Webinars, or online seminars, have gained considerable popularity. Bring in an "expert" (or use someone on your staff) on a current topic of interest to your audience. Put the presentation up on a dedicated web site, along with a telephone hook up, and - Bingo! - your credibility gets a big boost, while you and your audience save the expense of hotels and meeting facilities.

Links and Affiliations

Linking your site to other sites compatible with your product and your audience is one of the most affordable ways to reach your target audience. This also helps your website achieve more popularity on several important search engines, and makes your site a valuable portal to finding related sites.

Once you've identified your target sites, contact the webmasters (check out www.axandra.com for a software program that can help with this) to get linked. Your links will need to be managed, too. You can either do that manually, or buy software to automate the process (i.e. www.linksmanager.com).

To take linking a step further, set up affiliate programs with other websites. Typically, the sites you partner with will act as resellers of your products and services. You may or may not do the same in return. Depending on how the partnership is set up, one or both parties may receive a percentage of sales generated through their site, or some other kind of negotiated compensation. Some good places to check for help in setting these up include www.commissionjunction.com, and www.myaffiliateprogram.com.

Integrated marketing

For years, marketers have used direct mail, telemarketing, and other media in concert as components of an overall, integrated marketing mix. So where does web marketing fit in?

It can start as simply including your web address on all your outgoing business communications, including direct mail, correspondence, faxes and business cards, and outgoing email signatures. From there you can try dedicated landing pages set up for offers made through other channels. Then, get into testing different mixes --telemarketing follow-up to an email campaign, a broadcast e-mail prior to a direct mail campaign, etc.

There are a lot of choices - direct mail, broadcast fax, broadcast e-mail, print advertising, broadcast media, billboards, etc. But rather than asking "what do I want to do and how do I want to do it?", ask yourself how your customers want to be communicated with. You'll probably have to test and re-test to find the answer.

Advertising or Sponsorships

Banner ads and broadcast e-mail have been around for a while. And though response rates for banners have fallen off dramatically, they can still be effective for certain marketing objectives, such as branding. Pop ups and other types of intrusive ads have a slightly better response rate than banners.

E-mail lists tend to be expensive, and still not as responsive as direct mail lists, though that is starting to change. The best way to test prospecting e-mail lists is to arrange swaps with other mailers with an audience compatible with your offer.

Sweepstakes have also been successful. They can easily and economically be run online, and they are great for collecting a lot of names for your prospecting database. Just be sure to watch out for the "professional sweeps entrants," and be ready to make some quick decisions regarding the quality of those names.

Finally, don't forget traditional advertising channels like print, magazines, trade journals, direct mail, classifieds, trade shows, post cards, etc. If you have found these effective in the past, then test promoting your site through these channels to a targeted audience.