Every  business whether it is an online business or  an off-line business needs  marketing and promotion. Otherwise, no matter how good the business idea is, or how attractive the product is, nobody will ever  know about its existence.
Promoting business online is more specific and more sensitive to it´s success. It is crucial to find many ways to promote business online, and to get your name out there so people will visit your website and in the end buy what is offered.

Test shows that it takes about 7 visits to one website before  a purchase will be made. Tests are also showing that if you can prove a certain credibility you will have a lot of sales done. How can a totally new business prove any credibility?
A new online business can join other business who are already successful, known and trusted in something which is called JV marketing.

With other words joined ventures. There are many  experienced marketers out there and you can subscribe to their newsletters, they will let you know, when they plan another JV event. This is the most explosive way of making almost an instant  success. Another way is a recommendation email from an experienced marketer, who will describe your business,  or the product and send it to his own member list.

An online business need to build an own subscribe list though. When people visit your site  you just offer them a freebie. In this way they will willingly subscribe to your opt-in list. Everybody loves freebie's. And this is a good step to create a word of mouth and satisfaction. Try to over deliver, be generous.

A good idea is to release a mini course, newsletter and get your subscribers in this way. Sending those allows the online business to update the new information about products, new product, other services with their subscribers on the regular basis.
Another helping tool is the use of the auto-responder. There are many good services out there as www.aweber.com www.getresponse.com

You can exchange links, banners, ads with many other websites.
Try other skills even if they seem to be dormant. Write! Write articles, get them published.
Get access to the online marketing forums where people share a lot of information and offer help and free advertising. A lot of ideas get discussed there and then put to work.

There is a lot of possibilities of a good mentoring from those who had done all those and more successful marketing steps already.