The sheer amount of information available today about internet marketing can be overwhelming and confusing for the typical small business owner. This is one reason many small business owners avoid marketing via the internet, despite the many advantages of a targeted, internet marketing campaign. But wading through all the jargon and confusing technological concepts is not necessary for making practical use of internet marketing methods. The basics of internet marketing is no more complicated than other, more traditional forms of marketing. Whether your business is already online or not, much of the small business economy is conducted via the internet, and so understanding the basics of the internet, and of internet marketing, is critical for the success of your business.

I strongly believe that whether or not your business succeeds depends on how well you can get yourself noticed, how well you provide people with reasons to devote their loyalty to you, and finally, what claims they make about you. Whether on the street, or online, it is that easy. The only things that differ are the particular methods you use to make these things happen.

There are two basic ways to draw attention to your business online. You can pay for advertising or earn it by putting yourself out there and networking, letting people know what service you provide. Yes, it really is that simple! However, whether you succeed or fail depends upon on your ability to put the theory into practice and make solid marketing plans.

There are many ways to purchase advertising that gets your business onto the monitors of potential customers. As with advertising in any other medium, some of them are very cost-effective while others will be complete wastes of time and money. The degree of skill you employ in your advertisements is the deciding factor. A major advantage of internet ads is that they allow you to evaluate the return on your advertising investment on an almost continuous basis, and adjusting your internet advertising mix can be done very quickly. Google Adwords is a noteworthy form of internet advertising, placing ads on the top right corner of the pages listing their search results. Yahoo and MSN are among other service providers that have somewhat different versions of such advertisements. This column is too short to list every form of internet advertising, so I will cover other internet ads in future columns.

The other way to get yourself in front of your target customer group is to earn it. The object is to get yourself listed as highly as possible in the search results for terms of interest to you , and to get your business direct traffic from other sites that mention your services. The best way to do this is to provide information that other websites find useful for their viewers. This requires a commitment to effort and cash to make it work, but the results are much more permanent than buying advertising. Personally I much prefer this method since you get long term results for your efforts. However, you must know what you are doing in order to get the maximum return for your efforts.