Marketing your web site can be a time- and money-consuming task…

However there are several inexpensive techniques for marketing your site – be it a weblog, a company site or an affiliate site.

A quick overview:

• Search engine optimization – it's been shown that around 90% of all web traffic today originates from a search engine, most of that from the first two or three pages of results displayed. That makes search engines your most valuable advertising tool by far. If you learn everything you can about SEO, or search engine optimization, including but not limited to keywords and one-way links, you can raise your rankings in the search engines; and the more traffic you have, the more affiliate sales you'll have.

• Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising – Similar to standard advertising, PPC advertising only charges you if someone actually clicks on the advertising link and winds up at your site. It's something to experiment with slowly; you don't want to be flooded with advertising referrals you don't have a budget for, but it can also be a great tool to get traffic.

• Standard Advertising – This is just paying for banner and text link advertisement on someone else's web site… remember to take care about where you place your ads… after all the audience of the web site is crucial to you marketing success – you want your ads in front of your target group

• Personal Marketing – time consuming but potentially as valuable as SEO, this involves going out to bulletin boards and mailing lists to talk about yourself and your site. The key is to ensure that you advertise in the right niche markets. You also need to have great unique content or you're just going to annoy the very people you want to invite to your site. Also make sure you don't cross the grey line to "spamming" forums and bulleting boards with some kind of "ads" but try to engage in these online communities to become a respected member… word-of-mouth success if the most valuable

• Visitor Retention – potentially the most valuable marketing tool in the long run. By developing an emailed newsletter (following the principles of direct marketing ) and good site content to keep customers coming back to your site, you can build a customer base that is continually pushed to your site, instead of you passively waiting for them to be pulled there. And since emailing a newsletter costs nothing per person for most, the larger your mailing list pool is the more cost-effective the newsletter is. Make certain that your newsletter is an opt-in, however; mailing newsletters to someone who didn't request them is spam, and that will cost you customers in the end.

Any of these methods, or a combination, will help you build your customer base.