Free Internet Marketing Resources

Internet Marketing is one of the hot topics. Many people sell ebooks, guides, or information packages for high dollars. There aren't many secrets to internet marketing.

Whether you have an ecommerce site selling products, or a content site or even a forum, the free resources offered in this guide will help you boost your traffic.

All of these internet marketing techniques and resources are FREE, most of them will need time, patience and hard work. But if you follow each step for your new site, or already established site, you will start receiving some great traffic.

These resources are tested by myself, and recommended by many internet marketers. I have created this free internet marketing resources list to have an easy to reach guide for you to visit whenever you need them.

Sometimes a small company with a unique story to tell might make the national news. Don't wait for the big reporters to knock on your door.

Be creative, think outside the box, and start writing your first press release.

There are many websites which offer FREE press release submission. Some of them might give you more exposure for a small fee, but they still accept free press releases. Even if your PR doesn't make the national news, you might still get some great backlinks from local news sites, and bloggers.

There are hundreds of large, well known, and thousands of smaller free press release distribution websites.

I'd recommend submitting to top 20-50 of them. You can also pay for a press release submission service, but remember this guy will offer only 100% free resources, so start working :)

Here's a link to a list of 50 press release distribution websites. Most of them are free, and the site shows the free ones.

Start setting up your email list forms for your website, and start building your opt-in email list. Believe me, in the long run, email marketing will be one of your best resources.

There's nothing better than a quality, opt in built email list. I will not go through the details of email marketing since I have already written a detailed hub; Email Marketing Guide. Remember, there are many free email marketing softwares out there, but I'd highly recommend on of the quality email marketing softwares.

Unless the site you are promoting is a blog, you should definitely setup a blog.

If your site an ecommerce site, your blog might give product reviews, how to guides, coupons, tips, any unique and quality content that will bring more organic traffic to your site.

Search engines love blogs, always try to write unique content with useful information, remember to add links to your main site with proper anchor text.

My Blog Platform Recommendations:

• Wordpress (FREE)
• Sixapart (MoveableType, Typepad, Vox. Free and Paid)

Find related forums and communities to your site's niche, and become a member.

NEVER start posting your links right away. Start posting useful information and tips. Try to answer as many questions as possible.

After building number of posts, and trust from the community start marketing your site. But never overmarket it.

Remember to setup your signature links to your site. Each forum has different rules, make sure to obey these rules about signature links, and forum postings, etc.

If you can become a trusted member of a forum and/or community, you will be surprised how much traffic and conversion you will get from the links you post and signature links. So, do not underestimate forum marketing and start registering forums about your niche.

Quick tip about finding niche forums: Let's say your niche is "Maternity" a quick allinurl search at google will bring 1700 results which have maternity and forum in the URL. This means these are forums or forum categories about maternity.

If you write quality and related comments to blog posts with your links included, they will be approved 99% of the time.

Many internet marketers think blog commenting is not a great marketing technique any more since Wordpress and similar blogs add a no-follow tag to the links in blog comments. But remember, our ultimate goal is to bring quality traffic to your site with using free internet marketing techniques.

You will be surprised how much traffic you can get by submitting quality comments to related blogs.

Start with Google Blog Search Engine, find related blogs, and topics to your niche and start commenting with a link back to your site.

We all hate spam, if you don't have anything to contribute to the blog posts, please DO NOT spam. But if you can be little creative, you will find so many methods to add quality blog comments which will get approved instantly.

Add your site to social bookmark sites. Each social bookmark site will give you at least 1 backlink. Who doesn't like a free backlink?

Here's the most comprehensive list of social bookmark sites.

Sites where the content is generated by users have great authority in Google's eyes. Hundreds of thousands of indexed pages, great SERP's, and totally free to add your content with links back to your site.

Here's a list of user content generated sites:

• hubpages.com
• squidoo.com
• tumblr.com
• gather.com
• spongefish.com
• launchtags.com

Star building quality and unique content within these sites, and you will have increasing, quality traffic in the long term.

Main benefits of these sites: Direct linking to your sites, and revenue share model.

Some internet marketers think directory submission is dead, but I don't think so. There are still many quality niche directories which will bring you quality traffic, free backlinks, and Google Bots.

This is the site which has most up to date directory lists (free, paid, niche, etc.) Remember to download the excel list they have and start submitting your site to directories.

If you have a local business or not, you have to take advantage of local business directories also. Here's another hub we've written about Free Local Business Advertising. Get some free advertising for your business now.

If your site sells physical products, or info products, or even subscriptions, you can setup an affiliate program.

Affiliate marketers will work for FREE, you will have to pay them only when they bring a sale, subscription, lead etc.

Many ecommerce softwares come with a built-in affiliate system, but you can search google and find some free affiliate scripts, or sign up with an affiliate program (not free), and start promoting your affiliate program.

I'd highly recommend visiting webmaster forums, and trying to promote your affiliate program to affiliate marketers with special incentives.

Facebook, Myspace and many other niche social network sites joining the social era.

There are so many opportunities at social network sites. Just a few of them comes to mind right now:

• Start groups at facebook in interested topics, and send newsletters to your group members.
• Write Facebook applications and promote your sites/services within.
• Offer free resources (backgrounds, images, counters, etc.) for myspace and similar type social sites.
• Run contests at social sites.
• Join niche groups and promote your sites through groups.

Just be creative and you will find hundreds of ways to promote your sites FREE at social newtork sites.

You can get so many quality links by answering questions at answers sites.

Answers.com, LinkedIn Answers, Yahoo Answers, and many more.

Do a quick Google search for answers and start searching for questions related to your niche. Give them some useful information and try to add your link when appropriate.

Believe me, Google loves answers type sites.

How to sites offering "How to Guides" written by users generate some good traffic and being loved by google.

You can write short but effective how to guides with links to your sites, products, and generate some direct traffic.

Here are some popular how to sites:

• eHow
• wikiHow
• How To Do Things
• How Stuff Works

There are also hundreds of how to sites practically in every niche. More related the site to your niche, much better to get quality backlinks. So start writing how to guides related to your site.

Most famous group type sites are Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. There are many more out there with millions of groups in them.

Here's what to do:

• Choose related groups to your niche, possibly quality ones and join them.
• Turn off email notifications, otherwise you will start getting thousands of emails.
• Post some useful information, news, updates, industry reports, etc. related to your niche along with your link/signature.
• Keep doing this.

Remember, most of these group sites' archives get indexed by search engines, so basically every link in a group gets crawled by search engines. You will be surprised by the backlinks you might get from popular groups.

Try to avoid posting to very large spam groups, instead choose smaller but active, niche groups. Participate, and be a member of the community.

Flickr, Webshots and many more quality photo sites are available.

• Open an account.
• Browse related photos to your niche.
• Add comments to the photos (never too many, try to add real, quality text).
• Upload photos with descriptions (links in descriptions) and not spammy.

2 Great examples I've tried at Flickr and worked perfectly to get great quality backlinks:

1. I have uploaded a nice photo add a 2 sentence description. Second sentence was This photo was taken with Nikon D200 with a link to my client's Nikon D200 product page. This is a HOT tip, never looks spammy, and brings you quality backlink. If you are creative, you can find many other methods to add links within photo descriptions.
2. Was promoting a travel agency blog, and the page was a short story about a trip to Rome, Italy. Found all high PR links at Flickr, and added a nice comment and a link to this post (saying, hey read my blog post about my trip to Rome, Italy). Each of these comments were approved (none, removed) and got 1 backlink from each photo comment :) Great tip, huh?

Craigslist being the top classifieds site, there are hundreds of national, and thousands of local classifieds sites.

If you are creative, and do not spam the classifieds sites, you might get some great traffic + revenue from them.

You want a free tip?

Instead of posting a link to an ecommerce site and being flagged at craigslist, you can create an "Open Positions" page at your site with couple of job listings, and post these, also add couple of paragraphs about your company and a direct link. It will never get flagged :)

Just browse craigslist, and you will find tens of creative ideas to promote your site.

You have your main site and main blog, if you want to seriously dominate your niche, next step should be creating a network of mini sites.

Some ideas for a network of mini sites:

• Small blogs for each category in your site.
• Directory for your niche (e.g. mynichedirectory.com)
• Social mini site for your niche.
• Classifieds type site for your niche.
• Ask an Expert type site for your niche
• How to guide type site for your niche

If you are in a very competitive and saturated niche, creating a network of mini sites is one of your best options to dominate that niche.

Remember to host these sites on different web hosting companies or different C-Class IP's. If you have a large network all cross-linking eachother, your links might get devalued by google.

Offering free products & services might help you generate great traffic.

Here are a few examples before you get too creative :)

• A blog design website offering FREE design service to a few very famous bloggers and getting free (very positive) reviews from them, and earning hundreds of new clients.
• Small niche ecommerce site sending a nice gift basket to a national magazine's editor with a nice note in it, and getting an interview with this national magazine which normally would be impossible to get for almost free (usually high PR agency fees, etc.)

Just be creative and you will find hundreds of methods related to your site to offer something in very low value to get high exposure to the market.

You can run many types of contest. Offer a gift or free service, and try to get as much media attention as possible.

Remember to run a press release about your contest.

Even though well known shopping comparisons are paid services (buy.com, shop.com, nextag.com), there are some quality free comparison shopping sites.

Sumbit your site, or add your data feed, and start getting free traffic:

• Shop Wiki
• Google Base (Products come up at organic search results also)
• TheFind (sends great FREE traffic)

Some say social shopping will be the future of online shopping. There are some nice social shopping sites where users can create shopping lists, wish lists, favorite lists, etc.

Do not miss the social trend and start adding your products/services to social shopping sites. Here are some good social shopping sites to start with:

• Kaboodle
• ThisNext
• Stylehive
• Stylefeeder

We have listed 20 very important methods of bringin totally FREE traffic and backlinks to your sites.

Internet marketing doesn't have any secrets, it just needs hard work and dedication.

If you have a new site, start doing these 20 tips ASAP. You will face increasing traffic and revenues shortly.

Most of these 20 internet marketing techniques will also increase your organic search engine rankings in the long run.

Start the hard work, and share your methods, tips, experiences and internet marketing ideas at the comments section below.