We are all coming to understand the power that the internet holds to drive large amounts of traffic to our businesses. The question is, how do you, the small business owner, take advantage of this opportunity to grow your business. As you may know there are large corporations with astronomical advertising budgets who spend literally five figures a day to keep their top listings on Google. The internet is changing, and quickly. What was a great, inexpensive opportunity a few years ago, can be completely out of your financial league today.

So, the answer for the small business owner, while competing against big business with their advertising budgets that are larger than the GDP of some countries, is LEVERAGE, doing more with less. One of the beautiful and exciting things about the internet is that it gives you a unbelievable opportunity to leverage your effort. The downside is that if you do not understand the right way to go about this it can eat up your time, money, and effort leaving you with nothing but frustration.

Today affiliate marketing is big business on the internet. No matter where you look on the internet you will see many different types of offers and opportunities for affiliate marketing. It is big, growing, and one of the best ways to make money on the internet.

Affiliate marketing is an online advertising opportunity where the individual can use his/her website to promote the products or services of an advertiser or merchant. And when someone visits your site and makes a purchase of the advertiser's or merchant's product, then you get paid, or compensated.

There are a number of methods used by advertisers and individuals. Some use search engine optimization, others use email marketing, and still others use display advertising. But all essentially use one website to drive traffic to another wesite.

What an exciting time it is to be an internet marketer. The internet has changed our lives so much these last ten years and it is revolutionizing the way we advertise. Before the internet it was very difficult to track the success if your advertising campaigns with any degree of accuracy. If you chose to advertise with tv, radio, billboards, yellow pages etc., it was impossible to track the effectiveness of your campaigns. In the past companies have spent billions of dollars on ineffective advertising due to the fact that they couldn't track results accurately.

Now all that has been changing rapidly because of the growth of the internet nd all of the advantages it has to offer as an advertising tool. There are many tracking tools you can use to track your online campaigns. I am going to talk about 2 that are absolutely free (if you have an Adwords account).

Google Conversion Tracker

It is available in your Adwords account if you set up a piece of simple code in your website. It will tell you what campaigns and keywords are getting sales, leads, or pageviews depending on how you want to track your visitors. An e-commerce store would probably define their conversion as a sale. When a customer buys something conversion tracker would track the sale and the keyword, adgroup and campaign the sale came from.

Google Adwords is the most sophisticated and popular pay-per-click advertising system on the internet. Unlike regular search engine listings, which are listed for free according to "relevance," as defined by the particular search engine involved, Adwords are small text ads which usually appear to the right of the unpaid listings. Advertisers bid on specific "keywords", which determines where the ad is displayed. However, unlike other search engines, where placement is completely determined by the amount of the bid, Google uses a complex calculation which also takes into the account the popularity of the ad as well. Thus, an ad which gets clicked on a lot can end up in a better position than one with a higher bid. That's how Google rewards the ad for relevancy, so it pays to create an ad that will invite clicks.

Advertising with Adwords has many advantages. First, the ad is displayed immediately, as opposed to waiting for sites to show up in regular listings, which can take months. Second, they can be highly targeted, meaning you can make sure you're only paying for clicks by customers who are sincerely interested. Third, Adwords allows you to run several ad campaigns simultaneously, so you can test the results and experiment on the fly to constantly improve the quality of the ads. You can even track the "conversion rate," or the actual number of sales generated by a given ad. This is extremely precise marketing.