However you choose to advertise your site or promote your product, the one thing that you MUST avoid is sending unwanted e-mails (Spam).  Sending spam will often cost you more than you earn from it, especially if services such as webhosting etc are withdrawn as a result, as this will happen without warning and without the chance of getting a refund for the unused portions of your subscriptions.  There are plenty of ways of advertising your product effectively without resorting to this tedious, costly and frankly pointless advertising method.  Many people, especially those who spend a lot of time on the internet, do not buy from spammers on principle, even if the product that they are selling sounds interesting!

There are those who believe that if free advertising worked there would be no such thing as paid advertising.  They are wrong.  The difference is the amount of effort which each method requires.  You can run a successful business on nothing but free advertising if you have the time, energy and patience to implement the number of strategies which that would require.  It's the same principle which leads most of us to buy washing machines - we could wash our clothes by hand and keep a few hundred extra pounds/euros/dollars etc in the bank, but we consider the amount of time and effort saved to be worth the cost of the appliance and the electricity to run it.  Equally, you could generate all of your traffic by hand (ie for free), but most businesses, especially as they become larger and have more money available, consider paid advertising to be worth the time and effort it can save.  THAT is why paid advertising exists!

There are many ways to generate traffic to the websites you are promoting, and so there are as many different  tools as you could wish for.  However, here are a couple of hints to bear in mind before you go ahead and implement one strategy after another:

• There are a great many Free For All (FFA) sites on the internet.  These are sites at which it is free to post adverts into categorised lists advertising everything from aardvarks to zithers and, because it's free, submitting to these sites seems at first to be a good idea.  Indeed this used to be the case.  However, precisely because they were so successful, programmes were created which automated the process of delivering messages to thousands of these sites at once.  Gradually, the number of real people who actually visited them became minimal, and so the number of people reading the adverts placed there dwindled to almost nothing.  Also, because these programmes made the process so easy for thousands of people to post on thousands of sites, an advert which used to stay on site for a day-and-a-half before it was pushed off will now only be there for a matter of hours, if not minutes.  Even the owners of many FFA sites now admit that this type of advertising is usually a waste of time, which you already don't have enough of.  They also create a lot of e-mails if you do register with them.  Now some of the stuff advertised in these e-mails may be great, but much of it is as much a waste of time as your initial advert!  However, don't discount FFA lists - used properly they can still be very valuable - see Secrets of the Big Dogs and / or The Traffic-Jam Formula for details on how to extract maximum value from these sites.
• The other frequently cited free lead generators are Safelists.  These are sites which, among other services, collect addresses from thousands of people and let you e-mail them safe from accusations of sending spam, which is very bad!  This is why safelists are so popular.  Although these too, to some degree, are victims of their own success in that programmes have been written for mass submission of adverts and e-mails, these programmes are more expensive and many safelists charge for all but the most basic services anyway.  These two things mean that, if you are prepared to invest some money (or web-time, depending on the rules of the list) adverts/e-mails to safelists can still be profitable.  However, remember that there are many other people sending e-mails to precisely the same people, some of whom may be promoting precisely the same products.  You too will receive many such e-mails.  It is fair to say that the majority of mail generated in this way ends up being deleted before it is even read.  You must, therefore, ensure that your headline is a real winner before you send it in to one of these sites for circulation, especially if you are paying for the privilege!

FREE TRAFFIC SOURCES

Screenblaze.  This is an ingenious idea for generating traffic - once installed, your screensaver is one webpage after the other, each displayed for just 1 minute.  Once your webpage is registered with them, it is added to the list of websites being shown around the world as screensavers to lots and lots of otherwise idle computers.  However, therein lies the problem - all of the computers "visiting" your site are idle, so few people, if any, will actually see your site, even though you will seem to have had lots of visitors!  However, very useful if you are trying to sell a webpage with proof that it does get traffic!

The Traffic-Jam Formula.  This e-book is a great read and a mine of information on generating website traffic, both free and paid.  Its author, Graham Hamer is a well-known and respected writer on internet marketing in general, but famous for his traffic-generating expertise.  To get the book for free, sign up for the free course (see the links at the top left of the page).

MPAM.  This stands for Massive, Passive Advertising Machine and is a system of linked advertising webpages which compliment each other to create a fantastic advertising effect.  As you get further through the programme you go from a Bronze to a Platinum member, picking up bonuses and extra hits along the way.  Click HERE to start the ball rolling!

The FreeAd Guru.  At this link you can get Stephen Ducharme's free audio e-book which contains loads of tips, strategies and methods for generating traffic.  Not only this, but you can give the book away and get paid for it (yes, you read that right!) if you sign up as an affiliate HERE. 

PAID TRAFFIC SOURCES