Many smaller businesses may know it exists, but have no clue how to do it. There is hope!

Internet Advertising is just like advertising on TV or radio in that it conveys a message about a service or product to the general public or to a targeted market niche. Finding the right form of internet advertising for your business may require looking at your profit potential and your overall marketing budget first to understand what you can pay each month and what the Return On your Investment will be (ROI).

Most startups immediately go to Pay Per Click programs such as AdWords, which has become a very popular and ubiquitous advertising method. AdWords employs text ads, which are treated as artificial search results in a standard Google search for keywords. The highlight results at the top and listed at the far right of the Google search engine results pages are paid Google results, that is, AdWords.

AdWords cost a varying price per keyword per click. Though you can measure the click and where it goes, you cannot generally recoup your costs if no sales accrue, and there lie the biggest problem with Pay Per Click. Other forms of advertising using the Per Per Action model (Pay Per Call, Pay Per Chat, etc.) have begun to take root as a backlash to this downfall of AdWords. Click fraud, another specter on the horizon of AdWords, contributes to many estimates as more then 50% of the average click for AdWords campaigns in the more competitive industries. With this in mind, one must weigh the costs of AdWords and decide it the probable ROI outweighs such risks.

Online, one would be hard-pressed to do it yourself. Unlike a local pizza chain just getting started, you can't just get a phonebook listing and do a direct mail and newspaper ads campaign and expect to grow a following. Online marketing, or web marketing, or internet marketing, involves such needs as email (the virtual direct mail) campaigns, as well as networking and sponsorships, search engine optimization, and affiliate sales programs. Most sites selling a mass distributed product need all of these to actually maximize profits. Reliance on just one or two of these methods will not see as much profit in the long run as using all will.

Saturation of the internet with your product can substantially increase your rate of monthly sales over time. Other factors such as traffic coming in are actually a product of networking and search engine optimization, as well as the pay per ads and clicks. It's generally best to ensure you have organic search results traffic coming in to offset the long-term cost of pay per click, sponsorships and email campaigns. The ideal situation for any site selling a product or easily distributed service subscription is to invest in search engine optimization on a monthly basis, building organic relevance on your top keywords over time, as well as submitting the site to directories and other sites that can then link to your site in relation to your keywords. Without this component, a site owner may not be able to sell the business for a substantial profit later on. Much of the value in a website actually comes form the organic traffic streaming through.

Direct mail (email in our case) requires lists of likely customers. With the Can Spam act recently enacted, anyone can spam anyone, so long as the name and physical address of the spammer is attached at the bottom of the email. This said, however, one should ensure that the list used to email from on each campaign is filled only with previous buyers of such services or related services. These email addresses should reflect likely buyers of what you sell. If they do not, you are wasting money including them in the list. Purchasing a list is often the route business owners go. The lists purchased should thus be opt-in only. Again, this is in reality for the benefit of the spammer, not the receiver of the spam.

Why is it some do big volume and some hardly any? It usually depends on the outfit, the staff, and the intentions of the agency owner(s) and their availability for the business. Most agencies have hands that do more than one consulting or related gig ongoing. For this reason, agencies often limit their time to the clients most likely to pay off in the short run. Many take a longer view, but the general wisdom in many such agencies is that the average client has a short life expectancy as a client. Dissatisfaction or the pursuit of more profitable ways to do promotions often land a client in one agency's lap after another.

Thus is the life of an agency. How do we get clients? How do we keep the ones with high revenue potential? How do we spot the low revenue clients and toss them out and move on? These questions are usually the purview of someone at the top of the agency, but are also played out on the individual level of the consultant, as well.

Ad and marketing agencies tend to seek out big clients to offset the short-term nature of many of their clients. Ultimately, the equation of effort vs. revenue potential is and should be the chief measure of a prospective client. In the end, those who consistently bring their business to an agency and have low maintenance as their trademark will tend to become long-term clients. These loyal clients make up the foundation income of any agency and at least allow projections into the future with some small bit of accuracy in an otherwise often specious industry.

How do you decide what to buy and when? Many do not find the right medium for their message until late in the game, if at all. Understanding what you can manipulate to your advantage what to steer clear of makes all the difference.

Doing it yourself is the hallmark of many an entrepreneur just starting out. But this situation was not meant to last forever. Eventually, a business needs a marketing manager, meaning a person who knows how to run the whole shebang. The internet is the perfect place to run a small cost marketing campaign for a startup business. Local business can rely more on radio and TV spots, as well as newspaper ads and magazine space.

The great thing about advertising on the internet is that internet advertising can be of two kinds: short-term and long-term. Content is the way to create long-term advertising that does not require one to pay! Short-term ads all are marked by the fact that one DOES have to pay for a space to place the ad, and the ad eventually ends. With content, however, the ad opportunity lasts as long as desired, and one can change or update the content. Content plays into search engine optimization. Say you have a press release writing business in Houston, TX. Now let's say you want to create 50 new clients per month. By creating winning content and landing pages (the pages search engine users and others are desired to land on first, esp. to make a sale), one can achieve this end and rely less heavily on media purchases. That said, for any profitable business, a healthy mix of all internet ad mediums is typically the recipe for success. Without diversity, the full audience for an offering in a particular industry may not be addressed.

"How do I start an email campaign to get targeted people on my site buying my stuff?"

Laugh if you will, but you know you are asking the same thing, or did, at least, at one time. The answer CAN be email campaigns, which, provided one has a good opt-in list to start with, can take a site from no sales to lots of sales in just one campaign. The key is in the list, and the key to any good list is quality filtering. A good list should be culled from opt in lists by confirmed purchases by industry. This is the only way to ensure to have the best possible leads. These leads in turn will more likely become interested in the offering put out for them, if it matches their previous buying history.

Who the list is purchased from is also important. Not just anyone can provide a good list. Internet marketing agencies usually have the goods on email lists. Even if an agency isn't going to tell you a lot about how or where they get their bread and butter (their lists!), ask questions about the quality of the lists and why their lists will bring you sales. The more questions a client asks about this, the more likely that client will know if the agency knows email or is just barking up a strange tree.

There is no secret to email campaigns, it's just a matter of starting and following some basic guidelines. To really excel, one may have to discover tricks of the trade from experienced marketers. This can be done through email campaign how-to ebooks that lay out what to do, how to do it, and how to experiment to improve ROI results with each campaign blast or launch.

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