The interesting thing is that most search engines are free for both parties – the advertiser and the searcher. The problem is that almost every search gives thousands and even millions references and the fact is that only first 100 spots will ever see any significant traffic. Of course, there are ways of getting to the top positions but to get there it is necessary to know how the search engine works. There is always a possibility of paying for the positions in the first places.
Let us take a look at how the link popularity works in the most popular search engine today Google.com. Link popularity is a search engine’s measure of how important it considers a web page using some kind of mathematical formula. Each search engine has their own formula to determine your web page’s link popularity. Google calls it PageRank. The PageRank score is calculated from these factors:

- How many sites are linking to company’s site. The more the better in general.
- The types of sites that are linking to company’s site The more closely themed the better in general.
- The PageRank score of all the sites that link to company’s site. The higher the PageRank of these sites the better.
- How many outbound links are on each of the sites that link to company’s site (the less the better).

From these above mentioned factors is clear that reciprocal links are very important to drive more traffic to the web site.

The traffic is coming from the partners that linked the company’s web site but also from the search engines, because it scored high in the ranking thanks to the links referring to company’s web site.

Free and Paid advertisements
Free advertisements or classified ads can be posted on sites like Inzeraty.sk but the chance of getting customers through this internet marketing tool is very small.

Much more often are used paid banner ads. A banner is rectangular box filled with advertising (and often fancy graphics) that can be seen all around the web pages. The about banner ads is that people can quickly click on the banner ad and have their questions answered immediately. The reality is that click-through rate from banner ads is abysmally low. In 2003 the click-through rate for 1000 banner impressions was only 6 clicks. Therefore advertisers are looking for other, more effective internet marketing tools.

More statistics from year 2003 say that not only were there more online ads, they got larger. Leader board ads, sized at 728x90, registered a more than 900 percent increase throughout 2003, while button-sized ads (88x31) experienced a 58 percent decline. Other ad sizes that saw significant increases were various large rectangles and skyscrapers (also known as rich media), with growth that ranged from 42 percent to 262.3 percent. The once-popular standard banner size - 468x60 – measured a 12.6 percent decline from Q1 to Q4, and square pop-ups (250x250) fell 25 percent. E-mail marketing can be viewed as a form of direct marketing but without the need to pay for postage, usually the largest cost of any bricks-and-mortar direct marketer. An advertiser can create its own list of e-mail addresses which can take a long period of time or rent a list of e-mail addresses from a specialist company. E-mail marketing is getting more and more popular because the open rate in 2003 of an e-mail was 36.8% and the click-through rate 8.4% which is substantially higher than in case banner ads.

Newsletters are another interesting tool that can be very well used to hit the target audience. Most of the credible specialist web sites have their own regular newsletter and only readers really interested in the topic (and potential customers) subscribes to it. Properly chosen newsletter for the offered product or service can be a powerful way of advertising with strong response rate.

There are more ways of advertisement that are of minor importance like autoresponders or text links.

Word of Mouse Marketing
In short, the concept behind word of mouse marketing is to mobilize the customers to help the spread the message. In real world it is called a word of mouth and is a strong marketing tool. Online, word of mouse is the most highly recognized kind of marketing because people can communicate with each other so fast.

A positive buzz can launch a good idea overnight, but also kill it instantly in case of negative buzz. The two concepts using word of mouse marketing are viral marketing and affiliate programs.

Viral Marketing
The term was actually coined by the venture capital firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson to describe the phenomenon of a company funded in 1996 called Hotmail. Besides having a great name, Hotmail was hot because of the way it was marketed. It spread like virus, going from zero customers to over 40 million in only three years, increasing its subscriber base more rapidly that any country in the history of the world.

The key to Hotmail’s phenomenal growth was the free price tag and the fact that every e-mail contained the following tag line and an implied recommendation by the sender:
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

The more the service was used, the faster the word was spread. In 1998, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for $400 million (original investment was $300 000). There are more successful products and franchises around that used principles of viral marketing (often unintentionally), for example Harry Potter, Ebay, ICQ, Amazon.com or The Blair Witch Project.

Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is nothing more than a joint venture between a company or private website owner, and a company that wants to promote a product. Basically, the company with the product provides the product, the web site, the customer service, the order handling and the fulfillment. But the company also gives the website owner a link so that when he refers clients to purchase its products, he earns a commission from every sale. The company wins because it has thousands of marketers all over the world recommending its products. The website owner wins by being paid to market the best products and services. In short, the marketer refers people to these sites and gets paid for any resulting sales. Even the biggest business players like Dell Computers use the advantages of affiliate programs.