Before 1999, my budget for advertising was zero. It’s not that I didn’t have the money for advertising, but I just didn’t need to. Most internet marketers back then didn’t need to spend much money on advertising since all search engines were free. But since most search engines now require you to pay some sort of fee, times have drastically changed.

And like I said above, the ones that are still free can take a very long time before they do a thing for you. Since you didn’t give them any money, they know they technically don’t owe you anything. And in my opinion, free search engines don’t take their advertisers very serious. I think they treat you like cattle or 2nd class at best.

There aren’t many free marketing strategies that work anymore. If you plan to use a 100% free marketing strategy, your chances for failure will go way up. Most successful marketing strategies require some money. If you plan to make a serious income on the internet, you must be prepared to make some sort of financial commitment.

I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, but I think it’s best you know the absolute truth with no sugar coating. But the old saying “It Takes Money To Make Money” is absolutely true! It really does. But the good news is that it doesn’t take very much money to make money. You can do it on a shoe-string budget. You don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars. But just get the idea of a free marketing campaign out of your mind and continue reading below.

One of the least expensive methods of adverting are ezines. You can place ads for as little as $5 an ad. Again don’t use free ads on ezines because they don’t work and you’ll end up wasting your money. Free ads have no value anymore and that’s exactly why they’re free. You don’t get something for nothing anymore on the net and part of the reason 95% of the companies fail and give up is because they focused their energy on free ads.

If you’re one of these people that is overly focused on free advertising you must simply re-program your thinking. You must understand that spending money on internet advertising is a very good thing. Because you get exactly what you pay for with internet advertising. If you pay nothing, you’ll probably get nothing back. If you pay $10 for 500 visitors to your website, you’ll probably get at least 5 of them to buy something from you and that will more than pay for the ad.

When I pay for advertising I don’t like to mess around. I don’t even like to buy the $5 ads in the ezines anymore. They work much better than the free ads, but if you can afford it, you’ll get a much better return on your money with the “Top Sponsor” or “Solo” ads. What are “Top Sponsor” ads? This simply means your ad is at the very top of the ezine so it’s the first thing the readers of that ezine will see. And a “Solo” ad simply means your ad will go out as a separate, stand alone mailing to every subscriber of that ezine. I always get my best response rate with “Top Placement” and “Solo” ads.