There are many ways to market your website, some of them not yet being taken advantage of or explored by today's website owners and unknown to the market experts. This is because these marketing ideas are not yet popular and still have to grow, to become visible as having marketing potential.

So firstly what is marketing, how is marketing defined, marketing is essentially the promotion and advertising of a product or service that some one is selling or offering in this case over the internet. Internet marketing ties in all sorts of creative and technical ways of getting your information out there, into the World Wide Web, it brings in the design and development of how you may market your website, service or product. Internet marketing takes advantage of any media potential a website may have to display and show off your website, product or service, it can be as creative as one wants it to be having positive and negative effects.

So now we know what internet marketing is we want to figure out the different ways in which you can accomplish it?

Firstly there is Search Engine Marketing this is the method of increasing a websites visibility over a search engine's result pages (SERPS) for example Google. You can achieve this by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which you can find articles on here www.back-links.org/tutorials.php. You can also use Paid Placement (PPC) which is where advertisers pay for traffic from search engine result pages to their website. You can find a detailed article on pay per click here www.back-links.org/ppc1.php. Another way in which you can increase your visibility to the web is by adding your websites universal resource locater (URL) to the most popular search engines, these being Google, Yahoo and Msn live, you can also spend time adding your URL to the less common search engines, which you can find by searching for search engines, in a search engine.

Internet marketing methods is also dependent on the type of website that you run, as you would only advertise on a wall paper website (why an earth you would make a wall paper website anyways) if perhaps you were a decorator or a paint supplier, not if you was Toyota. This is the same for a lot of internet marketing ideas, also it depends on if you want to splash out on paying for advertising or not, if you have a budget and what that budget is.

You can pay anything from $1 for a link to be put up on a website for a month; to $1,000,000 for a fully fledged media campaign on the television websites, radio websites, Google and eBay.

So below I shall categorize them in free ways to advertise your website, and ways in which you can pay for advertising and marketing. You may be thinking, so why did I put SEO and SEM up there, above all these other ideas, well that's because I believe everyone should take some time to optimize there website, even just the slightest bit, it can have a great positive impact to your site.

Firstly these are the paid ways in which you can advertise your website, depending on your budget of course as I stated above.

1. Most websites will offer advertising space these days; just with a bit of relevant keyword research and then a search or two of the most popular websites within that specification you may be able to find a couple which offer advertising space. If you then find a contact link you can then email them asking for some information on there website advertising. You want to be looking for websites within your niche however not websites that are completely identical in content to yours, mainly because not many people are going to want to go from one site to another which has the same content.

2. There are loads of people on forums and websites that are offering to send newsletters for a small fee or if your lucky for free, if you find a website or person who is offering to send newsletters to what you think is the target market then great. This would be a great way of making your website visible, it targets the market for your product or service specifically and hopefully getting their attention straight away. If you buy space in a newsletter you may only get a couple of lines to promote your site and sell it, to its reader. So you want to make sure it gets to the point straight away and of course looks eye catching over the other advertisements that may be on the newsletter too. Also be sure to add your URL this is definitely the most important thing.

3. Buying links on another person's site is similar to the first idea; however with this you may not get your own advertising space, and may just be placed into a list of websites usually relevant to one another. With this kind of advertising you don't want to splash out too much, be sure to check how many links he will be listing with yours, try to find out how much traffic they have going to that web page, not website as people often view your home page but perhaps not the page with your link displayed on it. After you have done this, and if it still feels worth it, then you need to make your website URL look as eye catching as possible, capital letters, bold, a different color if you want. There are restrictions with paying for links to be displayed and this is that your maximized to what you can do to make the link look different from the others to make it stand out.

4. My space bulletins, not the best form of advertising however they may get you a few views, it all depends on your website, and how you make use of the space you have in the bulletin. If it is you're my space bulletin then fine you have all the space in the world, however still you don't want to make it boring and bland. Keep it short and sweet, they are people on my space, they probably have better things to do than read bulletins, however if you make the bulletin title stand out, they may just have a look. These can be affective with the right website, and right lay out of advertising space, however note most people on my space are in there teens. If you're promoting a wrinkle cream, you may not find this form of advertising quite effective.

Well there is a few ways in which you can splash out a bit of cash, to promote your website. Of course there are more, however as I stated it really depends on what your websites niche is.

Here are some free ways in which you can promote your site

1. Well this form of marketing can work very well with specific website areas, one that I have found it to work well with is proxy websites. Yahoo answers, basically the idea behind this is, that you take your websites main keywords and search for them on yahoo answers advanced search box. Try to find general questions on your websites keyword for example this might be 'What are the best types of goggles for skiing?' You may answer, well I love skiing, I have these goggles...you can find articles on them here (add link) (or) you can find them here (add link).This may get only one or two people viewing your website, however if there are 10 of these kinds of questions a day, and it only takes 5 minutes or so to answer them it can be very effective.

2. Yahoo groups, find specific groups again in your websites niche, and just add a new topic to these groups explaining about this new amazing website being open, saying how great it is, and how full of information or cheap products add the websites URL to the end of this topic then post. You can copy and paste this, to each Yahoo group you join, making it easier and quicker to accomplish.

3. Adding your websites URL to your forum signatures is another way to get visibility, if it's a forum that's in the same niche then even better. Make the anchor text on the signature something catchy and colourful, and 'hey presto' that's all you need to do. Add it to two or three forums that you may post on daily and this is another way in which you can increase your websites visibility.

4. Tell your friends, this is one method that is much underrated but should definitely be done. Word of mouth is such a powerful way of marketing a product or service and especially now as communication between people is so easy and simple. Literally just tell a couple of friends, or even send an email to all your contacts on MSN or another social network you may use. Ok one out of them 20 people you have just emailed may tell their friend but it all adds up in the end.