First of all I want to point out that if you have the resources to do Pay Per Click, by all means do so. This is the best way to get clients to your website. But as the old saying goes “Don't put all your eggs in one basket”.

Free advertising is an excellent way to get “your feet wet” with online marketing. Just don't expect huge success right away. There are a lot of people out there using this form of advertising. You have to keep on top of it every day, every hour. On some advertising sites, the ads rotate faster than you can put them on the site. If you can afford it, purchase a good program for submitting your ads on a rotation. These are especially helpful if you don't have hours to spend in front of the computer.

The use of online forums is growing daily. These are a good source of information, and a great spot to advertise your products. The people on forums are there because they believe in online marketing. They are a captured audience. When you are on forums, make sure you follow their rules. You cannot go on most forums and just start advertising on every thread, this gets very annoying for everyone involved and will in some cases get you banned from the forum. So be sure and read the rules before you post. Also ask questions, answer questions, and always make sure your website address is in your signature. You will meet some great people and get ideas for advertising on most every forum you join. It is a wonderful source for free advertising.

ARTICLE WRITING

Who knew when you were taking high school grammar, that one-day you would actually put some of what you learned to use. I certainly never thought of it, to me it was just a requirement to graduate and move on with my life. I hated this particular course: but I am digressing.

Articles are a main stay of any online business. If you look up any topic on the Internet, you will find someone who has put his or her thoughts on “paper” and published it worldwide. The Internet has become a writers dream. You can write about anything and everything. There is no limitation; only your imagination. Write some useful articles about your business. Write some articles about your products.

I recently wrote an article about Data Entry, which is one of the products I sell, I received several hits to my website from that one article.

Publish your articles on any and all ezines. Again, there are programs available that will do this for you, but you can do it on your own. Make a list of different article websites and publish. Some article websites want only original material, so with one article change the title and opening sentence, just change things around in the article so that the same wording is not on every site. Most article sites, however, will publish the same articles; it is only a few that require you to do this.

FREE ADVERTISING SITES

Remember with any free advertising site, yours is not the only ad for online business. There will be quite a few. Make your ad unique; offer something the others aren't offering. In one short sentence you have to capture the audience attention. Why should they buy from you and not your competitor? You have a very short time to get people to look at your website, and hopefully purchase.

With these types of free advertising sites, you have to keep on top of where your ad located on the site.. Daily I check each of my ads on each site I have put an ad on to see where it is placed. If it is off the first page, I resubmit my ad.

Make sure when using free advertising sites that you are putting your ads in the correct category. On some sites you can use Business Opportunities, Work At Home, Jobs, Employment. If the ad sites let you, use all these categories to advertise your business. That brings you total for the one site up to at least 4 ads at one time.

Now that you have the basics of how I use free advertising, you are probably wondering how I found over 200 forums, ezines, and free advertising sites.

It is really simple. #1 Go to every search engine and type in Free Advertising Sites, ezines, and business forums bookmark every site. Go to the next search engine and look for ones that were not in the first search engine and so forth. #2 Once you have done your search, go to your bookmarks and make separate folders for forums, advertising sites, and ezines, and separate what you have saved.

Another good source for finding new sites are forums. As I said before people on forums are very generous in sharing ideas. They are also a great source for finding other advertising sites.

In closing I would like to point out that free advertising takes time, patience, and tenacity. The more you advertise the more your site will get picked up in the search engines for ranking.