There is nothing more freeing than starting your own online home based business, as you have the freedom from going to a job, the freedom to make all of your own decisions, and the freedom to shape your own destiny. Whether you are new to a home-based business or you’ve been doing it for a while with less than excellent results, you can increase your success by following a few simple steps to increase the number of leads that come into your business.Ultimately, the method you use to drive more traffic to your online business doesn’t matter, as long as it is the best method for you and it is something that provides you with both immediate and long-term results. In my own online home based business, my goal is to not only work for success now, but to set myself up for success in the long-run, so I only do marketing practices that will result in continuous results in the future.Since I’ve received the most success from these free methods of driving leads, I will discuss three of my favorite free marketing tools that not only drive laser-targeted leads to my online business, but continue to bring in results long after I’ve done the work and moved on from them.#1 – Harness the power of article marketingArticle marketing is a great marketing tool for so many reasons, but the most beneficial are that it is completely free, it brings in only those who are already interested in my products, it pre-sells the leads on my expertise, and finally the articles continue to bring in leads for years after they are written. Image that, it takes 10-15 minutes to write a good article of 300-500 words, and this short period of work bring me thousands upon thousands of leads non-stop. Another great thing about article marketing is that you can write a few per day and over time you will have an army of articles working hard for you, even if you no longer choose to write them.#2 – Start your own business-related blogBlogging is a great way to build a following and is a great platform for selling your products. Blogs can be quite simple to set up, only taking a few minutes to get up and running, and require nothing more than a post or two every week. Blogs are popular with Google as well, meaning they receive great rankings in the search engines.#3 – Make intelligent forum postsYou can find plenty of forums that are related to your niche, and all you have to do is set up a free account, then post to whichever topics you can help with. By posting a couple times per week, you can build plenty of interest in yourself and people will click on your name and be sent to your website/blog/business. it really is a great free technique for getting plenty of targeted leads.