Going online means you no longer have to hire a professional to get powerful marketing results. Success with internet marketing can come from your home office once you discover the keys to promoting your business online.

Your Starting Point

First, you will need a website. It is best if you do your homework and select optimal keywords before you get your domain name. Then you can separate the keyword phrase with hyphens when composing your domain name, thereby making your keywords more accessible to search engines.

Keywords

Next, you will need to optimize the keywords as you build and add content to your website so that the search engines will find your site and rank it well. If there is too high a percentage of keywords can hurt rather than help your pursuit of good search engine visibility. Seek out some effective Search Engine Optimization tools to help you succeed in getting a website that will rank highly.

Links and Traffic

After you've done what you can to build an effective website, you will need to turn your attention to letting people know about it. Getting links to your website is critical if you want people to find it. You can draw traffic to your website in a variety of ways, and you should try at least several of these options in order to build links and traffic.

1) Write articles—lots of them—and submit them to article directories. At the end of the article, your resource box gives your name, some brief information, and links to your website.

2) Create a blog that you update frequently. People enjoy the casual, conversational style of blogs, and if they like yours well enough, they may even subscribe to it as an RSS feed.

3) Answer questions on forums that deal with a topic related to your website. You can generate better leads by writing truly helpful responses rather than posting only for self-promotion purposes.

4) Create a lens on Squidoo. Here you can promote your website for free, and possibly earn money for charity and perhaps yourself while you are at it.

E-mail List

Gathering e-mail addresses from people who respond to an offer on your website, blog, or resource box is what you need to do in order to begin an e-mail marketing campaign. You want people who are interested enough to "opt in" and sign up for your list. E-mail is a way to stay on the radar of people who might eventually decide to come to your website to buy.

Your Results

Finally, you should be tracking where the visitors to your website are coming from and work toward improving how many people you reach and how likely they are to buy from you (your conversion rate). The best marketers are always trying to evaluate their results in order to improve them. By staying on top of overall marketing trends and strategies as well as monitoring how well your own efforts are paying off, you can gain success with internet marketing. The satisfaction and savings that come from doing it yourself are what will keep you and your business moving forward.