Marketing your business online can be done in 4 simple steps. And, before I go into the very depth of analyzing each of the 4 steps, I want you to be aware of the common mistake that both newcomers to internet marketing and also experienced online entrepreneurs make.And, that mistake is related to the fact that many ambitious internet marketers first focus on creating or finding a product to sell online.This approach to doing business online is absolutely wrong. The reason why it’s wrong is because you haven’t first examined whether there is a demand for your product which is very important. And, this is exactly why so many people fail and struggle to build and develop a profitable online business. They are in the ‘hit and miss’ business not knowing who to sell and not knowing how to sell because they don’t know their niche market at all.Having said that, the first and most important step when building an online business is not creating your product but finding your potential customers that are known as your niche market.The most important thing to focus on when identifying your niche market is following your main passions and interests in life. Why? It’s because your great interest in a certain field will keep your motivated to persist along your journey to online success.The next thing you do within this most important market research stage is visiting your interest related blogs, forums and other places online where your prospective customers meet to discuss their problems, wants or desires.Once you join in their discussions, pay close attention to what kind of vocabulary and jargon their use when describing their problems because that will hugely help you when doing your keyword research.Speaking of keyword research, all you have to focus on are the so called longtail keywords (two or more word keyword phrases) that have a high search volume and a low number of competing sites that’s the sites which have the same longtail keyword included in their titles, descriptions and tags.Another important tip when doing your market research is that you make sure members of your niche market are spending money on purchasing different kinds of products. The best way for you to find that out is by simply checking how your competitors are doing and also by visiting places like eBay where you’ll be able to see what types of products are being sold within your niche market.Once you have identified and researched your niche market, you then move to the second step that relates to developing or sourcing your product to sell. Here you can either create your own product which is normally an information product like an eBook or sell other people’s products that could be sold by you through affiliate programs, resell rights, private label rights (PLR) or dropshipping arrangements to name only a few.The third step is writing a compelling sales copy. Whether you are confident to do it by yourself or you will hire an expert to do that for you, in either case you need to make sure that you have a professionally looking sales copy because that will keep up your sales conversions (the percentage of your site’s visitors turned into your customers).The next step is collecting your site’s subscribers’ names and email addresses by getting them to sign up to receive your high value free product. The way you can manage the list of your subscribers is simply by using an email marketing software known as an auto-responder.Finally, marketing your business online mainly relates to the last or the fifth step that revolves around advertising your web site across the internet. Naturally, there are free and paid options for advertising your business online.As for some of the widely known paid options, I could mention Google AdWords and solo ads, and with regards to your free possibilities, optimizing both your website and YouTube video with your main keyword for securing high organic search engine rankings is definitely your best option.