Advertising is the key to success for any business, as people can't turn into customers if they don't know you exist and don't know how you can meet their needs. Traditional advertising, such as print and broadcast media has been around since a day or two after the invention of the printing press and following the birth of radio. Direct marketing could have been born with the Pony Express but despite all the years of using these types of advertising, the internet has cast a new light on marketing a business.

While the cost of internet advertising may seem cheap considering the number of potential customers it can reach, for companies with a brick and mortar presence, advertising globally just may not make sense. If your business is located in Iowa and your advertising appears in England or in Africa, chances are the return on your advertising investment will not be what you expected.

While internet businesses can gain tremendously from internet marketing, it can get expensive over time and many people do not open emails that appear to be advertising in nature and pop-up advertising windows usually just irritate people to the point that they won't buy from you even if it is something they need in an emergency. The best advertising you can hope for is to have others send your advertising message to their friends, free, without being asked and without complaining.

The use of viral marketing has been growing and simply involves having internet users distributing your advertising message of their own free will. One of first and most successful uses of viral marketing was when companies began offering free email accounts. A brief advertising message appears at the bottom of every email sent, usually including a link for the advertiser and whenever people signed up for the free email service, every email they sent out contained the message.

This resulted in advertising being sent out by the user of the free email, every time they sent correspondence. Viral marketing of this type is typically either extremely cheap or free, with the email company receiving a percentage of any sales made as a result of the message included in emails. While the sales were based on the recipients' clicking on the link in the email, the number of click was relatively small, but by percentage based on the number of emails sent improved as more people took advantage of the free email offers, the commission from the sales more than paid for hosting the email service.

Finding a product on which to place your advertising that be given out free, and which in turn will be handed to others by the original recipient can be an easy means of reaching more people with a smaller investment.