In this section we will discuss various online business promotion tools.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is mainly divided into online & offline affiliates. Online Affiliates are ones having their own website to promote products & services and offline affiliates are ones who are not having any website currently.

Online Affiliates:

In this system a product or service is promoted by placing logo & banner on affiliate website. Affiliates can track number of users registered through Affiliate account management system and the traffic that affiliate have driven qualifies for commission or not.

Offline Affiliates:

In case of offline affiliates, references from them are gathered and tracked in a system. Each time new customer register through affiliates marketing efforts points are assigned and an affiliate can track the no. of points earned.

2. B2B Portals

B2B (business-to-business) portals are becoming way of doing business for SMEs. These portals facilitate in establishing new trading relationships between companies and they also supports the existing relationships. It can be termed as an e-market place. A B2B portal primarily serves as a platform for wholesalers, retailers, distributors and manufacturers to carry out their business activities online. Some of these B2B portals even offer free business directory and local yellow pages.

B2B online marketing is an essential part from buyers perspective as well as sellers perspective. For buyers it facilitates in searching new suppliers, post buying requests, and search for used or new goods. For a seller point of view, it makes easy to find out buyers for their products, they could sell online new as well as used products.

Marketing done through the B2B portals is exclusively online thus there are no print, distribution or postage costs plus it is measurable through sophisticated tracking software. SMEs generally dont have big marketing budgets and the portals have become right source for them to promote and attract new customers.