| What is the best way to promote your online buinsess? Lets look at the choices. I have been wondering for a while now what is the most effective means of marketing on the net right now. There are, to what I see, 3 major ways to promote: Safelist/Opt-In Lists, PPC/Search Engines/Directories/etc..., or hit exhcanges (traffic/banner/text).
OK first we will cover lists. Safe Lists like Ad Tactics or The Mad Vlad say that they have thousands of Members. While that is true how many send the lists e-mail to an account they never check. I know I am guilty of this and should really start looking at the stuff people take time to send but then you run into another problem common to lists, volume.
In my safelist e-mail I get about 250-400 emails a day. That is quite a chunk. And with e-mail pouring in constantly it becomes a loosing battle rather fast. Even being an upgraded member in Adtactics I still get a lot of e-mail. while it means the safelist is healthy, you have to wonder how many people read them after a while.
Ok next is directories. This includes PPC/Search Engines/FFA/callsified ads..anything that catagoizes your site. While Search engines like Google and Yahoo are good because they can help you target your hits there are directory options that just don't make sense.
FFA's are a good example of this. There are usually onlly a couple fo catagories and always one "throw away" catagory. For most of them the throw Away catagory is Government (yeah dunno what I would do without a Government catagory to tell me about the latest casino affiliate program). Some directory resources, like Pay Per Click(PPC), are for more experienced Marketers too like Google Adwords while others try and help people learn the in's and out like Frog Search. So while directories look like a great idea, take them with a grain of salt.
Now on to the third and probably the most popular method, hit exchanges. You have more interesting choices here and are almost always guarenteed your site will be visited. The most common are Traffic Exchanges. These are engines that let you surf websites that other people in the group are promoting. There are two forms of Traffic Exchanges, Manual and Auto.
Manual Traffic Exchanges guarentee that someone will look at your site because they have to physically click something to move on. Some good examples of manual traffic exchanges are:10K Hits4uNow,Nexus,Ts25 and Tsunami Gold.
Auto Surfs are basically good if you want your hit counter to get a boost. Not many people look at them because there is no need. The nly one I have seen so far that is good is Blasted Hits because they put prize links in there that are worth a lot. In 10 sites I won 60 credits. So they make sure you're paying attention. One other note on auto exchanges. A lot of them are going "Pay to surf" or in their case "Pay to leave your computer to run on our exchange". Let me warn you now, whomever may be reading this. No one ever gets anything of worth by doing nothing.
Next up is text ad exchanges. While these arent so common as they used to be you can still find them. Most fo them are on tool bars for your browser, the newest of which is Fat Money Bar which works with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla's FireFox.
On banner exchanges I will say this since I don't currently know of any aside from EbannerX, but then again I haven't looked either. They can do good especially if the banner code is put in a good spot on all the sites in the exchange.
One other form of Hit exchange is promotional pages. These pages either have 4 or 5 text or banner ads that you have to click on. Once you do you get your own page with your ad at the top. Not a bad system but it relies on people promoting a site with other peoples ads on it which most folks aren't to keen on doing. Some good examples of this type of page are:Crazy Traffic,
Free Viral and Traffic Sword.
I hope this helps even a little for someone who has questions on how to promote on the web.
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