Boost Your Legitimate Online Business With an Article Directory

One of the most important assets of legitimate home based businesses is an opt-in mailing list, or lists, of qualified prospects. A list needs to grow and to be renewed with fresh supplies of potential customers on a daily basis to ensure growth for your legitimate online business.

One effective, but under appreciated method of building an opt-in e-mail list is to set up and run a free article directory on your website. Internet marketers are always looking for new outlets for their articles and will willingly submit them to free article directories wherever they find them.

In order to submit articles to a directory, writers have to register and they know that. All you have to do is to build into the terms and conditions of the registration process an opt-in clause in which they agree to receive updates and other information from legitimate online businesses by email.

How easy is it to set up your own article directory? How much does it cost?

Setting up an article directory on your website is not as difficult as you might suppose, nor is it so expensive. You can download a directory software package free from ArticleDashboard.com.

Other software packages can be purchased for a one-time payment of around $30-$50. You simply download a zip file and upload it to your server with Article Dashboard. It is just as simple to set up a My SQL database.

The article directory provider will also run support services to help legitimate home based businesses through any difficulties during the set-up stage. Your article directory may look a bit threadbare at this stage as you have just set it up and not begun to publicize it.

Making use of a service that will populate your article directory with articles will solve this problem. Article Marketer offers just such a service, which you can use to keep your directory fully loaded and regularly updated.

That kind of service gives legitimate online business directories the vital ingredient of credibility that will encourage visitors to submit their article - and opt-in to your list as part of the registration process.

Once your article directory is set up and loaded, you'll need to get to work publicizing it via blog posts, articles on your website, articles submitted to other article directories with your own directory link in the signature file.

Make use of ezine ads and add a link to your signature file when you visit Internet marketing forums. As your directory develops it will attract a growing volume of traffic as webmasters come to collect articles for republishing and readers come to check out the articles on websites for legitimate home based businesses.

This, and the constant arrival of newly submitted articles will help your website to rise up the search engine rankings. A virtuous circle of increasing publicity and increasing traffic for your legitimate online business will be created. That in turn will bring more and more article writers to your directory, where they will submit their articles and join your opt-in list to grow your business.