I would argue your best, cheapest and most effective marketing tool in the long run is a blog.  You can use your blog to accomplish several different objectives at once. 

There are many blog programs and platforms and most all have some form of easy administration to allow you to categorize and organize your pages and information.

Establish a method
You first must establish a method.  A good method would be to write at least a post a day.  A post is also known sometimes as a page/story, whatever you call it the bottom line is it is a unique piece of content that gets added to your site.  This information of course can take many forms, and deciding and presenting this will be one of the primary functions of a Webmaster.  This method will ensure your site grows by 365 pages a year.  In 4 years your site will have over 1000 pages of unique content, and a post may take you an hour a day. 

What to write
Typically a good rule of thumb is stick to writing about “how-to” do something.  The Internet is here for people to find information.  You only search for information when you don’t know how to do something, so it’s logically flows the most searched for type of information would be “how-to” information. 

The advantage of content in the form of a daily post you make is that it is unique and found nowhere else, unlike an RSS feed which provides content, but it’s the same on who knows how many other sites. 

Each post can potentially be found with search engine hits, thus each day you write one, the higher your chances of being found, the larger your site becomes, the more relevant it seems to search engines, the higher the page rank your site goes.

Integrate Affiliate Links
Once you find a market and angle and material to write about you then find companies you like and wish to partner up with and sign up with their affiliate programs.  These are going to be companies that pay or share their revenue with you when you are responsible for driving business their way.  The key is to place these links (whether Google Adsense or otherwise) within the content in a very “blended” and natural way.  That way when users are naturally drawn to the information you post, clicking these links to further their knowledge now becomes a natural process of their surfing, and these links are designed of course to directly profit or benefit you in some way. 

Networking
Having a blog with unique content is how you carve out your corner in Internet Land, otherwise you can have what everyone else does and “be unique like everyone else”, which of course isn’t unique at all.  The best way is to simply find other webmasters you would like to share links with, and watch their exit traffic go to you.  This is of course a two-way street, but what you must understand is that the user isn’t going to stay on your page forever – yes, they will leave sometime.  So why not enhance their experience by displaying links to other sites you find valuable?  The other Webmaster is doing the same and you will find that traffic can double, triple, sometimes more.  Also, leaving valid and honest comments on other blogs is a nice thing to have for a blogger in contrast to all the spam.  Your link will show with your comment, and if the comment has value and purpose the webmaster will leave it on their blog – again driving more traffic to the one who said these words.  It’s like a free ad and that is why spammers like blogs so much.

A lot of work?
Yes, at first it can be.  What must be understood is that the Internet doesn’t make you magically rich.  But what it does do, is provide an environment, where a single set of actions can set in motion a repeated return of benefits.  This of course is in contrast to a 9-5 job where one set of efforts gets you a pay check, but to get another paycheck you will of course have to give more effort. 

You see at some point your site, with all of it’s pages, affiliate links throughout, comments, posts, and other Internet/User interaction, will begin to “roll on itself” and through networking and search engine hits alone can begin to make money with no effort – and this is what all the hype is about.  Now all of these posts you have made profit and benefit you weeks, months, years to come, and it maybe only took you an hour to write. 

Maybe it takes you two days to write –in the overall scope of things it really doesn’t matter.  What matters it that is it done right the first time, so that it’s residual presence on the web draws users, produces clicks, and ads relevancy to your site and page ranking.  The benefits of efforts of two hours or two days or whatever are now multiplied indefinitely – and off one set of efforts.  Do this a few times and you will new become the success stories you read about. 

So in short, if you are looking where to focus your energies then focus them on learning how to use a blog.  It is the best tool that comprehensively builds your site, promotes affiliate revenue, promote your own products or other sites, and get better and better as time goes.  Marketing is the key to success – that and who you know ;)

tucker