It is very easy to start a home based business these days, especially an online one.  There has never been a better time to start your own business, whether you have an existing job at the moment or not.  All you really need is a computer with internet access and a passion to succeed.  Most people will have the computer and internet access!

Many people when they do start their home based business they get caught up in the online hype about the next best thing, instead of finding a niche that they feel passionate about and making a business out of that.  Do you have a skill that you can teach others to do?  Do you have a hobby that you can build a website around?  The beauty of the internet is that while you may be the only person in your local area who is passionate about a particular thing, when you get online you can find hundreds, if not thousands of like-minded people, pretty quickly.

It is very easy, with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Ning communities and Twitter to find hobby and business groups to join.  You can start answering any questions on these forums and become known as an expert in your chosen field pretty quickly.

Need a website?  You can create your own website for just a few dollars startup costs on buying a domain and some hosting and using WordPress to build your website.

Never has it been so cheap nor so easy to start a home based business.  The commute time is amazing and if you have children, there is no more childcare costs to pay until your business really starts to take off, and that’s only if you want to have childcare.

As for creating content and products, you can use free software such as OpenOffice to create your products and use free social media websites to promote both your website and your products.  You can get a product creation guide to help you figure out how to use free software to create your paid products.

Before starting your business you will need to check with your local authority/local government office to register as a home business.  There are usually very friendly staff there who will talk you through the process.

WordPress makes it very easy for visitors to follow your rss feeds and keep up to date with your latest blog posts, however, as an internet marketer (yes that’s you!) and online business owner, you want to be able to mail things to your list that you may not want to necessarily post on your blog.  Exclusive offers, promotional materials, product recommendations are just a few of the examples.

Having visitors sign up to your rss feeds is great but you should always have an alternative, one that you have more control over and that’s where the mailing list opt-in box comes in.  There are several email marketing software companies that you can use to start your mailing list.

There are 3 main autoresponder companies to choose from, each offer either a free trial of their service or a free version, which comes with advertising on each email you send out as well as a limited service (usually just 1 autoresponder per account). This is fine if you are just starting out, however if you are already established, you should have your autoresponder already and this delivery system won’t cost you any extra!

I use GetResponse as my autoresponder, which I’m very happy with and it works out cheaper than Aweber which quite a few of my clients use and Aweber also offer a $1 first month trial. To compare the 2, GetResponse is the cheaper option although the less well known brand (although it’s catching up!) and most of the emails you will receive from internet marketers will be from Aweber, apart from mine!

Another option is Constant Contact which offers a 60 day free trial. This is another great way to get started, without the initial expense.

Have a look at all 3 and choose which one best suits your needs for now and for the immediate future.  Once you’ve signed up and set  up your mailing list, you will be given a code to use to capture email addresses.  This is the code you need to use for the next step.

It is very simple to add an opt-in box to your WordPress blog within the sidebar as a widget.  Go to Appearance – Widgets – and you will see your widget options.  You want to place the code into a TEXT widget, and in the main sidebar, which is usually the right one.  Press save and then you should see your opt-in box appear on your website.

Social bookmarking is a great way to drive more traffic to your website as well as telling many more people about your blog posts.  Allowing your visitors, who love your blog posts to recommend it to others, as well as bookmark it so that they can go back and re-read your blog post at a later date.  It may be that your post has a great how to instruction on doing something or perhaps it’s a list of resources that you’ve compiled.

There are a few main social bookmarking sites that you’ve probably heard about – Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Diigo that are very popular with users, and you can follow others bookmark accounts to see what they have been bookmarking.

When using social bookmarking it’s a good idea not to just bookmark your own websites all the time as the search engines might get wise to what you are doing, it’s better to have a mix of sites you’ve bookmarked.

Also it is good to know that often when you get traffic from bookmarked websites it can often be quick traffic, in that they have come to your website out of curiousity and unless you make an instant good impression, they will leave quickly.  So if you are getting lots of traffic but no conversions then you should think about editing your content to be more appealing to visitors, that is unless you are getting conversions on your page from other traffic.

As you can see at the bottom of this blog post, I have many different social bookmarks available for you to use to bookmark this post.  The plugin I used is called Sexy Bookmarks, and if you like this plugin, you can add it to your WordPress blog too, very easily.

All you need to do is go to Plugins – Add New – and in the search bar, search for “sexy bookmarks” and when it appears in your list, click on “install”.

Once you have installed Sexy Bookmarks you will now be using social media to promote your website.  Make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website so that you can then track how effective this is for your site.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  It means that it converts your content into a feed which you can stream into other content with just 1 url.  For WordPress the rss feed is usually mydomain.com/feed/ and that will allow you to feed your blog posts into a number of other websites, which is great for both the promotion of your content and for backlinks to your website.

With all the different rss readers available, it’s much easier for a visitor to subscribe to your rss feed rather than to sign up to your mailing list.  One of the main reasons is that the visitor is then under control over what they read and will not get their email address misused and sold or rented to a third party and receive spam in their email inbox.

Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own readers, which means if you have an account with any of these services, you can add your blog feed to these readers as another way for the search engines to pick up and index your content, especially if you make the reader feed public.

Also there is bloglines which is a very popular blog reader, where you can keep all the feeds of the blogs you follow in one place.

There are also hundreds of blog directories that you can submit your blog rss feed to.  You can just go to your chosen search engine and search for “blog directory rss submission”.

Ning is a community of different groups, and with each profile you create in the different groups you can add an rss feed which is a great opportunity to add your own blog feed.  Only join the groups that relate to your market as these members will be most interested in your content.  Remember that if a Ning group is private, in that you need to join it before you can see any of the content, then the search engines will not be able to index your feed.

I’m sure everyone reading this will have a Facebook group.  You can also add your blog feed to Facebook Notes and have your blog content flowing into your Facebook account too.

These are just a few of the ways you can use your rss feed to promote your blog.  What other ways do you know of?