Once you have built and uploaded your home business website the next step is to start promoting it both offline and online. Offline methods include putting your web address on your business cards, stationary, brochures, flyers, pamplets, home sign, automobile or whatever literature you can. Online methods generally start with submitting your home business website to search engines and directories.

For those of you who either have a website now or are planning to have one in the future, you will obviously want youur website to be found in these search engines and directories.

You will therefore have to at some point decide whether you want to submit your site to each individual engine and directory manually, pay a submission service to do it for you, buy site submission software, or use one of the free submission services on the internet.

Submitting to each individual search engine and directory manually is quite easy to do but can be somewhat time consuming. To do this, you simply visit each site individually and look for the "Add URL" or "add a website" link which is usually located at the very top or bottom of each site. Then just click the button and add your URL. In some cases you will have to add a title, description and possibly other information. For the directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ, you will be required to visit the relevant category first. Be careful to choose the right category. If you pay a submission service to do this for you they can save you a lot of time and will usually do a slightly better job with the keywords and descriptions based on their know-how. If you choose to do it yourself, a good place to start is directoryguide dot com and searchenginecolossus dot com.

Another method is to buy software such as Submit Wolf. If you are only promoting a single site, I do not recommend purchasing this software because it is rather expensive and time consuming for a novice to learn. If you have an older computer this software will chew up a lot of resources while it is running and slow down your computer performance. On the plus side it does submit to a rather large number of sites. This can boost your page rank or popularity. That leaves us with the freebie submission services that exist around the net. There are number of them available, and they vary in quality. The way it works is you fill out one form and the service submits that information to all the engines on it`s list. I do not recommend using them if your whole business is built around your site, but for many sites they are adequate. The problem is that some search engines block these automated submissions automatically(they want you to personally visit their site), and they are ineffective for most directories which require that you navigate to the pertinent category first. Also, each engine allows a differing amount of keywords and requires different types of information. Some of the more popular services include submitexpress.com, which will submit your site to 40 search engines for free, addme.com which will submit your site to Google, Subjex, Alexa, Scrub The Web, FAST Search AllTheWeb, LookSeek, ExactSeek, Jayde, and a few others for free, addpro.com submits to 20+ top search engines using an automatic service that is easy to use, and quickregister.net which will submit your site to the major engines and directories if you put a small text link on your site. If you go to ez2www.com there is a freebie site submission service there if you click "add url" at the bottom of the page. There are other free submission sites out there. Just go to your favorite search engine and type in "free search engine submission" and you will be presented with a list of such freebies.