For many people starting a new business or seeking to advertise their existing business, internet marketing is the most efficient and cost effective method to pursue your goals. However, finding a reputable consultant and becoming well versed enough in the industry to understand what you are looking for is often cumbersome. This article seeks to provide you with the requisite information you need to market your business on the internet.

If you have a phone number that clients or customers call, put your web address or domain name in the outgoing message on your voicemail. Anyone who calls in and hears that, may just sign in to your website to see if they can find the answer to the question that they were calling about.

When you are marketing on the Internet, make sure that you remove the doubts that people have about doing business online. Try to secure customers by leveraging off of the honesty and trust that you will instill in your business. This will help your clients become more comfortable with purchasing your product.

To write clean and simple HTML code learn how to write web copy using the Markdown language. Markdown was developed to give web copywriters a simple way to build HTML code into an article (like H1 tags and ordered lists) that is as clean as possible. Many content management systems allow the Markdown syntax directly in their post editing software.

Using online video can be a great way to improve your site and attract more visitors. People are always on the lookout for interesting, informative or just plain funny videos to watch and share. There are plenty of affordable and easy to use video hosting sites out there that can host your videos.

Make sure to get your business out there by listing it, along with your contact information, on as many free business directories as possible. This way an increased number of potential customers will see your business, and this will hopefully drive more people to contact you through your website.

Some social media sites will consider you a spammer if you're promoting affiliate links with them, but others around the web are more receptive to it. As long as you're writing quality content and are not spamming links out there, sites like Squidoo and EzineArticles will accept your links. Just remember to keep things at one link per article.

Designing a website to market your business online is an exciting yet challenging process, especially with all of the video and audio aids that you can use to enhance it. However, don't fall victim to the common mistake made by beginners of thinking that more is better. Even a brief Flash presentation, takes a long time to load and many consumers would rather move on to the next company's website than waste their time waiting. Pop-ups are nothing more than an annoyance to most buyers. Limit your use of photos and images, and make sure they are all relevant. If you choose to add audio to your website, give the consumer the choice of clicking on a button to hear it. A customer who is visiting your store while at work or one who is at home with a sleeping baby within earshot, isn't going to appreciate music or sales pitches that play automatically.

To help your business internet marketing, make sure your website is user friendly. You might think it looks good, but try it on different computers and with multiple browsers. Sometimes certain features are disabled on various browsers, and this might affect how much content your viewer has access too, as well as how long they will look around the site. Keep things simple and easy to find.

Advertising plays a huge role in internet marketing. Make sure you advertise your business in any way possible. You can buy banner ads, classified ads or use ezine advertising. Investing money in advertising is a great way to generate short term business that will help you in the long run.

Besides a regular site map, intelligent webmasters build a properly-formatted sitemap.xml page. This is a carefully-organized reference page that search engines use when indexing a website. A sitemap.xml file that includes all website content and has its format validated can provide a massive boost to a web site's search engine ranking performance.