Whether you are out of a job, looking to supplement your income or want some of the luxuries in life we all have one thing in common, we want to make extra money and a home based business is a great way to do this. An online home based business allows you to work from the comforts of your home.The first step to earning extra income in an online home based business is to have a computer and an internet connection.The second step is to find an online home based business that you believe in.The third step is to begin to build your business and this is where the work begins. Most people become disappointed when they have not made any extra money in the first few days, weeks, or even months. This is mostly due to a lack of understanding of what there actually is to do to build an online business. To build a legitimate online home based business is a continuous process of showing your business, educating yourself, applying what you have learned and marketing your business. The main objective to building your online home based business is to pitch your business to a specific targeted audience because you have to get your website in front of as many people as possible so they can see what your business has to offer. To earn extra income and show that your home based business is legitimate, you need to make your presence felt on the internet. You do this by marketing.There are many ways to market your home based business. You need to do this in a way that ensures that your website is optimized for the search engines to find you. You need to start choosing certain keywords and build back-links to your website to achieve good rankings in the search engine resulting in free targeted traffic that goes directly to your website. This whole process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).Here are 9 effective ways to market your home based business:Viral emails – This kind of marketing is done by sending out emails, using back-links to your website. There usually is a one- time fee for this service.Forum marketing – Join a forum and join in the discussions. Put a back-link to your website in your signature file.Article marketing – Article marketing is simply writing and submitting your articles to several article directories on a consistent basis. You use the author’s resource box to anchor your keyword and use a back-link to your website. This type of marketing can be totally free, all you need is the time to write and submit your articles. If you don’t have the time, you can hire a ghost-writer to submit articles on your behalf.Squidoo and Hubpages marketing – Here is where you are creating lens or hubs by writing articles. You use the same rules as in article marketing; create back-links and keywords in your resource box. This type of marketing is also free.Video marketing – Create YouTube videos from your articles and put your website on the video. This will create back-links to your home based business as well.Social Bookmarking – Join Digg.com, or like sites, and submit your articles, Squidoo lens, Hubpages Hub, YouTube video, etc. Then there are sites that will take your submissions and spread them out using an RSS feed. This again creates numerous back-links to your home based business website without having to rewrite all the work that you have done.Social marketing – Create a group and spread the word about your business. This can be done through Facebook and MySpace. Create a back-link to your website here as well.Twitter marketing – spread your seeds here creating curiosity about your home based business. You can then send them to your articles, blog, etc.Blogging – Talk about yourself and what you have learned. Share some information and put your website here, creating yet another back-link.These are only a few of the marketing tools that are available to you to use. Just make sure that you are consistent in adding your material and that your material has unique content and is educational. This will ensure that your presence is legitimate online and once this starts to happen it will generate traffic to your website.