You’ve probably heard of a variety of ways to market your business online. Some marketing techniques work better than others. Some don’t work at all. Too often, business owners spend too much time focusing on one area of marketing, and ignore the other marketing options and techniques that also work. This greatly reduces the market that you are trying to reach - and reduces sales as well.

Just as you would diversify your investments in the stock market, you must learn to diversify your marketing - spending your marketing dollars and marketing time over several different marketing techniques, for the best results. Never depend on one marketing technique or medium to get you all the sales that you need to make, or you will be greatly disappointed.

The search engines are important to your online business. Pay per click search engines are quite effective, but they are not all the marketing that you need to do. You also need to optimize your site for the search engine, for listings that are not paid for.

Make sure that you are writing and distributing at least one article per week, using an author’s resource box at the bottom of the article. You should strongly consider writing ebooks and reports that you can give away as freebies, and that other people can also give away. Articles, ebooks, and reports make your marketing viral, which not only saves time and money, but will also allow you to reach groups of people that you might not reach otherwise. Ezine advertising, email marketing campaigns, and ezine publishing are also cost effective marketing techniques that must not be ignored.

You need to keep yourself visible in the area in which you specialize by posting to the related forums, newsgroups, and email discussion groups as well. All of this falls under the realm of forum marketing, and it is not only quite effective, it is also free advertising. Staying active in these communities can be time consuming, but when you have an effective signature file to use, and something of value to contribute to the community, the results you will get make the time spent well worth it.

Make a plan to diversify your marketing by spreading your time and money out over several different aspects of marketing to achieve optimum results for your efforts. Don’t make the mistake of only investing your time and money in one market!