Branding

Branding is probably the most important thing you can do as far as your credibility goes. You can brand yourself or create a brand. You may even want to do both. Many people buy a domain name that is their actual name. For example, JohnSmith.com. You could also be creative and come up with a theme for your brand. Some internet marketers use words like 'team' or 'group' in their brand name. If you have a little graphic design ability you may even want to design your own logo but this is not necessary to get started. There is much more info on this topic in our forum. You can buy domain names for $10 a year or less. We have used many companies over the years and if you would like to use our experience for free you can visit Jimbo's Big Domain Page where you will learn even more.

If you would like to create your own logo to represent your brand try unlimited logo files from LogoYes for free.

Offline Advertising

Promoting your income streams offline is an often overlooked approach to getting traffic to your web pages. There are many ways to do this that are free and some that are easy but cost a little. In the Offline Advertising Manual we've covered ten different ideas to get web visitors that are looking for honest internet income. Don't miss out on some of the easiest ways to get traffic by leaving the house for an hour once or twice a month. Download this one now.

Classified Advertising

Classified advertising is another very good way to get traffic to your website or splash page. Either free online classifieds or the classified section in your local newspaper work well. Of course newspapers don't give away advertising space, but depending on where you live a small ad in the "business opportunities" can be very cheap. There are more of these types of websites out there than can be counted. Download the Classified Advertising Manual for a comprehensive list of the free online classified advertising websites that we use and some really good tips on how to use them. This manual also contains a special supplement for using Craig's List (which is free.)

Forum Signatures & Online Commenting

These are a great source for free traffic. Visiting forums, news type websites and blogs and including links to your website in your signature or comments that you post is a common practice that can lead to very good results. Especially in forums and blogs that relate to what it is you are selling. Some forums will even allow you to publish banners in your signature. There are several do's and don'ts when using this particular promotion approach. Download and look over the Signatures & Commenting Manual for a quick lesson on the rules of the road. We have also included a very good list of forums for you to become a member of if you like. These are the best places on the Internet to meet other business owners. We've also included a nice little section of BB code snippets to use when posting signatures and banners on forums.

Link Exchange

This promotion method is easy and somewhat effective. Basically you are trading links from your web site for links to your website. The web sites below fit into this category for the most part but could be considered newer versions of an old theme. They are all free to use. This is a very good place to get some free advertising and have your site reviewed by other web masters. We try to visit this one about once a week.

Great idea and OK results. It's easy to set up though, so you should definitely place a banner from here on your site once you've gotten that far.

We get plenty of traffic from this site. It is a very unique concept and worth the time to set it up and use it. Banner ads here work OK but it's the traffic bar that gets good hits.

Traffic Exchanges

Traffic exchanges (TE's) can be a good way to advertise a web site if you do it right. (Most people don't do it right.) There are a number of variations of these out there. You can buy views of your site, or "surf" for credits towards views of your site. Depending on what you are promoting, these can be a little frustrating sometimes. Especially if you are promoting a replicated affiliate website. It's best to use a splash page. These sites also have banner and text link rotators, but we've never had much luck with either on these sites. The good news is the more popular TE's get many new members everyday. That means more potential leads for you. You can also promote the TE's and build a downline that may make you a little money over time or at least earn you credits for their surfing. Download the Traffic Exchange Tips eBook we wrote to help you use these free advertising resources and avoid wasting your time. This eBook is free and only available on this website. (It also contains a very neat little trick to make some money with traffic exchanges while you promote your main web pages. We even give you the exact high-converting custom designed splash page we use for this little secret- Free!)

Join Traffic Hoopla. It's free and is the absolute best resource for TE's. You could call it a clearing house for all the best traffic exchanges out there. The owner is a great guy and we enjoy everything about our membership here. If you are brand new at these start with just one of our all time favorites like Traffic Swarm or Easy Hits 4U. All the exchanges listed at Traffic Hoopla are getting the most current traffic. Watch the "How To" video once inside and you will understand exactly how it works.

Email Marketing

List Building
"The money is in the list." Right? Not so fast. If you have some experience at earning money on line, you have no doubt heard this before. You want to build a following and a team not just a list. It is certainly a good idea to have a mailing list, but many marketers abuse this promotion avenue or don't understand it. We are on no less than 150 mailing lists and are amazed everyday at how many offers we get that are the exact same thing. Usually for something that is in pre-launch or brand new. The internet gurus promote to each other's lists, the traffic exchange owners promote to each other's lists and then there are those marketers that send an email everyday promoting a different product or opportunity. It is true that people that have a list of thousands can make a lot of money from one email, but this isn't the most honest way to go for us. We don't try to sell anyone on anything that we haven't bought and actually use and believe in. We don't promote anything as a favor to anyone. The use of auto-responders will never go away but we currently choose not to market this way. We do maintain an email list, but only send to it every couple of months.

Safe Lists
A more honest way to market your honest internet income streams is to use safe lists. These are programs that work somewhat like Traffic Exchanges in that you sign-up and agree to receive and open emails in exchange for sending your emails to the other members. Another way that these are similar to Traffic Exchanges is that most of the people that are going to open your emails are only doing so to earn credits for their mailings. We do use this promotion avenue from time to time and use List Joe. It is one of the newer Safe Lists and the administrator is really great and doesn't spam the members everyday like many of the Traffic Exchange owners do. There are also links to many other safe lists linked inside the member's area of List Joe and once in a while we will join a new one just to to test it out. List Joe allows you to send to 4000 members every week for free. We average about 50 opens for every 4000 emails sent here. The most important thing you need to know about using Safe Lists is this: Make your subject line catchy and the body of your message very short.

Banner Advertising

Creation
Most affiliate and MLM opportunities provide ready made banners in one or two different sizes. There are industry standards for all the sizes but there are only about five that are commonly used. We recommend making your own just like splash pages to distinguish yourself from your competition. For making your own banners Adobe Photoshop is what the pros use but it is an expensive application with a very large learning curve. For a stripped down version that is way easier on your wallet try Photoshop Elements. Elements is "Photoshop for beginners" and is much easier to learn to use. There is also Gimp which is a free answer to Photoshop. For those that have no graphics art experience at all we recommend Instant Banner Creator. It is free and really fun to use. You can also use it for creating headers and footers for web pages, buttons and even peel away ads. You can download your creations or let Instant Banner Creator host the images so you can just paste a little code into your web pages and there they are! See some free graphics we created with IBC.

Rotation
You've created a few banners and now it's time to get them out there into cyberspace. There are many places to do this (your own web pages being the most important) and our absolute favorite is 1800 Banners - We really love this service. The free membership works great and we also buy clicks here. If you decide to use the paid side of it don't buy impressions. Buy clicks. The large square banner at the bottom of the Welcome page of this site is part of the free side. For every hit to that page we earn impressions for our banners on other sites. Another approach we use here is running splash pages (that we created for different income streams) with the 1800 Banners banner code on it through different Traffic Exchanges. This earns thousands of impressions for our banners.

Social Media

Depending on who you ask, this term can have a few different meanings. At we lump together blogs, social networks (including video sites), social search, social bookmarking and Twitter which doesn't quite fit into any of the other categories. These are all very important now and not using them is just not smart for any business owner. These are used for long term goals and must be worked at and maintained over time. Getting all your social media avenues working for you is not hard, just somewhat time consuming. The sooner you start, the sooner you reap the rewards.

Download the Social Media Tips eBook when you are ready to get to work on:

• Building your friends and followers lists.
• Meet like minded people and tell them about your business.
• Bookmark your web pages on sites like Digg and Technorati.
• Make your first videos to publish on sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

Article Marketing

Writing and publishing articles on the internet is a great plan for getting traffic. Highly motivated and targeted traffic. Most of the gurus use this method as they can afford to pay professional writers to do it for them. You don't have to be a professional writer or hire one. Use the Free Traffic System as a shortcut to get your first two or three articles out there along with Hub Pages. Then you will have a little feedback as to how your writing is going and can tweak your article writing to go prime time.

Download the Article Marketing Manual and learn everything you need to know about this method of promotion. It contains tips for writing good copy, explains why you want to use this promotion method and contains a dozen links to sites where you can submit your articles for publication for free.

Search Engine Optimization

The absolute best way to sell something on the internet is to build a website or webpage for a product or service that comes up on the first (or second) page in the search engines. This is known as search engine optimization or SEO. Getting a website in front of folks that are searching for what it is you are selling is golden. Not to mention you will get a lot of visits to your site without spending any money promoting it. Unfortunately this is somewhat easier said than done. If you want to promote an affiliate site, SEO becomes a little tricky but not impossible like many folks may tell you. We could have written an eBook on this topic also, but the simple fact is it would not have been nearly as good as this mini-program by Kevin Riley. This is a very stripped down version of a program that was offered online at the Warrior Forum at the beginning of 2009. This is more for advanced marketers and is well worth five times the $50 price tag. If you are a newer marketer you may want to get the full version of the program which is available to all members of the Marketing Team. Get your copy of the Traffic Generation Lab Cheat Sheet HERE. You might also be interested in his other very well done products for internet marketers.

See why we like Kevin Riley and everything he does by visiting IM Report Card.

Pay Per Click

Google AdWords is the King of pay per click advertising. These are all the little "Google Ads" you see on practically every web page out there. There are really two networks here - the content side and the search side. Most people use the search part of it as learning the content network is daunting for even the savvy internet user. Opening an account with Google is free but of course you will be paying for clicks on your ads as they appear on other websites. (Google AdSense is the other side of it where you place other people's AdWords ads on your site and get paid for your visitors clicking on the ads.) You can spend a long time ( and a lot of money) learning how to do this on your own. There are seminars you can attend, webinars to take part in and pros you can hire to do it for you. The basics aren't hard to grasp, but as you will be spending your money to place your ads it is best to spend some of those advertising dollars on lessons first. The internet marketing gurus spend millions of dollars testing ads every year. Yahoo and Microsoft also have their own versions of PPC advertising.

We can not begin to emphasize how important it is to learn from somebody before you spend any of your money on AdWords campaigns. We can tell you with absolute certainty that Perry Marshall is the best resource out there for making money with AdWords. At the very least take his free 5 Day Course. You will be far ahead of the competition by doing this and receive his free AdWords cheat sheet. After signing up you will receive one email a day giving you the basics of writing ads, doing keyword research and bidding. The 5 day course is a primer to sell you his AdWords 2010 Definitive Guide which is a steal at $49. The guide will pay for itself in just one campaign but there is no reason to buy it until you are ready to unleash yourself on the AdWords networks.

See why we really like working with Perry Marshall and what other Marketers have to say about him.