You need to consider several factors before deciding what’s best for you and your business. It will take you longer to build an income if you only use free advertising methods, so it’s a good idea to start reinvesting a portion of your initial earnings into paid options as soon as you can.

There are a lot of free ways to market your business online. Some of the better known ones include traffic exchanges, safelists, article marketing, social networking sites, forums and online classified ads. Here is a brief overview of each of these methods.

Traffic exchanges are where you visits a certain number of sites in exchange for people visiting your site. A typical ratio is where you need to visit three sites to get one visit back to yours. You will need to visit each site for about 20 seconds before it counts, but that means others have to visit your site for that amount of time as well. Safelists work in a similar manner, but you have to read email messages as opposed to viewing websites. So, the more sites you visit or emails you read, the more people you will have viewing yours.

Article marketing can be done with little or no internet advertising costs, depending on your ability as a writer. Here you simply write articles that are related to your business. You then submit these to various article directories, and include a link at the end of the article for readers to visit your site.

Social networking sites and forums put the power of communities to work for you. This takes time because you have to focus on building relationships with the people of each community. You have to be careful that you don’t use a “hard sell”, or you will just make people mad.

Online classified ads work just like putting an ad in the newspaper. You will be limited to how many words you can use, but that should help you in choosing your words more carefully. One of the downsides is that the free ads tend to move down the page quite quickly, so you will have to submit ads as often as each site allows. The other problem is that the only people who will be viewing your ad are people using the site themselves to advertise. For the most part, the average internet user will never visit a classified ad site.

Yes, internet advertising costs one way or the other. But if you’re just getting started, and don’t have any money to spend, then it’s good to know that there are plenty of options that only require an investment of your time.

Perhaps this is because the return on the investment of your advertising dollars goes further online than just about anywhere else when compared to other advertising options such as color printing, making flyers and bill boards. Not only that, it’s very easy to track your results when you advertise on the internet. And the tracking can be much more specific when compared to offline ads. For example, you can find out exactly where each visitor is from, information about their computer, what time they visited your website, how long they stayed, and the list goes on. It would be virtually impossible to do this with any of the traditional marketing methods.

If you have been thinking about advertising on the internet you may already be using color printing and then you have probably heard about using social networking as a free marketing option. The good news is that it can, and does work. However, the general rule of thumb is that the less you invest in online advertising, the longer it will take to see results. That doesn’t mean you should skip social sites for marketing, far from it, but be prepared for it to take a while to see an increase in your profits.

Continuing with social networking sites as an example. They are free to use, but you will have to post to them regularly. This takes time. You then need to work on positioning your business as a top resource for whatever it is that you’re selling. You can do this by becoming a noted expert in the field, which also takes time. But, once you start gaining traction, your followers will start recommending you to their friends, and you can experience exponential growth before you know it.

On the end of internet advertising business are the paid options. We’ll use pay per click (commonly referred to as PPC) for an example. This is where you pay for each click somebody makes on your ad on a search engine. However, a lot of the search engine’s visitors won’t even know it’s an ad. Let’s say you’re selling table lamps, you would select keywords (the terms people enter into the search engines for information) that best match your business. You will then pay the search engine you have a PPC arrangement with each time somebody clicks on your paid ad. How much you pay per click will largely depend on how competitive the keyword is.

PPC can be somewhat risky if you don’t know what you’re doing, but most places will allow you to set a daily cap on your pay per click spending. This will help you keep your budget under control as you learn how to do it better, and until you start seeing solid results; at which point you can invest more in your internet advertising business choices.