If you sell a product or a service, there's no cheaper or easier way to market yourself than venturing online. It doesn't matter if you sell exclusively online or from a retail location, Internet marketing offers the best way to reach the largest number of potential customers.

This isn't discounting the more traditional marketing methods. Press releases and direct mail marketing can still be successful, especially for offline businesses, but they'll take more time and money.

Internet marketing can be as simple and inexpensive as you want it to be. It's true that some larger companies pour millions into online marketing. However, a small business owner can start on a smaller scale and move on to more sophisticated marketing techniques as sales progress.

Many traditional advertising methods don't offer inexpensive, beginner options. Newspaper advertising, direct mail, and television advertising can sometimes require hefty, up-front payments with no success guarantee.

As an online marketer, you can shift your marketing dollars, and time, to those methods which give you the best return on your investment.

It's harder to track and measure offline promotion strategies. Asking customers how they heard about your business is the only way to accurately gauge offline promotion success.

If you're running radio, television, and newspaper spots simultaneously, you won't know which sales come from which medium. Was last week's spike in sales a result of your latest television ad, or was it because people are finally taking notice of all your advertising efforts?

By selling online, you can track precisely how many people visited your Website, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed on any single page, and if they bought anything. Because of advancing technology, it's much easier to customize and track individual campaigns. You'll know which campaigns drove the most traffic—and most sales as a result.

Marketing online also lets you choose the activities that best fit your budget and personality. Pay per click advertising, text link advertising, and search engine optimization are all techniques which will drive traffic without requiring much interaction with customers. You simply let your Website sell for you.

But, if you're more outgoing and prefer the one-on-one communication with customers, email is still a valuable way to create relationships.