costs doesn't mean a cut in facilities or quality. The company claim 99.9% guaranteed up-time and I've certainly never experienced any of my sites down for more than a matter of seconds

Depending on the package you choose you get up to £400 worth of software, on CD-Rom as well as the usual hosting package with unlimited e-mail forwarding, free e-mail autoresponders, e-mail forwarding and a catch all e-mail address.

If you've never created your own website they even provide "Website Creator" - online software to create a professional looking site in minutes. Try out the online demo now.

All packages come with a 90 Day Money Back Guarantee. If you are not 100% satisfied, they will refund you your money although I'd be very surprised if you feel the need to make a claim.

If you're trying to be as eco-friendly as possible then you might like to consider Eco Web Hosting. They not only provide reliable, carbon neutral web hosting but also have outstanding customer service - an average rating of 5 stars at Web Hosting Stuff. Despite their really low prices, starting at just £2.99 a month, you get all the features you'd expect from a web host plus £300 Software, 500+ templates and 100,000 images for you to use. Find out more from Eco Web Hosting

Without doubt, this is THE web hosting package - the only all-in-one site-building, site-hosting, and site-marketing product - with the results to prove it.

Not only do you get all the usual web hosting facilities that you'd expect from the best hosts eg unlimited hosting, unlimited data transfer, unlimited e-mail accounts, e-mail and telephone support etc. etc. you also receive dozens of other features including:

And if you're still not convinced, take a look at a selection of sites created with this package, paying particular attention to the traffic rankings each site has achieved.

If your ISP doesn't provide a website for business use, click on the links below to check out some of the best free sites for business use.

web-store-hosting.com lets user build their own professional online store and business website. they offer a free online storefront ecommerce design solution which includes a professional shopping cart, ecommerce web hosting as well as secure online payment processing through tight integration with paypal and other merchant account providers. Their ecommerce software solution is easy to use and very flexible.

Hostinplace.com - With Hostinplace.com FREE Hosting you receive, 50mb's of space 3 gigs of bandwidth, Subdomain, File Manager, php, phpbb forum, mysql & more for FREE!

www.tripod.co.uk - 50MB available for personal or business use. Join the appropriate community for your site and gain extra publicity. If you already have a website hosted elsewhere, you can transfer your site in only 3 clicks, from any external hosting provider into your Tripod account. You just have to enter a few details about your current hosting account and that’s it!

Bravenet - In addition to free websites, get yourself counters, guestbooks, search engines, webrings, password protection, chatroom, ads, FFA site and loads more utilities - ALL FREE

Whilst you can get your site up and running totally free (excluding your own time and telephone costs) I would thoroughly recommend you buy two things:

1. Get your own domain name. Most companies will allow you to divert the address to your free site, usually at no charge so this will cost you no more than £10 for a UK domain or £30 for a US domain including registration fees. Check the small print though as some companies have conditions over transferring the name when you are ready to pay to host your site.

2. Splash out around £20 on probably the most important manual you will ever buy. Called "Making Your Site Sell 2002" you get 1500 pages crammed full of information on everything you'll need to know to make a success of your website, including a huge section on driving traffic to your site, written by somebody from his experiences not from theory.

Keep it simple - people don't want to spend ages waiting for fancy graphics to load, so they won't!

Make it clear what you are offering - don't spend 4 or 5 pages on fancy talk whilst forgetting to mention the product.

Make it easy to navigate the site, with links back to, at the very least, the home page, from all pages. On long pages there should also be links back to the top of the page from the bottom.

Make sure your contact details are on every page, whether this is e-mail, address, phone or fax.

Throughout the site I've frequently mentioned the benefits of creating your own website, either to publicise your own business or simply as a business in its own right. I know many of you have been put off by the idea that it is just too complicated or expensive, but I think I may have finally found the answer. The Newbie Club has produced "First Website Builder". Newbie Club took a total beginner who had built her very first Website using FREE programs and graphics - and asked her to write a book about it. Then they added a further 3 books by world renowned Internet marketing experts Joe Robson, Tom Glander and Joe Barta and created the definitive guide for anyone wanting to build their first website.

In line with all the packages I've recommended in the past, this is another one worth way in excess of the asking price of $39.95 and comes with a no strings, no questions asked, 1 year money back guarantee.

UPDATE - This package has now been updated to include a 24 part HTML Course and such website building tools as a gizmo wizard which enables you to add special effects in just a few clicks, a mini site wizard for creating a no-frills mini site in minutes and a website encryption wizard which allows you to encrypt everything on your new Website to stop content thieves and spammers.

Free eBooks
At SureFireWealth.com every Free Member product comes with Full Give Away Rights... use them for your own benefit or as free bonuses for new subscribers to your newsletter, mailing list, or to attract attention to your advertising of other products, services etc.

Optional silver and gold packages provide access to additional software and eBooks with resell rights. Get instant access to dozens of software, ebook and resell packages and hundreds of professionally designed website and banner templates!

Once you have your site up and running you need to tell people about it. The way you do this will depend on your type of business. If you are only operating in a geographically small area, you need only use the web address in all other advertising and business literature so that interested people can access the site for more information.

If you are hoping to get work from a wider area, then you need to get your web site listed with the top search engines - Yahoo, Altavista etc.Make sure you read "Make Your Site Sell" to ensure you maximise your chance of getting listed. You can either go to each site and enter your site description or you can use one of the many programmes or services available that will do it for you. Recommendations are below. You will need to resubmit monthly to ensure your site remains listed, but should be aware that it can take weeks or months to get listed by some of the bigger engines.

To increase visibility of your site, little is more effective than backlinks from high ranking websites. Tag & Ping gives you an instant, unlimited Supply of PageRank 5+ Backlinks and works for any site including both Adsense Sites and Information Products. Get full details from Tag & Ping

There are several products and services that will automate your web submissions for you. Many offer limited free trials which are worth checking out prior to buying anything.

WebPosition 4 FREE Trial

Free 30-Day Trial Allows you to Try WebPosition 4 Risk-Free

WebPosition 4 now delivers complete website search engine visibility metrics making it an even more indispensable tool in your search marketing tool box. WebPosition 4 allows you to:

1. Report your search engine rankings

2. Target your keywords

3. Optimize pages using built-in expertise

4. Submit URLs to search engines

5. Analyze conversions using WebTrends*

The one I use is by a company called self promotion. You don't ever have to pay for the service if you don't want to, but if you decide it is useful, you can pay a fee of your own choosing. If you make a payment the details you have entered in the past remain on the server making it easy to resubmit each month. You can choose which companies to submit to automatically, and links have been included so that you can manually register when appropriate. They even e-mail you if the submission fails for any reason. I paid $10 (just £6) and can honestly say it's one of the best investment I've made on my business. For further details go to the website and try it out. http://selfpromotion.com

Or try VERICA!'s Web Submission Package

Submission to 13,500 + engines and directories nationally and internationally (AltaVista, Direct Hit, DMOZ Open Directory, Excite, Fast/All the Web, Go/Infoseek, Google, HotBot, Lycos, NBCI/Snap, Northern Light, Starting Point, WebCrawler, Yahoo)... 6 month program - one submission every month. Automatic rule check prevents accidental spamming when engine rules are broken. Listed with VERICA.COM! their family-friendly directory, free from erotic content.

Generally I'm not keen on services that blast your details to thousands of sites, but in this case, the testimonials are extremely impressive and clearly genuine.

If your site is primarily aimed at a UK audience, the following directories accept free site submissions:

Ask Jeeves UK - Search the web in plain English. Just enter a question, word or phrase and then click Ask.
http://uk.searchengine.com/ is a UK-only search engine that claims 90% coverage of UK domains. Formerly known as UKsearch.com.

For more sites, www.theenginerooms.com/ provides a comprehensive directory of UK search engines.