If you have a struggling internet business, you are probably facing the difficult task of how to attract visitors to your website at a price you can afford. Indeed, internet marketing is a challenge, and it takes years of persistence. There are many affordable ways to get traffic to your site. For now, we will outline the most practical ways for you to market your online business without having to spend a great deal of money.The most important task is search engine submission and optimization. There are many different search engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web site. You need to sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible search engine submission service. There are hundreds of these submission services on the internet; you can find them by doing a search on Google.

However, be wary of submission services that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search engines. These unscrupulous submitters will submit your website to FFA pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned permanently from the search engines. You should only do business with submission services that submit only to the major search engines and directories.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is even more important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize your keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words or phrases for which you want to be listed. And, you need to use proper Meta tags so that the search engines can interpret your web pages.

If you do not know how to optimize your web site, you should search for an optimization consultant on Google. Avoid SEO experts who want to charge you $1,000 per month or more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you figure out that they really can not help improve your ranking. Stick to providers who will optimize your site for a reasonable fee.

More important than SEO is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently link to your site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

There are several ways you can increase your number of inbound links. You can submit your site to free directories, or join a link exchange and trade links with other sites, or, you can author articles and press releases and submit them to article directories. When webmasters looking for free content place your article on their site, they must link back to your website.

If you are not patient enough to wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract visitors to your web site right away by using pay-per-click (PPC). With PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have an ad for your web page run at or near the top of the search engines. This can be extremely costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow thousands of dollars on PPC advertising and make only a few sales.

The best way to promote your site, if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program. You need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that they will place your banner on their site; every time you make a sale that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a commission. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who can set up the program so that the affiliate codes can be tracked properly.

Some internet companies have thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need or want this way; and it costs you nothing. To recruit affiliates, you should submit your affiliate program to directories where you can list your affiliate program for free or for a small price. The best way to find affiliates is by listing your program on forums or message boards frequented by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue for their online business.

I hope this information will help you with your internet marketing efforts. No website can become an overnight sensation; it takes time and effort. But, if you work diligently and follow each of the procedures outlined in the article, you should do fine.

About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.