Worried about the cost of promoting your home based business? Entrepreneurs are discovering how challenging it is to run a home based business in the current economic climate. Today, it's doubly important to control your budget and spend less in every area of your home business expenses. Fortunately, that's easy to do where your marketing budget is concerned.

Here are some tips on how to save money on marketing and promoting your home business.

• Set up a blog. This is a great-and more importantly, free-way to promote your business. Begin by creating a creative, inspiring and eye-catching design that will captivate the minds of your audience and pull in new readers. Don't be discouraged if it doesn't make you rich over night. As with any marketing method, building a loyal blog readership takes a little time, but the results are well worth it.

Post a short, helpful article on your blog at least three times a week, more if you can. Give information of interest to your target audience and build your personal brand. You can invite guest bloggers to post as well, in exchange for a link to their sites or blogs. But do your best to use original, never published before, content when possible for the best results.

• Take part in online forums. Internet marketing forums such as Warrior Forum or Digital Point forums are a great place to start. You'll meet others who are marketing online and build relationships with them. You can also learn more in a short time visiting these sites than you will in years working on your own.

Discover how to design and maintain blogs and Websites, market your business ethically and professionally, and much more. Be careful, though. It's easy to spend too much time on a forum and not enough time working!

• Use cross promotion with non-competing businesses that reach the same target market as you. You can connect through the forums or by searching you keywords online. Then write out a simple email and explain the benefits of cross promoting your products with theirs. In essence, you promote their products to your audience and they do the same for yours. Some people get rich working this marketing strategy alone.

• Build a mailing list. Gathering names and email addresses of people who are interested in what you sell that will allow you to promote your products and services to them on a regular basis-free of charge-and continue to sell to them. You'll want to give them lots of good, free information, too, like ebooks, reports, articles, software, etc. But this is a tremendous way to market your home business at no additional cost.

These are just a few tips to help you market your home business online. Put them into action and reap the benefits they can bring in a very short time while keeping your bank balance untouched.