Free Internet Marketing Strategies to Avoid
Table of contents for Internet Marketing Strategies
- 7 Basic Rules for Internet Marketing
- Free Internet Marketing Strategies to Avoid
- How To Use Craigslist as an Internet Marketing Strategy
- Is Ezine Advertising a Hidden Gem for Internet Marketers?
The first thing to understand about free internet marketing strategies is that they are extremely competitive and take a lot of work to get results.
Now there are some online marketing methods that you can call "free" that are currently extremely effective, such as web 2.0 strategies, but this article will cover methods that you should avoid.
FFA Sites
FFA stands for "Free For All". When FFA sites first started there weren't too many of them and there weren't too many people posting to them. Also there was no auto posting software so FFAs were a good idea. A person would go to the site to post his ad or opportunity and while they were there would see other peoples' opportunities.
Posting to FFAs years ago would result in quite a few sales or sign ups.
Today it's a different story. There are so many FFA sites that one can't possibly visit them all. So web technology came out with the ability to post your ad to hundreds of thousands of FFA sites at one time.
This sounded like a good idea at the time. The problem is, once this auto posting caught on, everyone started doing it. Eventually no one physically went to an FFA site anymore, therefore nobody's ad was being seen.
Even if someone did go to an FFA site to post an ad or even read an ad, because of the number of ads posted per hour, a person's ad would be off the page within the hour and again never to be seen by human eyes or at best by very few humans.
Safelists
A Safelist is a group of people who agree to receive emails from each other. They do this in order to get their opportunity seen by others.
At the beginning this was a pretty good idea as there weren't that many people subscribed to each list so the number of emails they received was minimal. That made it so that reading each one was not a problem.
Today, things are much different. The Safelists have become so large, as you may have found out for yourself, that joining one leaves you open to receiving hundreds if not thousands of emails from each list.
Since there is no way to read all these emails, what people have started doing is set up a junk email account to have their incoming mail from these lists sent to. Once collected they just select all the emails and delete them.
The result?
No one reads anyone's offer and Safelists as we knew them became a dead means of selling.
Traffic Exchanges
At one time traffic exchanges worked fairly well. There wasn't that many of them and people weren't just clicking through just to get visitors.
Those using the exchanges were genuinely interested in seeing what was out there. In actuality the early days saw
more pages of games and other sites than business opportunities.
Well, with all the changes in online marketing and once people saw the potential of putting their web site right in front of a potential customers' face, advertising on traffic exchanges started to take off.
Now about the only thing you see on traffic exchanges is someone trying to promote their product, very similar to what you would see on an FFA or Classified page.
On the surface this still seemed like a good idea. After all, even with all the competition you're still getting your site out in front of everyone surfing these exchanges.
But therein lies the problem. With so many opportunities out there in order for someone to get a potential customer to view their page they have to surf multiple exchanges and for hours a day.
Because of this there is no time to actually look at each page. After the 15 or 30 second timer goes off the surfer immediately clicks to view the next page and get his next credit.
The good news is this: if you have a lot of time and are on a limited budget, there are a couple of classified ad sites that some internet marketers have had success with.
One such site is Craigslist. The next article in this series will provide some tips and strategies for advertising on Craigslist and one other classified site.
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January 16th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Great work. All your suggestions are very nice and also will be of great use to the online business entrepreneurs.
January 17th, 2008 at 7:28 am
That was a very nice post, I’m proud of you!
January 19th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Great article.
People need to realize that things that worked at one time don't necessarily remain viable.
Adaption to new marketing strategies and constant research is the only way to do well on the internet. Plus, hard work.
Great job and thanks for the love on My Blog Log.
Sheree
January 19th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
@Internet Business, Assissotom, Sheree - thanks so much for the encouragement.
-Mark