Unlike the offline world, where advertising is very effective, content rules the internet. You'll develop a more effective marketing campaign when you focus on strategies centered around developing content for your site.

Below are some of my most effective ways to market online, and I do it all for free.

1. Search Engines

Before you even develop your website, the first thing you should do is focus on the search engines. Organic, i.e. free search engine listings that are highly ranked, will get you far more traffic than using any kind of advertising.

The most important thing you should do here is find the right keywords. You can do this by using any of the pay per click search tools. You can also download a free tool like Good Keywords, http://www.goodkeywords.com

2. Articles

Writing articles not only allows you to brand yourself as an expert, it helps you to create original content for your website. The more quality content pages you have in your site, the higher it will rank in the search engines, and you will also create a viral marketing strategy for your business.

3. Press Releases

Press releases are news. Just like the offline world, where press releases are more effective than advertising, so too are they more effective online.

You should remember to focus on news about your business. Don't make your release a glorified sales letter. It will get rejected.

A simple search for press release writing will help you find resources to help you write an effective press release.

Press releases, like articles, are spider, or search engine food. The search engines love them, and a good release can be very viral.

4. Blogs/RSS

Blogging is the latest craze online. It's a very effective way to promote your business not only because of RSS, but because you can quickly and easily create content without knowing HTML, and with trackback, it has its own built in link building strategy.

RSS is nothing more than a very search engine friendly code that allows you to syndicate your content to other websites, or to be read in RSS readers.

With trackbacks, you can link back to other sites and build your links. This raises your search engine rankings.

5. Free reports

Free reports, like blogs, articles, and press releases, not only allow you to build a content strategy for your website, but you will also create a viral marketing strategy for your site.

A viral marketing strategy is very important because it's mainly passive. If you create good content, your content will be recommended by others. One person reads your content and recommends it to someone else, and before you know it, your content is all over the internet. The more entries you have in the search engines, the more likely you are to be found by your potential customers.

The point is, if you develop an effective content and search engine strategy for your business, you will get your message out a lot faster. Potential customers will find you, and they'll be eager for what you sell because they were already looking for you.