Of all the things you can do online, there is one that you should definitely know how to do. MARKET A BUSINESS ONLINE!

That's right, with the power of the Online World to reach millions of people, Online Marketing is definitely an awesome tool that no business should be without. The simple fact that advertising is practically FREE. The ability to get the results of thousands of dollars in free publicity is practically unheard of in business today. Only recently have more and more people figured out how to utilize the ever exploding Online World to market their business efforts.

Think about it, there is probably no business in existence that could not benefit from free publicity! And the fact that properly utilizing free advertising raises net profits to unbelievable levels! Using any or all of the major online services, or the INTERNET, can help you market your business efforts.

Let's start with plain-old advertising. On America Online, for example, they will let you place classified advertisements for FREE! They have a variety of classifications to choose from. By placing these small free ads you can generate some very quality leads that can turn into sales. Or if you are a really good marketer you could sell something straight from your free ad. Wouldn't that be something, using the actual free ad to do all of the selling.

The other services offer free advertising from time to time. When they do charge for classified ads it is usually very inexpensive, and still a great deal considering how many people those ads can reach. When you place any advertisements you should always "code" your ads. This means put something in each individual ad that will tell you, if you get any business from it, which ad it came from. This way, you will probably find that some sections are better producers than others, and you will want to concentrate on these sections and not the ones that weren't making any money.

To code an ad you could make them request a certain "report" for more information. You should give each report a different code for each ad. Such as: "ask for report #1tv" , this way you would know that this request came from the ad on television, for sale category, and so forth. If they send you an order straight from the ad, make them give you an order #, which would be different for each ad. THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WHO ARE ADVERTISING ONLINE ARE NOT USING THESE AD CODES!!!

THIS IS A MAJOR MARKETING MISTAKE!!!

By not tracking exactly which ads are making money, they are wasting their time by continually placing ads in "loser" categories. The actual code can be anything you want to assign to it. ALWAYS keep track of every ad you place. Make a note of what it said, where and when it was placed. You will be pleasantly surprised when you analyze your "ad data" and see some positive trends developing. Just repeat these trends andit will help you to make more money!

How would you like to find a name list of several hundred (or even thousand) people who might be interested in the particular product or service you are selling based on their jobs or interests? Wouldn't that be great!? Well, you can! And the Online Services supply this service as a part of your regular membership.

This little unknown tool is called the "Member Directory!" You can do searches in the directory for other users with certain characteristics. For example, if you were selling fishing equipment, you could do a search by "fishing." All of the people that were registered in the directory and had listed fishing as one of their hobbies would show up on that search list. You could now send each one of those people an e-mail message telling them about your product or service, it's just like using a mailing list, but you have no postage! (*Make sure you check with your Online service to see if they allow unsolicited E-mail.)

You can also get the names of several prospects by doing some "browsing" in the different topic forums. Using the earlier example of looking for people who fish, you could look under sports until you found a discussion on fishing. You could then take note of the users' names that were participating in the discussions. You could do the same thing on the INTERNET with one of the many newsgroup topics that they have.

The bottom line is that you "test" and record the results of your Online Marketing efforts. Then just repeat the steps that are making you money and expand on them to reach more people. Doing simple research on the Internet. The Internet has several mailing lists that are dedicated to marketing on the Internet. You will also find hundreds of articles on the World Wide Web. By searching one of the WWW search engines like Webcrawler you can find all the information you can read. Use search strings such as: "online marketing", "internet advertising", "selling online", and so on.

You can also find many books on the subject at your local bookstore or being advertised online.