My niece asked me about making a simple website for them so they could teach people how to make worm beds and also sell their worms. I told her to send me the pictures and information that I needed and I was going to make them a simple 5 or 6 page site and host it on my server.

She decided she wanted to try herself which is good, but she chose to host on a free site that will not give her much bandwidth and did not downsize her graphics and it just doesn’t look very professional, but at least she jumped in there to learn something new, but she like many other work from home businesses that are trying to get started on the Internet need to know a couple of things to get started which brings me to the point of this post.

The first thing you have to do if your planning on selling anything online is to create a website. If you don’t have a website or have a poorly designed website you should consider creating, which she did or re-design your website so you can adequately market your products and if you don’t have any experience in web design there are many software packages that make it a simple job for those with no experience.

However, hiring a web designer if you can afford it or having someone that at least knows more about designing than you would be worthwhile because they could create a website which would be functional, attractive and more suitable to your products. They would also be able to implement some advanced features on your website.

You have to at least know a little about optimizing your website for search engines if you expect to get any free traffic. Most people understand that search engines rank websites according to quality and relevance for particular search terms. Most Internet users appreciate the effort by search engines and use these search engines to find the best websites on a particular subject.

This means the Internet users are likely to only visit websites which rank well with search engines. Therefore if your website is not high ranking, you are not likely to generate a great deal of traffic from Internet users who use search engines to find relevant websites. This post is meant for the beginner starting an online business.

Those of us that have been working on the Internet know that top ranking websites usually obtain the most traffic from search engines and all websites that land on the first page of the search engine will have better success in improving their traffic. Now in the case of my niece I suggest that they get business cards printed up and advertise in bait and tackle magazines.

They could also print out flyer’s and advertise in their local paper plus I would definitely go around to all the local businesses that need this type of thing for all those southern fishermen and strike up a deal to supply the bait, but that could work with any product that you sell. Also placing free classifieds in the appropriate sections will bring a lot of inquiries about your product.

Their are many ways to drum up business when you are first starting out, but remember to have a website that looks professional and not something that is just thrown together for your business and make sure you don’t use free hosting it doesn’t look good for your business either.