If you want to make money online, you will need to get the hang of the various promotional methods available on the Internet. There are free advertising resources as well as paid for advertising. Some work, some are a pure waste of time and some only work if you know the right way to go about it. Let's have a look at a three Internet based advertising methods.

Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges are often used by Internet newbies because firstly they are free and secondly they are easy to use. The problem is that traffic exchange advertising does not work for every type of offer and you need to know what works and what doesn't if you are going to use traffic exchanges successfully. For the average newbie, advertising on traffic exchanges represents a lot of wasted time.

The problem for newbies is that your advertisement will be seen by other webmasters who are interested in promoting their products and not in looking at yours. You, however, as a newbie, will be bombarded with ads inviting you to sign up for all sorts of money making programs, useful tools and so on. You can easily find that using free traffic exchange advertising ends up costing you money because you have been tempted into signing up for some useful items. Save traffic exchanges until you know how to use them properly.

Safe Lists

Membership of a safe list program, entitles you to email your ad to everyone else on the list. In return you agree to accept ads from all the other people on the list. You will be inundated with emails, and this could mean hundreds of emails every day depending on the size of the list. The people on the list are there to promote their own goods and services and most will probably not even open your email, let alone read your ad and click through to your website.

Most safe list members use a free throw-away email account and have all the mail directed straight to trash. The chances of your email being seen by a potential customer are extremely slim; it is up to you to decide if that slim chance is worth the time you will need to spend on sending emails to the list.

Purchased Leads

Most Internet marketers will tell you that you should never purchase leads. Leads, for the sake of complete Internet marketing newbies, are details of people who are purportedly interested in your product and would welcome an approach from you. The problem with leads is that they are either cheap and completely useless or expensive and mostly useless. The cheapest leads will have been obtained by dubious methods (ie stolen), they will be years out of date and will have been sold many times over.

If you buy these you will be paying for out of date information and details of people who have received so many unwanted approaches from other Internet marketers that they would be more likely to come after you swinging a baseball bat than sign up for anything you recommend.

If you buy expensive leads, they will normally be fresh but they will still be sold to several different people and if you are unlucky enough to be the tenth person calling them with an offer, you won't get a warm welcome. These leads might also have been obtained by the offer of an incentive, and you will find that they are not interested in your offer and only signed up to get a freebie .

In summary, I would not recommend any of these three promotional methods to newbies. Bulk emailing to safe lists is a waste of time, paying for leads is a waste of cash and traffic exchange advertising is only effective if you know what you are doing.