Simple Advertising for a website. Not Wikipedia, or Facebook.

When promoting an online business the most essential thing to do is to get a large amount of responsive visitors to your website to view your offers. Having a brilliant product to sell is never enough to make your fortune. Without visitors to your website you may as well be trying to sell snow to the proverbial eskimo,( or Inniut if you prefer). Simple advertising is best.
There are many types of promotion that you can use. Some people like to use newspaper advertising, although this is more suitable for those who want to sell within a clearly defined area; as the publicity generated is confined to the locale that the newspaper appears in.
Postcard advertising is something that was used a lot in the past, and it can still be effective today. But mailshots suffer from the same drawbacks as newspaper ads. You only reach the people you send them to, and the postage can be costly. Besides most of what people consider to be "junkmail" will be thrown out.
Social network advertising can be a good idea. You can pay to place your ads on Facebook and some of the other networking sites. This way they can be seen by quite a lot of potential customers. Of course you have to pay. You can however have a link to your website in your profile, and that costs nothing.
Another good way to publicise your offers is to post a lot on forums. Have a link to your website in your signature and you get good advertising plus backlinks to your site. A lot of the pages on forums also stay on the internet for quite a long time after you have posted, so you can have links to your offers all over the place.
The same result can be achieved with a lot of the free classifieds sites. Just make sure that you post only on those who allow you to have a link to your website. Dont bother putting your email address in your advertisement. You are most likely to only get emails from people who are trying to sell you their offers.

The type of advertisng that I use the most myself is Mass E mail Blasting. This is effective, and in many places quite low cost. If you use a well scripted e mail with a good subject line that grabs attention, you can generate a lot of interest. Many of these blasters send your messages to particular categories of customer, so it is useful for you to know the type of person that you want to reach. Some of them send out to millions of people. Even if only a small percentage of the recipients read your ads that can still amount to a very large number indeed.
It is always useful to look for a program that offers you a resell option, as this can frequently get you your money back very quickly, and that can be very useful indeed.
But however you decide to operate I hope you have every success in all your endeavours. That is the best that any of us can hope for.