Understanding how to market your online small business:

Understand your market: First, you will need to understand the market you are promoting to. Analyze your visitors. Find out where they go, (which websites they visit,) and what publications they are interested in- this will give you an idea of where to advertise. It will also help you to understand your market's specific wants and needs so that you will be offering them the right products and services.

Basic promotions to begin with:

Website promotions-search engines: Build an optimized website: when you do this you will be able to take advantage of many cheap website promotions. Make sure you have good optimized content so that you can submit your site to the search engines. You will get good quality ready to buy visitors from search engine traffic.

Article distribution: You should write or have written a variety of articles about your industry. Submit at least 2 per week for article distribution. You will get valuable back links from article distribution. Plus, you will get highly targeted traffic who will convert well to sales.

Free newsletter: Use some articles for your newsletter: build your business list by offering a free newsletter on your website. This is a very valuable list in that you will be able to build up a good relationship with your subscribers so that over time, they will convert to your life long loyal customers.

Start a Google Awards campaign: This is a little tricky, so do some keyword research and read all the tutorials at Google before you begin. Keep a close watch on your campaigns and remember not to bid too high. Understand how many clicks through are converting to sales and adjust your bidding on this knowledge.

These few marketing methods will help you to get a good start on your promotions and allow you to drive good quality traffic to your website. It is very important to plan your promotions carefully and always be testing them.

Budget your promotions: Make sure you have a special budget for your promotions. The most common mistake in small business owners is not taking care of the marketing budget. Keep a certain amount of money aside from your regular business budget to take care of your promotions. Do not expect to make any real money your first 3 months, so budget for this. The above marketing methods are very cost effective, but most will still cost money. Therefore, start with a small amount of money, test, and when you know there is good sales conversion with a promotion, then channel some more money into it.

Do not forget to keep good records. Test and record each promotion and be sure to have multiple streams of marketing in place. Keep records of everything that is spent and the money that comes in. You can use a software program like 'quicken' to help you keep the budget straight.