Promotion is among the four major divisions of marketing. It includes advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and publicity, which all aim to increase sales, create brand equity and corporate image, compete with other products, or introduce a new product.

Marketing on the other hand, is a more general concept referring to the process of facilitating a sale of goods and services. Other divisions of marketing are product management, pricing and product distribution.

Today, as the use of the Internet gets so popular, businessmen are geared towards online marketing, which is essentially the process of achieving marketing objectives via the Internet. It includes Web site advertising as one of the many promotional strategies.

For most businesses, Web site advertising is the most efficient promotional method and their easiest gateway to the international market. Compared to conventional ways of advertising, it is proven to be more effective and less costly, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

In 2005, analysts say that online advertisement spending in the United States increased by twenty percent. They say that even a burgeoning company can spend more than $10 billion for online advertising at the outset of the business. The rising number of consumers with high-speed Internet connection contributed a lot to this phenomenon.

If you are planning to advertise through a Web site, employing the help of professional Web site promotion service providers is one of the wisest things you can do to ensure growth of your business and increase in sales. These service providers are experts in the field of Web site advertising and can dedicatedly plan, execute and monitor progress of promotional strategies for your site.

There are actually two basic categories of Web site promotion services: paid and free. It doesnt follow that paid advertising is more beneficial as any free Web site advertising can be just as effective as paid. What is important is that each is able to generate more traffic to your site.

Among the Web site promotion services being offered online, free or paid, are search engine submission, link exchange, email marketing, Web directory submission, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, affiliate marketing, meta tag development and copywriting. Most companies combine all if not many of these services in a package.