It doesn't matter what type of business you are, if you don't have sales you won't have a business.

When you are deciding to start a new business choose one that has good sales prospects. This is the total opposite of what I did and I am now in the position of having to work very hard on the marketing front to get those sales. So do your research.

A good example of someone who did this was a young guy (23yrs) by the name of Sam Morgan who in 1999 started a company in New Zealand called Trademe. When he was looking around for a business idea he discovered that online auction sites made money and that where the site was first in a country it generally managed to obtain and retain market share. Sam Morgan sold Trademe in 2006 for NZD 700 million. American auction giant Ebay has failed to make any serious inroads into the New Zealand market.

Just because you're an online business doesn't mean that you should focus all your marketing efforts online and ignore the traditional areas of marketing. In fact just the opposite.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO - more on this later), even if you do everything right, can take 12 to 18 months to see any results especially if you are trying to rank highly for competitive keywords, such as "gifts"! A new business owner can't wait this long to have their business in front of potential customers.

Ah, but you say what about Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising? Well, my experience is that it is expensive in terms of the sales:cost ratio. So new business owners must utilise the traditional methods as well as the internet based methods to ensure that their name (brand) is getting out there.

The cheapest form is obviously email and I would send an email to your entire contact list. Enter competitions. eCourier got a huge amount of free publicity from winning the Inspirational Business O2 award as did all the runners up. Hand out fliers. The take up is supposedly as low as 0.02% but if you generate just one sale from standing outside the tube for an hour it has been worth it.

Going mainstream, I haven't had any experience yet between the cost/benefit difference between straight advertising versus PR, but my personal feeling is that I am more likely to check out a product recommended by someone else than a product sold by someone who says their product is the best. They would say that wouldn't they! They have a vested interest in the outcome, whereas on the face of it the person recommending someone else's product doesn't.

It is not enough just to design your website so that it looks good. Potential customers must be able to find you. How do they do this?

If you're a new business, they won't know your name so they will search on some generic term, such as "gifts". The search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN then go to work, spidering through millions of web-pages looking for pages that are relevant to the search term, called keywords. If your website is not easily readable by the search engines they won't read it. Simple as that. Any new business, in fact any business, new or old, wanting to operate on the internet must ensure that the pages in their website are optimized for the search engines.

Many website designers will not optimise your website for you. My website designer didn't do too bad a job, but I have done a lot of research on what makes a good page and have asked him to implement several changes to make my website more "readable". Two examples were making sure the title tag described my business i.e. unique and personalised gifts, rather than giving the name of the company i.e. BeRapt, because customer are not going to be searching for the name of a new business as they won't have heard of you, they will be searching for the information or product they need i.e. "gifts". I also added software to change my URLs to search engine friendly URLs.

Equally important is making your website as popular as possible. The search engines rank popular sites higher. How do they determine whether a site is popular? Well, there are a number of ways, but in general it is the number of inbound, relevant links to your website from other websites.

It is extremely hard work finding the right websites and those that will let you put a link to your site. Some will include your link for free, some with a small charge. It is vital to submit your site to www.dmoz.org. Many of the major search engines and a large number or directories use the DMOZ list so you automatically get additional links simply as a result of your inclusion on DMOZ. In saying that I am still waiting to have my site accepted. Acceptance is done by a large number or volunteer editors so the process is quite slow, but by no means should this deter you.

Another very easy, albeit, time consuming method of generating topical inbound links is to write articles and submit these to article websites (many are free) and you get to put a link in the author box.

My feeling is that SEO has a touch of the butterfly effect. This refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that ultimately cause a tornado to appear. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large scale phenomena. With every small bit of effort you expend in popularising your website with link optimisation any results although not visible initially, should become visible at some time in the future.

This doesn't have to cost you anything but your time. It's relatively easy to set up a myspace or squidoo page to give away information/advice that you have that someone else may find valuable, but at the same time promotes your business. If other people think the advice is good enough they may DIGG or Del.icio.us it. These are social bookmarking managers that allow people to rank pages on these sites according to popularity, judged by votes. The higher you rank, the higher the number of people who see you and your business.

Blogging on other peoples blogs, giving them helpful advice and information, is another great way of using the social media network to improve your website's popularity and visibility.

Bed, Bath and Beyond in the US uses this "give to get" tool with reportedly great success. They have a huge list of guides on everything from window treatments to how to size up your bathroom and people who go to the site to get information are also tempted by the products on the site that they are selling. Its like making you walk through the museum gift shop in order to leave the museum. A great and simple sales technique.