Best of all though, you can sometimes arrange for free links with partners in return for a similar placement on your own site. That doesn’t just give you free advertising—it also helps your search engine placements.

I use a lot of text links to promote my sites, but I wouldn’t just use them. They aren’t prominent enough to really keep traffic moving in droves, but in terms of effectiveness and cost, they’re way up there.

4.3 Classified Ads

Offline, classified ads are cheap little adverts that appear at the back of newspapers or magazines. They work well if you’re trying to sell your old Ford Escort or you’re looking for a new home for your tatty sofa, but they’re not too profitable for businesses aiming to keep repeat sales coming in.

That’s offline. Online, things are a little different. But not hugely different.

I post adverts on classified columns, but I don’t expect to make a lot of money from them. What I do expect though is an opportunity to test my headlines and ad copy before I start spending hard cash on AdWords, text links and sales letters.

That’s why I don’t bother with the dollar ads. If I’m going to spend marketing money, I’d rather give it to a search engine than a classified ads column. The return on sales just doesn’t justify it.

But there are places where you can place free ads, and you can actually do this on some of the really big sites like AOL and Yahoo. Even if I don’t make many sales, the fact that I’m getting my product in front of so many people certainly won’t do me any harm.

Occasionally, I’ll post an ad on one of these and monitor how many replies I get.

4.4 Cultivating New Customers

Text links, banners and search engines are all ways to attract clients and build a customer base. It’s our buyers that’s we’re really talking about here. But the web isn’t the only place to look for customers even for web-based businesses. Some of the old traditional methods like word-of-mouth referrals still work just as well, and still bring me a fair bit of cash each month. Here are some tips to help you grab as many customers as you can while you’re setting up your business and getting your online marketing programs in place.

Know Your Market

Whatever your line of business, you’ve got to know your market. You have to know who your clients are, what they want and what makes them buy. Do the market research, check out your competitors, create a formal marketing plan—but take the effort to put yourself in the shoes of your buyers. Otherwise you won’t get any!

Bring Out Your Benefits

You might think you know what your product’s sales points are—you might even be dead proud of them—but the fact is, your buyers don’t give a toss about all the wonderful gizmos you’ve packed into your product. They just want you to answer one question: what’s it going to do for me?

That’s what all your marketing has to be about: explaining to your buyers how you’re going to improve their life.

Make Your Site Sing

It can take a fair bit of effort and not a small amount of time to create a website that works. But you can’t stop there. You’re going to have to keep updating it, checking it and making sure all the links and addresses work. It’s the first place to look when you notice your sales starting to drop, and it’s crucial to keep them coming in.

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