Internet is an ever evolving medium. What worked yesterday necessarily does not work today. There are many advertising methods that are a total waste of time and money. If you do not know what some of these things are, do not worry about them. But some of the items on the list below will probably surprise you. I have tried all these and have spoken to various internet marketers for their experience. The list below gives in a nutshell the advertising that no longer works on the net so please do not waste your time effort and money in chasing a ghost that no longer exisits.



free classifieds

free for all link sites (FFAs)

viral generators

banner exchanges

link exchanges

search engine posting

multiple search engine posting

multiple search engine and FFA posting

safelist contact name blasters

literally anything with the word 'blaster' in it

guaranteed sign ups

paid guaranteed click thrus

practically anything you have to pay for

just about anything with the word 'viral' in it

purchased leads or free leads, it does not matter if they are 'double opt-in'

auto-surf exchanges

paid surf exchanges

This is a simple word of advise from someone who has wasted a lot of time, effort and money on the net. Please do not re-invent the wheel of folly.

THINGS THAT WORK A LITTLE BIT

In the world of free advertising there are things that work a little bit. I would not say that really anything works well. The truth is that if you want to pick up about one new recruit every one to three days, that you can do it if you use the techniques I am about to show you. But it will require about two hours or more of your time on a daily basis. And you will have to be consistent to profit from it.

There are really only two methods of free online advertising that work at all - safelists and click exchanges. But having said this, you must realize that 99% of both are no good. You have to choose the right ones. Further, you have to use them the way I tell you. By themselves they will not work.

SAFELISTS

You can spend about ten minutes daily posting to safelists. You should pick up one recruit every other day if you use the top twenty list at Traffic Hoopla. And you may pick up as many as one recruit per day if you use all of the lists given at SafeList Boyz combined, although this is a nightmare to set up. I do not want to sell these to you by offering you my affiliate number for these programs. Look them up on Google. Traffic Hoopla will lead you to the most effective lists. SafeList Boyz will lead you to the most popular ones and give you an automated method for posting to about a thousand different lists every day. The response rate is much lower than with the lists on Traffic Hoopla. But you post much more quickly using the SafeList Boyz manager, which is sold through PayPal for about $5/month. Do NOT use the SafeLists listed on SafeList Boyz by themselves. Allow two to three weeks for set up.

Now all of these lists are free but offer upgrade options. If you get results will it be worth it to upgrade? That depends on how much you value recruits. In every case you are targeting recruits. You use them to find opportunity seekers. That is because opportunity seekers are the people who use these lists. Or more accurately, people with opportunities and an appreciation for MLM. Between the SafeList Boyz subscription and upgrading your membership on ten safelists or more you can easily spend $100/month. The figures I gave you in the paragraph above assume you are remaining as a free member. Suffice it to say you could multiply your results if you upgrade. To me, time is money. So if you see you are getting results, you should consider upgrades.

CLICK EXCHANGES

Traffic Hoopla rates both safelists and click exchanges. A click exchange is a network of people who agree to view each others web sites. This is arranged through a program. The program is a server you log into. To move from one members web site to another you click - hence the name click exchange. Many exchanges will cheat you so that you do a lot of clicking but you do not have other people looking at your site. Traffic Hoopla serves as a watch dog group among click exchange users by rating the reliability of the exchanges, as well as response rates.

SIMULTANEOUS USAGE

The problem with click exchanges and safelists is that everybody is interested in having their own advertisements seen. Nobody is really interested in seeing anybody elses advertisements. For one thing, there would n0t be time to do so if they tried. As a result, response rates tend to be very low. On the other hand, a good safelist or exchange will offer safeguards, to be sure people really do look. Hence the ratings. But good is still really not very good.

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS A CLICK EXCHANGE?

A click exchange, hit exchange, surf4hits program or whatever you want to name it usually has an offer that looks like this:

A) You agree to visit web sites of other members who have joined the exchange

B) You agree to look at their web sites for a specific period of time before moving on to the next member's web site in the exchange, usually 10-30 seconds.

C) Other members of the exchange make the same agreement and agree to visit your web site in exchange for you visiting their web site.

D) Most exchanges give you a two to one offer. In other words you will get one visit to your web site for every two visits you make to web sites of other members in the exchange.

E) If you do the math you will see that this leaves them with a lot of spare visits. The administrators of the exchanges usually sell these extra visits to you and the other members. That is how they make their money.

F) Some exchanges offer credits to you if you refer other members to the exchange. Most of these will give you one visit to your web site for every ten web sites your referrals visit

G) Some exchanges offer indirect referral credits too, in a multi-level marketing fashion, except they're not splitting up commissions among several marketers, they are splitting up visit credits among several marketers.

H) Often this is referred to as 'viral' marketing. But don't let this word scare you. You will not get a disease. You are not spreading a virus. The word 'viral' is a description of the way your free advertising can multiply. It multiplies as fast as a virus does, from person to person.

Or, at least, that is what the administrators of these exchanges would like you to think. The reality is a little bit different. The truth is that very few people continue to use click exchanges for very long because they soon encounter some harsh realities.

1. Nobody is using just one exchange at a time staring at any screen for 10-30 seconds except for the most naive kind of person

2. Everybody is deliberately clicking past every site they see on the exchange.

3. Nobody has any money to spend. They are out there trying to earn money.

4. They have fierce competition. Their own products or services are rarely unique and compelling to this ad-weary group of non-buyers.

5. The 'I-give-up' factor kicks in for their downline and for them. They conclude that click exchanges don't work.

But they are wrong. Click exchanges work quite well. The percentages may be very low but the people who are using the exchanges are the people who are actively involved in internet business. They are the right target audience. Even if you get one serious click out of 600 the effort is worth it. By multi tasking and surfing several sites simultaneously you can reduce your effort substantially.