I wish I had a dollar for every home business owner who has told me they’re good at everything… but marketing. The good news is that you no longer have to be "good" at marketing. Thanks to the latest online breakthroughs, your marketing system can actually be set up to run itself. All you have to do is put that system in place, and consistently add content every so often.

Here are seven key components of any successful online marketing campaign, using the latest online technology.

1. Banner Ads & Classifieds
Banner ads are, for the most part, old-think when it comes to the Web. And they’ve gotten a deservedly bad name as they turn ten years old; most have never produced more than a 0.2 to 0.3 percent click through rate for advertisers. All that has now changed, thanks to “rich media.” 

These are banners or any kind of media that have been enhanced with animation or video. They’re often streamed live from web sites, so they appear more like tiny television commercials. Or they interact with visitors, enticing them in, rather than just headlining static images and text. Rich media banner ads can be in static positions on web pages, or even inserted into the middle of video clips. 

And here’s the great part: Rich media banners are scoring up to five times the click through rate of static banner ads. Like conventional banner ads, they’re sold on a CPM (Cost Per Thousand) basis, or CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) basis, which tends to be cheaper and therefore less available to advertisers. CPA advertisers only pay for actual leads or sales produced from a click-through. Contracts cover ads placed from thirty days up to twelve months. 

You can create rich media banners through specific web sites that offer such (run a Google search on rich media banners) or through vendors on sites, such as www.elance.com, which specialize in farming out design jobs to freelancers.

Do note, however, that static banner ads actually work better in certain environments, where their content has editorial relevance — such as in the margins of blogs, RSS feeds, e-mail newsletters, etc. (I’ve found my own static banner ads in my blog to produce as high as a 9 percent conversion rate, especially when I blog about a related topic.)

Down there with static banner ads, but still worth mentioning, are classified ads. The one significant plus here is targeting. Put a well-worded classified ad in a relevant e-zine, and you could create a small stampede in traffic to your site or blog. (Both banner and classified ads should lead to product or offer-specific landing pages on your site, not just the home page.)

On the other hand, classified ads, especially the free ones, tend to be time consuming to maintain and can produce a real mixed bag when it comes to quality of the traffic. It’s better to stick with paid classifieds that are directly targeted.