Advertising your online business is one of the biggest challenges that you, as an internet marketer, will face. The big question is always, ?How much money and time is it going to take to run an effective and successful business that will earn a good profit?? Many people will even shy away from internet marketing and business in general knowing that it will probably cost a fortune to advertise. Others will think that because their business is online, rather than the traditional offline, brick-and-mortar business, it won't cost as much to advertise. Here's the first installment of two explaining what it takes to advertise an internet business successfully:

When you have a good business idea and a business plan in place, the first thing to do is tell everyone you know about it. Tell your friends, your family, your relatives, your colleagues, and everyone you can comfortably tell about your business. When you tell one person, think of it as not only telling just one person, since each person will likely tell everyone they know in turn, and the news will spread. If one person is not interested, then maybe someone they know will be interested. Word of mouth can be a very powerful thing, and takes no extra money or time at all!

Next - and a frequently neglected form of advertising in the internet world - is to advertise your business offline. This includes advertising in the classifed business sections of local newspapers, in magazines, with flyers, posters, and business cards. The internet is filled with prospects looking for this and that product or service online, so they see hundreds of ads all mixed together. It can be more effective to have an offline ad that stands out from the rest and grabs people's attention. It costs very little in both money and time to advertise offline. A newspaper ad may be $30.00/month, and you can use your word processor to create flyers and business cards.

A good way to advertise online is by using ezine solo ads. This means paying $30-$200+ to have your advertisement posted by itself in other people's newsletters. Some newsletters have a huge subscriber list, so your ad can potentially reach thousands of people in one shot. A solo ad is more effective because it is the only advertisement that these subscribers will see in a day, so it captures their attention and they may click through to your website products and services. The advantage of ezine solo ads, while the cost may be higher, is that it is very quick and easy, so it can be a huge time-saver!

You may want to try Google Adwords, which can get thousands of targeted visitors to your site in no time when they search for the keywords in your ads that you bid on, and click on your ads which lead to your website products and/or services. It can be expensive, especially if you don't know what you're doing, so you want to make sure you read up on it closely, such as reading Perry Marshall's Definitive Guide to Google Adwords ($49), so that you come up with the high demand, low cost keywords you need to run successful ads without losing your money. Some people swear by this method alone, but be careful!