Don't panic, the four letter word I was referring to was FREE. If you are like me and you have a website you already know that you cannot make any money without traffic. Traffic refers to the amount of visitors that view your website. The most popular forms of advertising on the internet can cost you anything from a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars per month. I don't know about you but when I was starting out I most definitely did not have that kind of money to shell out. So I went on a mission to save my credit cards from burnout.

On my travels I have found many free or inexpensive advertising mediums and if I may I would like
to share them with you.

Forums.

No internet marketing campaign is complete without the use of forums. A forum is place where you can meet like-minded people and discuss just about whatever you choose. That's just a fancy name for a chat room you may say, I beg to differ. What makes a forum different from a chat room is the facts that in a forum you get to talk about your business, in other words its FREE advertising. I cannot stress enough the importance and value of using forums. You can generate hundreds if not thousands of hits to your website through the proper use of forums. You can find thousands of forums just by doing a simple search with your chosen search engine. If marketing is an important part of your business then you need to find forums that specialize in marketing and business ideas. My personal favorite is W.A.H.M. which stands for work at home moms. This forum is dedicated to women and men who have a home based business, no matter what your specialty is you will be able to find folks with similar businesses there. If you have any challenges or questions you can get help, the forum is very friendly and you will be made to feel welcome right from the start. If you are an expert in any particular area your help will be greatly appreciated by others as new members are constantly arriving. When you post a question or reply to a question or comment you can include what is called a signature, this is a brief ad, telling people about your business.

Whenever I make a post on a forum, this signature appears at the bottom. When it is clicked on, the
person is taken to my website or which ever site I am promoting at that time. Remember to read the rules of the forum before you begin posting as you can easily loose your membership if you make an unwelcome post.

Use the forum to help others and to get help, do not SPAM that is definitely a no-no. Do not use a
forum just to advertise, try instead to contribute something useful to the arena. If you do this
consistently you will gain the trust of other forum members and they will become more likely to follow your lead whenever your are promoting a product or service. Posting in forums is my far the most effective free advertising you can get, use it widely and wisely and it will serve you well.

Article Submission.

Another favorite amongst internet marketers. If you combine article submission along with forum posting you will quickly become witness to a very powerful viral effect. If you have useful information to share on your chosen field of expertise, the best way to get exposure would be to submit an article to several article directories. An article is simply a short guide (usually around 3-600 words) giving information on your chosen topic. How does this work virally you may ask, well by submitting articles on a regular basis, over time your article will generate many back links to your website. In other words, you start submitting articles, they are accepted and published by online article directories, those directories are published all over the internet and a great deal of people get to see your article. Over time your articles gain momentum as more and more people see them. This is where the viral effect (or word of mouth) kicks in. Two things will then happen; firstly you will begin to gain respect, people will think of you as a real expert. Secondly you will begin to see a lot more traffic to your website which in turn means an increase in sales or sign-ups or whatever it is your business requires the most. How quickly this happens depends on several things.

1. How often you write articles.
2. How many directories you submit too.
3. How many of your articles are accepted for publishing.

As with all things there is a slow methodical way and a lightning quick way to get your articles distributed. Lets start with the slower way. You write lets say 5 articles. You register at 5 article directory sites. You submit your 5 articles. Then you wait anywhere from 14-30 days to find out if your articles have been accepted or not. Once accepted, your articles are then off and running. Whilst you were waiting to find out if your articles would be accepted or not you wrote another 5. Then you went through the entire process of submitting and waiting again. Now don't get me wrong I am not trying to put you off writing articles because they are an extremely powerful form of advertising, but I would be remising if I did not warn you about the length of time it can take to submit articles and get them published.

The upside is you can get help. Unfortunately it is not free. There are websites that offer article submission services. I have yet to find this service being offered freely and quite frankly due to the amount of work involved I doubt I ever will. Article submission services will, for a fee submit your articles to hundreds or thousands of directories for you. Be warned not all article submitters are created equally. Some of these services will submit without you having to register with all of the directories (hurray) but others will require some registration. You can expect to be charged any where from $5.00 to $300.00 for these services. Some will ask for a one off payment for a certain number of articles, some will offer monthly subscriptions for unlimited articles and some will offer monthly subscriptions for a set number of articles. If you wish to go this route it would be wise to shop around to find a price that you can live with. For me I will stick with the slow, methodical free option.

Directories To Submit To.

ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
articlecity.com
articlealley.com
isnare.com

Paid Article Submitters

isnare.com
article-submission-service.com

There are many more directories available just do a search and you should be able to come up with plenty of choices and pretty soon you will have your articles spread across the internet.