For those of you taking marketing classes, I am sure you are all very familiar with the 4 P's of marketing. They are Products, Place (Distribution), Promotion and Price. When you are marketing your website, you need to be aware of this four P. This four P helps you market your site effectively, just like when you are opening a retail store.

Product. What is your site's product or service? Are you selling services, tangible goods or both? Are you giving out free service to turn your customers to buy your products? or vice versa. Are you giving both free service and products to drive visitors which will drive your advertising revenue? Whatever you do, it is crucial to know your products so that you won't forget why you do all the promotion.

Place. This is the distribution channel of your products or services. If you are giving out free contents, make sure you distribute it well. If you merely post your content on your site, you are not using maximum distribution. Furthermore, if you are using unrelated forum or submission service to distribute your content, then you are wasting time. For example if you are distributing content about how to choose a credit card, you should be submitting your content to article submission service that specializes in finance first before distributing it elsewhere. This way, you will get a bunch of interested viewers instead of casual visitors.

Promotion. One way I can think of is to pay a text-ad at another website to describe the superiority of your product or service. Promotion normally involves spending money. Again, you need to focus your promotion on your core audience instead of blindly spending money on general audience.

Price. This is the pricing strategy of your product or service. The pricing strategy is very dependent on the other P of online marketing. If you are establishing yourself as a high-end mortgage lenders from the way you describe, distribute and promote your products, then your price should reflect that.

In online marketing, the 'place' aspect costs little or no money. This amazes me. For example, to create awareness of your website, you can list it to hundreds to thousands of free web directories. For content distribution, you can sign up and submit your article for free at various article submission service.