Internet Marketing. What Does and Doesn't Work?

Let's talk a little more about the experiences I have had with internet marketing online. In the interest of saving you some of the anguish I have had trying some of these methods. I am assuming you have an affiliate program that has given you a link and you are wondering how to market it. The first thing you may want to do is buy a domain name and forward your affiliate program link to it. Even better if you have a blog. Marketing your blog url is liked much more by the search engine spiders.

Safe lists

One of the first things I was involved in was safe lists. These are little groups of people that agree to receive emails from each other about affiliate programs they are in. There are literally thousands of them out there one can join for free. It then becomes a game of " Hey you join my program " and then they reply with " No thanks, I have a program but hey you join mine ". Well you get the picture here. Unfortunately I can't say I achieved much results in the years I used them or that this is a very effective way to find sign ups for your program. The other annoying thing is you have to agree to receive email ads from others and everyday you wind up clearing off hundreds of emails from your email account. If you are smart you can collect email addresses from the ads you receive and strike up business friendships by inquiring about other people's programs. This takes longer but is much more effective than shooting out email ads about your program everyday.

Traffic Exchanges. Manual And Autosurf

These are websites that show your site to others as you view other sites. This is real traffic to your site but I would say manual exchanges where a person actually has to be there and view your site are prefered. This ensures they at least view your site for a time. Trafficswarm is the most effective one I have found simply because of it's text ads, the size of it's overall network, and it's search engine aspect which I feel produces targeted hits. I have gotten signups from them in my programs.

I would say stay away from these autosurf sites where you can leave the room or take a nap and it surfs itself racking up credits for you. These autosurfs where you can earn money tend to be scams and the site simply disappears when they have suckered enough people into buying. Then they open up under another name. DO NOT PUT ANY MONEY IN THESE! You may win for awhile but eventually you will lose it.

Pay Per Click Search Engines

Of course the biggest and most well known is Google adwords. What you do is bid on keywords that are frequently searched in Google. Others are also wanting these keywords so the more you are willing to pay the closer to the first few pages you will wind up when a search is done. You only pay for actual clicks from actual visitors so these are targeted hits. It can be very expensive with Google or any of the big search engines so set yourself a budget.

A better route for you to go may be with some of the smaller search engines. Why,you ask? Because they have sign up incentives. They will offer you free pay per click money to get you going with them. Bonuses range anywhere from $5 to $550 in click credit. Even though these search engines are not as familiar they still will produce targeted hits to your site although at a slower pace than the big guys. To find these simply do a search in Google and punch in " free pay per click money" or anything along those lines. Meteor surf, Search post and Mammoth search are a few that offer money that I have tried with favourable results. Using a keyword search tool first to figure out what people are searching is wise.

Internet marketing is a big topic so I intend to write another article on this in the future so stay tuned for part 2.