(FORTUNE Small Business) – Steven Bernard's efforts will not go into advertising history alongside such immortal tag lines as "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" and "Just do it," but perhaps they should. Bernard tried to play by the rules, hiring an agency in 1996 to develop an online campaign for eDietShop.com, the Web business of his family's 53-year-old Evanston, Ill., specialty-food business, Bernard Food Industries. The agency designed banners--the Web equivalent to billboard ads--and Bernard remembers being told to "spend massive amounts to capture eyeballs." The consulting fees ran to nearly $2 million over three years, and Bernard paid another $1 million for the online ad space. The results were less than spectacular. "Maybe we got an order a month," he says. In 1999, convinced he could do a better job on his own with less money, he plop-plopped the agency and the consultants to take a chance creating his own fizz buying advertising space himself and having one of his 90 employees build banners.

Through some research, savvy bartering, and smart placement deals, eDietShop.com now does $2 million in annual sales. Bernard used the Web itself to learn who else was catering to the needs of the 15 million diabetics he believed were the target consumers for his sugar-free products, finding a slew of diabetic and weight-loss interest groups like DiabeticGourmet.com and contacting them directly to set up deals. He sponsors e-mail newsletters distributed by other sites. He arranges noncash banner exchanges with similar sites like CyberDiet.com. Bernard's ad budget is aimed at pay-for-performance search engines such as GoTo.com, where he shells out cash only when people show up on his site after searching for the keywords that he's targeted, such as "sugar free" and "low fat." His monthly fees total $10,000 but are bringing in $150,000 in sales. "You need to identify your audience and only spend money directing those customers to your Website," says Bernard. "On limited resources, you can still fine-tune and home in on your target."

The conventional wisdom is that the Web is washed up as an advertising medium after the fallout in the market of the past year and a half, and that the only hope is new ad formats that try to replicate TV. But Bernard and others are rediscovering why the Web excited marketers in the first place. The gatekeepers of traditional advertising--ad agencies and the media--can be outmaneuvered by coordinating your efforts with outfits whose customers share the same interests as yours--but you have to do the research, make some calls, and barter for deals. Guerrilla tactics are the order of the day to generate business--and they work.

The vast majority of Web users take advantage of search engines to find what they're looking for online, thereby making search engines ground zero for businesses that want to attract their target audience on the cheap. Brent Robertson, principal and founder of B.R. Graphic Design (www.brdesign.com) in Farmington, Conn., refused to pay anything to advertise his business and put his effort into researching search engine protocols to get coveted top-ten placement in search results. He read books, reports, and articles from sites like Search Engine Watch. He structured his site's design and its HTML code so that each page had a title, like "graphic design," and then reinforced that title by inserting it into the page content and HTML heading code that search engines look for. He targeted other terms such as "West Hartford" and "design" in various combinations. "I was able to get 900 unique visitors a week," says Robertson. "And by further reviewing and tweaking what terms were working and ditching the ones that weren't, I was generating ten warm leads a week, with two to five real contracts." Thanks to his search engine-optimization efforts, Robertson now needs six employees to handle all the work at his company, and he is about to open an office in Los Angeles.

The Web is a communications medium as much as it's an information-gathering one, and there's no reason that marketers can't get into the conversation to sell their product. Damian Bazadona, owner of Situation Marketing, spread the word about the site he built for men's sock designer Ova da Fut Hosiery Co. (www.ovadafut.com) by hiring people to enter message boards and chat rooms devoted to men's fashion. They'd talk about men's socks, solicit user's opinions--and oh, yeah, laud Ova da Fut and its $17.50 socks whenever possible. "It gave us the chance to interact with them and tell them about the product," says Bazadona. Those tactics helped secure a large order for socks for the L.A. company from GQ magazine, which had read what people were saying at places like the About.com fashion message boards; it now will be using the socks in its fashion shoots this fall.

Many burned Web advertisers complain that the painfully small 468-by-60-pixel banners have limited them, ignoring that an unlimited canvas to convey their message exists in creating Web content. Dan Pritchett, founder of LowCarbChocolates.com, a two-employee business based in Oak Harbor, Wash., set himself up as an online expert on low-carb foods, writing restaurant reviews for compatible sites such as LowCarbLuxury.com. "If I wrote a review that they used, then it got my name and e-mail on the page along with my site address," he says. Getting LowCarbChocolates mentioned on other sites has generated publicity and traffic to Pritchett's site, and the additional links make his site appear more important to search engines such as Google.com. "These hidden benefits can't be measured," says Pritchett, adding that they have definitely helped his business.

Maybe Pritchett's not going to win a Pulitzer for criticism, but his, Bazadona's, Robertson's, and Bernard's openness to experimentation shows the way of the future for Web advertising. New ad formats, such as pop-under ads, which sneak in underneath your Web browser, may or may not reinvigorate Web advertising. But ultimately the winners in grabbing business online will be those who remember to "just do it."