Banner Advertising:
In most cases you will be expected to pay per thousand impressions. This means, a site you wish to advertise on, will charge you a certain amount (usually around R250-R250 on quality sites) for every thousand times your banner is shown on their website. Now you can obviously buy the amount of impressions that suits your budget, but in many cases a site will encourage you to invest a minimum amount to book out a certain percentage of the available impressions the site receives. What's nice about these type of ads is, you can have attractive eye catching imagery in your ad that tells a lot about the campaign you are running, making the brand awareness and product knowledge a big benefit. However, if you are looking to drive traffic to your site, this might not be the best form of paid advert to bank on, as the click through rates of these tend to be very low.

Search Engine Advertising
These ads tend to be the best form of paid advertising, due to their targeted nature making them totally relevant to the searcher, at the exact time they are searching for a product (the perfect period during the purchasing cycle). They are cost effective, and relatively cheap when compared with the average cost per click of other means of paid web adverts. These text ads also work very well due to the cost saving benefit if you create quality adverts that are optimized well for a product you may be selling (this will also make the advert more effective, as the surfer will more than likely find exactly what you advertised when he/she lands on your site). The downfall of these ads is, they can be very difficult for the average man in the street to run effectively, without the aid of an experienced internet marketer with experience in these.

Social Media Advertising
As we all know, millions of people log into sites like Facebook and MySpace every day. This makes it the perfect place for businesses to advertise, especially with the amount of information these social media sites obtain from their registered users. A great benefit of these is that you can stipulate the exact audience you want to see your advertising messages and customize them according to the market you are after. These also tend to be quite cheap, but the downfall is that people aren't actively looking to buy your product at the time you are showing them the advert. This makes the conversion rate slightly lower than search engine advertising but still more effective than the pay per thousand impression banner ads.

It is important to use a mixture of these to obtain the most from your limited marketing budget, and to chose the methods that would be most applicable to your business and website.