Marketing strategies?

Marketing strategy. That was my next burning question.
It's all good and well saying that you want to have an online business but where do I start? Marketing sounds so complicated when it's online. All I wanted to do was make some money online but work from home. Well I opened the doors to a vast new world not knowing what I was going to find along the way.
One after the other, I found adverts about 'how to advertise your online business' and 'how to make money online' or 'you too could be a millionaire within 12 months'
How about that? I did want to be a millionaire in the next 12 months but so do everyone else. Are these empty promises? Is this another ploy to sell yet another marketing system with half the information left out so you again surf the net to find even more answers. I was about to find out...... the hard way.
I, like many others before me started to buy ebooks, systems, how to products and just about everything else to enlighten me in my quest to at least break even with all the spending that I was doing and still am doing.
Be warned! there is a lot of rubbish out there that ends up gathering dust on your harddrive but there are some good nuggets too. I think I'm lucky, because I found a group of folk who I subscribe to and they seem to be knowledgeable on most things that I've wanted to know in the past.
There definatly is a system to marketing. It seems that the formula comes in many steps and if you get the steps going in the right order your going to sell sell sell!