Since most people are really looking for free sources of advertising, let me start off with those first. If you are looking for advertising avenues that won’t cost you anything and still bring you some results, your best bet is to go with article marketing. Article marketing, in theory, is very simple. You write articles that pertain to your target market and product, submit them to article directories and bring traffic to your site through the link in the article that you’ll include in your author bio. The only drawback is that this form of advertising is relatively slow to bring results.

If you’re looking to actually spend some money and get results a little faster, one of the most cost effective ways is to host your own FFA site. You can do this for as little as $10 a month. What hosting an FFA site does is it allows you to send out your daily advertising message to people who post their own ads to your site. This is a great way to reach other people who are involved in Internet marketing. This is a very cost effective way of advertising as you can host about 10 sites a month for under $200.

If you’re looking to spend a little more money and get the most targeted traffic that you can get online, your best bet is to go with Google Adwords. In a nutshell, Adwords is a system of advertising where you put up a 3 line ad based on certain keywords that you want to target and pay for this ad only if a person clicks on it and goes to your site. The amount you pay per click will depend on how targeted the keyword is and the competition for that keyword. For the most part, the most expensive keywords, per click, are those for make money online opportunities.

In the early years of the Internet, only large companies with broad name recognition could take advantage of the new medium’s vast marketing potential. While search engines such as Google were still in their infancy, small businesses were mostly left out, and were forced to stick with traditional advertising methods, many of which were rapidly becoming obsolete. These last few years have been nothing short of a revolution for online marketing of small businesses. This, of course, is an aspect of larger social and cultural shifts facilitated by the Internet. More than ever, the individual voice can achieve exposure equal to that of powerful corporations.

As a small business owner, you may already have a sense of the changing times, and maybe you’ve added a blog to your website, on which you write about issues related to your business. If used well, this blog has pleased your regular, established customer base. This is great yet it does little toward building site traffic and expanding your market. There are tons of Internet advertising techniques you already know about, and these are somewhat useful, but most of these techniques do little to earn the long-term trust and respect of new customers. If you’re interested in reversing this trend in a creative way, you might want to try article marketing.

Article marketing is an innovative strategy that can generate new, long-term customers. For detailed information, do a Google search for “article marketing,” and you’ll find some helpful websites that can lay out the details for you. In short, you’ll be generating solid web content always a hot commodity in today’s constantly-updating cyberspace and, through “About the Author” boxes attached to your content, you’ll draw a growing number of potential customers to your website. It’s similar to the blogging you may already do, except the article marketing service will help to spread your content through many different corners of the web.

The key to drawing customers is to show that you have an expert and insightful perspective on your field. You can do this by writing short, informational articles. Start with things you know about, and do a little research, if necessary. Make your articles around 600-700 words, and use them reveal insights about your field that your customers should know. This is the leveling power of the Internet. Though your business may be small, you can use your knowledge and expertise to compete with big corporations, whose marketing budgets may be a thousand times larger than yours.