Let's cover a few of the basics concerning online marketing. In the earliest years of the Internet it was widely believed (contrary to fact) that websites, by their very existence, could function as advertising. Put up a website and the world would beat a path to your online door. This misconception caused many heartaches, because advertisements are offers that you see accidentally - when you aren't looking for them.

A website is like a billboard in the wilderness. No one knows it's there unless they learn of it somewhere else and go looking for it. In those early days it was essential to advertise offline to bring customers to one's website. Of course, offline advertising still works - you see website addresses in offline advertising all the time now. You see them on television, in magazines, in newspapers - almost anywhere you look. There is though a form of advertising that works for online marketing.

Today people go online to look for information. And they find what they are looking for by using a search engine. There are thousands of search engines online, but the most commonly used ones are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These folks discovered that they could sell advertising space on the "results" pages that their search engines generated. Not only that, but through the use of "keywords", the terms people type into the search engines, they could present the visitor with ads that bore a useful relationship to what the visitor was seeking.

At Google, for instance, you will see them at the top of the results page and in a column off to the right. They are listed as "sponsored ads" or Google Ads, depending on where you see them. Few people go looking online for advertising, but anyone using the search engines finds them anyway - and they are very effective in bringing interested visitors to the sites that use the internet to advertise - and this makes for good online marketing.

Since Google and other search engine companies are in the business of selling targeted advertising, they have developed very sophisticated language analysis software to help search engine visitors find what they are looking for - useful information related to the subject of their searches. They have also created a system whereby advertisers bid for the top spots on the results pages. This is called "pay per click" or "PPC" advertising because the advertiser only pays the search engine when a visitor clicks on her ad.

From an advertiser's point of view, of course the best spots are those on the first page of the results - and these command the highest per-click bids. From a visitor's point of view, the unpaid-for results are more interesting than the sponsored ads. The visitor is, after all, not much interested in a sales pitch and will view the un-sponsored results with less resistance than they will a sales pitch. They give preference to high quality unbiased information over any kind of sales pitch or online marketing advertisement.

As an online business owner, there may be times when you will want to buy PPC advertising, but a better deal for you is when your website is so well received that it rises to the first page of results that a visitor finds when they search for websites likely to provide the information that they are looking for.

The Online Marketing Crossroads So we find ourselves at a crossroads. There are three distinct methods of getting prospective customers to come to your website.

1. Pay for ads that will bring you online traffic - PPC ads are just one of several types that work,

2. "Fool" the search engines into ranking your website highly by means of "search engine optimization" (SEO for short), or

3. Build a website of such compellingly high quality that it ranks highly in the search engines without resort to elaborate SEO strategies.

I'll cover the advantages and disadvantages of each of these choices in a separate article about choosing your approach. But first, take a few minutes to learn a few things about how to do your online marketing from home.