Many people when they start to make some money online make the mistake of spending any profits they make. Now obviously we all have living expenses which should of course be taken care of, but any surplus profits left over from your online ventures should be reinvested back into your business to achieve long term success.

I always think your primary aim as an online business should be to build a large database of subscribers, who you can contact over and over again for as long as they're subscribed to your ezine or newsletter. If you can build up a good relationship with your subscribers, over time they will become very receptive to your offers, and actually look forward to receiving your emails, meaning increased long-term profits for you.

This should be your main focus. Getting traffic to your site is something you should aim to do, but a large percentage of those people who leave your site without purchasing anything may never return to your site. However, if you encourage them to sign up to your newsletter by displaying a prominent sign-up form, or maybe creating a pop-up form, you can send them follow-up messages over time and increase your chances of making a sale.

Therefore you should reinvest any profits you make, and your time, which is also a valuable commodity, back into your business with the aim of increasing your database of subscribers.

What are the best ways of doing this?

Well I've always had great success with writing articles and submitting them not only to all the major article directories, but also directly to ezines relating to the subject of my site. This doesn't cost anything and is something I do regularly to generate a lot of traffic to my sites, which usually take the form of an opt-in page where subscribers can sign up to my newsletter, or the home page of my site which prominently displays the opt-in form.

In addition to this, you can also guarantee inclusion in an ezine, if they accept advertising, by paying the ezine owner to run your advert. This can take the form of sponsor ads, top/middle/bottom ads (top ads usually get seen the most so they obviously cost more than middle or bottom ads), and solo ads, which I've always found to be the most effective.

You could also invest in pay-per-click campaigns. This is also another effective form of advertising as you can use highly targeted keywords which ensures that any visitors are pre-qualified and will already be interested in your site when they click on the link to your site.

There are many other forms of paid advertising such as buying text links or banner space on other sites, as well as many types of offline advertising methods you could use. However, in my opinion getting your articles and paid adverts seen in related ezines, and using pay-per-click advertising are the most successful forms of advertising.

Whatever types of advertising you decide to persue, just keep reinvesting your profits (and your time) into your business and focus on growing your online business. You will reap the rewards in the long run.