Michelle Donahue-Arpas, founder of the successful GeniusBabies.com site (http://www.geniusbabies.com) that sells infant development products learned this early on. She said, "The biggest mistake I did when I started was to think that with so many people online they would come across or stumble on the site. No way! And it takes a long time, but once you put in a lot of hard work, it pays off."

Despite the economic slowdown and the terrorist attacks last Sept. 11, the Internet business continues to expand and the number of online users and buyers continues to grow. In fact, the new eCommerce:B2C Report from eMarketer estimates that Internet users in the US alone is estimated to grow from 116.5 million in 2000 to 184.1 million by 2005. The also study estimates that business-to-commerce (B2C) revenues in the US alone, which totaled $38.3 billion in 2000, will quadruple to $156 billion by 2005. If you want your Web-based business to get a slice of this pie, you must learn how to market effectively on the Web.

Marketing an online business follows the same principles as marketing a brick-and-mortar company. The goal is the same: to entice your customers to try your product or service, with the hope that their first experience will be a positive one and that they will return as customers again and again while referring new customers.

To help improve your chance of succeeding online, we have compiled the marketing strategies that successful entrepreneurs featured in our Making it Big on the Web series have used in their online businesses. These entrepreneurs share a common story: starting with budgets of less than $5,000, they have been able to attract the audience they need using shoestring marketing strategies.

Here are the most effective marketing strategies an Internet entrepreneur on a shoestring budget can use:

Tony Roeder, founder of RedWagons.com (http://www.redwagons.com), a site that was started with less than $5,000 but now earns about $2 million a year from selling Radio Flyer toy wagons, markets his site mainly through the search engines. "We took some drastic moves into getting ourselves well positioned on the search engines. We were just well positioned on Yahoo and on some other sites, and from that we got the traffic."

Search engines are also the main online promotional tool used by Tamara Carlisle of BigKidsVideo.com (http://www.bigkidsvideo.com), a site that distributes educational software and video products for children. "Online we focus mainly on search engine submission."

Donahue-Arpas swear by its results. In GeniusBabies.com, "Our repeat business has been our salvation. Absolutely our repeat business and our word of mouth. We ask visitors to our site how they found us and at least one of every 10 was referred by their brothers, sisters-in-law, mothers, co-workers. And I guess that's also the same number of people they can tell if we do something wrong."

Carlisle of BigKidsVideo.com considers publicity generated from media stories and other public relations campaign to be very effective in marketing her web site. According to her, "Newspapers and other means of media have been the most effective strategies for us. So when a parent is reading about our catalog in the Dallas Morning News, we'll get hundreds and hundreds of phone calls and major amount of hits on our site."

Publicity can oftentimes be more effective than advertising. Not only is it cost-effective, but also people are apt to remember an article about your business rather than advertising. People find a write-up or special feature about a business more credible and objective than a paid advertising.

To be effective, however, banners need to be carefully targeted to your demographics, creatively designed, showed to the right audience, even timing of the ad -- considerations that are often far beyond the budget of small businesses. As Carlisle said, "We have tried banner advertising and hiring a web site promotion company, both of which turned out to be wastes of time and money."

Carlisle of BigKidsVideo.com understands the importance of communicating with customers and reaching potential customers who express an interest in their products via email. "Once a month, we do a monthly promo special and we send emails to inform our customers and opt-in visitors. Like the June special is 20% off on all products and 10% off on all software. And sometimes it will be a percentage discount and or sale of baby products like Baby's First Impressions series. Sometimes, it will be a free CD-ROM if you order more than $100."