Assuming that you've completed the first steps such as figuring out your audience, what you're going to offer your audience, and how you're going to earn money from your website, the next step is to figure out how to get people to visit.

Online marketing can be broken down into two general categories: organic and paid advertising. Organic refers to search engine optimization, referral links, and viral marketing. This marketing channel tends to be free or nearly free, but it takes a while to build up the links and traffic streams. Once your site has been around for a while, and people start to look at it as an authority site, the flood gates can be opened up and you can get thousands, even millions, of free visitors. It might be a year or more before this happens.

In the meantime, paid advertising will fill in the void. Pay-per-click or PPC advertising refers to ads that you pay for when somebody clicks on ad. This type of advertising is good for conversions. CPM or Cost per 1000 Impressions (the M means 1000 in Roman Numerals) is also still a popular form of online advertising and is good for branding campaigns. Affiliate programs make it possible for people to send traffic to you, and when a visitor buys something, fills out a form, or whatever your site's goal is, you pay them a commission. The rates are totally up to you and it is an effective method of advertising. Similar to Organic marketing, affiliate networks start out small and build over time as more affiliates sign up.

Offline marketing is still a great way to get more people to your website.  Putting your web address on your direct mail campaigns, phone directory listings, TV and radio ads, billboards, and newspaper ads is a great way to get more people to your website where they can turn into leads and customers.

A good strategy is to use a combination of several different types of marketing.  Pay per click advertising is a good place to start because you can start to see traffic and results immediately; however, it can be expensive and result in a lower ROI. At the same time, you'll want to optimize your website for both human visitors and search engines. Use multi-variant testing to improve your conversion rate.  Multi-variant testing, also known as MVT, is the process of displaying different combinations of a website to see which one has the highest conversion rate. In addition to on-site optimization, building quality links to your website is valuable for both direct traffic and the indirect benefit of improving your search engine rankings. For popular topics, you may need hundreds or possibly thousands of links from related websites to your site. To build your brand, CPM campaigns where you pay per impression is a good way to get noticed because it can be relatively inexpensive to display your logo and banner to thousands of people. Links can be created from blogs on different sites, article repository sites, forums and message boards, social and professional networking sites, link exchanges, directories, and by commenting on other's sites. Different places will have different levels of effectiveness; however, building links from many different sources will help round out your marketing efforts and will help boost your search engine rankings faster than having many links from a few sources.

Next Step

After you have a good idea of the marketing approach you'll take with your website, the next step is to create your entity and manage your online business.