Promoting a website comes down to one of three things at the end of the day.

The first being, pay per click advertising, on the right hand side of search engines.

The second, search engine optimization, improving the organic position of your site.

Lastly, and perhaps least of all, affiliate marketing.

All three of these exercises can be particularly taxing on the bottom line. However, each form of internet marketing has its distinct advantages and flaws.

One positive characteristic shared by all these forms of internet marketing is transparency. Using analytics programs such as Google Analytics, you can easily configure a goal, a value for that goal and thus, track conversions and cost vs expenditure.

Upon balancing you cheque book and evaluating the effectiveness of each market source, if you make more that you have spent, then you have won, and you should continue to increase spend until the cost vs benefit graph levels off.

If you have spent less than 3 months on your online advertising campaign, short term loss is expected. This is particularly true for SEO, which requires at least 3 months on average for benefits to flow on.

Internet Marketing Options

Google Adwords, and the Yahoo and Live equivalent are used quite heavily in the opening 5 months of the business. Then, as the business either sinks, swims or plateaus, the PPC budget is adjusted accordingly. If however, PPC is only a short term strategy for you, I encourage SEO.

Relying purely on SEO can also be a foolish action to undertake. SEO cannot guarantee ranking outcomes, and even with steady traffic to your site. You may not be capturing the qualified users. PPC brings in steady, targeted and specialized traffic specific to your terms. You can control your budget, what your customer sees, where they land who they are and much more. Many successful companies maintain their PPC campaigns even with strong SEO backing, as PPC tend to have 10 times more conversions on average than organic campaigns.

Finally, affiliate marketing is something that is only worth considering if the site you would like to place your ad on will reveal clear user demographic, traffic and other information pertinent to you. Only subscribe to have your banner or link displayed on affiliate sites if they will bring you qualified visitors who are likely to generate conversions. For instance, A computer tech forum, would be a good place to have an affiliate link to a computer troubleshooter site.

As a rule of thumb, start off with paid marketing, simultaneously grow your SEO and later find relevant affiliates.