First, identify your target market if you haven’t already done so. It’s surprising the number of people who start businesses without realizing who their customers are, or many long-term business owners who haven’t kept up with the shifts in customer trends. In order to eventually reach your ideal internet advertising campaign, you need to understand your customers/potential customers very well. What are they looking for. What concerns them? Write down a list of questions that you could ask your target audience and find the answers. This will help you to reach them with your promotional efforts.

If you are on a low budget, you can start with free advertising at any of the social networking sites like FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. The key here is to be social. Include all of your business information and websites in your profile but you shouldn’t go out blasting your network with promotional messages or comments.

You can also start a free blog at Blogger.com which provides information about the products and services you offer.  Still staying in the low cost and blogging sphere, you can create your own blog to represent your business at a low cost and improve your business appearance over the free blogging platforms.  Sites like Blogging Beginners will show you how.

Or you can try article marketing which means creating informational articles about your business and submitting them to the article directories. YouTube is another fantastic way to do free (social) promotion. Upload a video or tutorial that is helpful to the people you are trying to target. More and more people are jumping on the YouTube bandwagon. It’s not the only video sharing site, but it is the most popular. Other forms of no-cost promotion include participation in your industry’s forums and/ or placing free online classified ads. Free advertising can be very effective, but it does take time to start seeing results. The goal is to provide real value to your audience and to be persistent and consistent in your efforts.

In terms of paid advertising, you can choose to run some PPC (pay per click) ads on your favorite search engine, paid online classifieds and banner ads on other websites that are relevant to your business. Ezine advertising is another effective method. Again, here it’s important that you do some research. Choose an ezine which suits your target marketing. Of course, you want to go with the ones that have more subscribers but the responsiveness of the subscribers is also very important. Get as much information as you can from the ezine publisher before committing to an advertisement.

Your internet advertising campaign should never be stagnant. It changes and adapts as you learn and your business grows.

These are just some of the many internet advertising places. There are many other venues that you can use to promote your business, products and services:

1. Article Directories, Article Marketing and Content Sites. Registering with Ezine Articles (and the hundreds of other article directories), Hub Pages and Squidoo is completely free. Your goal with these sites is to create informative articles about your products/services and publish them here. Doing this will earn you credibility, expert status and possibly higher ranking in the search engines once you start bringing in traffic to your site.
2. Search Engine Pay Per Click (PPC) Platforms: All of the major search engines and many other search engines offer the possibility for you to advertise on their sites and some of the most sophisticated internet advertising help. It works like this. . .you place an ad based on some keywords that are relevant to your business, products or services. All of the search engines give you free tools that you can use to find the keywords that you want to target. You will bid on each keyword that you advertise and the search engines will also help you to identify what your bid should be. Once you have placed your ad, whenever anyone types in the keyword that you targeted into that search engine, your ad will come up. Where it appears depends on how high you placed your bid and how relevant your ad is to the keywords that you specified.
3. Ezine Advertising. Advertising in online magazines, called ezines, is another very effective way to get started with internet advertising. As with all of your advertising efforts, this requires some research on your part. Your goal is to find an ezine which fits your target market and advertising budget. Don’t discount ezines with small subscriber count. They may allow you to advertise for very little and often have very responsive lists.
4. Banner advertising. Placing banner advertisement on high traffic sites within your industry is also an effective way to bring in traffic to your own site.
5. Online Classified Ads. Many online classified sites allow you to place free advertisements within restrictions. Upgrading to become a paid member usually allows you to place more sophisticated ads more frequently than if you are a paid member.

Each of these methods offers internet advertising help in the form of written instructions, tutorials and support communities within their sites.