Free Online Advertising For Your Content

There are many ways of driving traffic to your work online. Promotion is the use of backlinking, SEO, social networking and other methods to achieve this. Advertising generally means paid placements that leads targetted traffic to your site. Payment can be measured on a Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression basis.

Despite much use of the word “free” – such as in the title of this article – nothing is truely free on the internet. Everyone is trying to make money and any enterprise unsuccessful at this doesn’t last long. What varies is the way payment is made. As long as the average user contributes something of value a site will be profitable. Some user will not contribute anything and some will contribute a lot. This fact has led to the introduction of a new type of site that offers advertising without requiring a monetary investment.

This new type of site uses links as the currency. For any site you wish to link to in your content, regardless of whether it is an internal or external link, you create a customized link.

This link still sends your reader to their desired destination but it also credits you with a point that is used to ‘pay’ for your ads to be displayed. As links can be placed anywhere and there is no limit to the amount of links you place, it is easy to keep a healthy balance and your own ads displayed on the network.

This type of program is similar to Pay Per Click advertising. It is best suited to sites that directly sell a product or are affiliate sites. It could be used to promote articles that target adsense earnings but this would probably be a less effective use of resources.

If you have any online content that has non-revenue earning links clicked on a regular basis, you can use these to allow the ongoing promotion of other sites you control. I am using a couple of my hubs on a related topic that have frequent links clicked between them as a great source of "revenue". They are generating more advertising points than I am currently using so I am getting completely free promotion of a couple of my affiliate sites that needed a boost.

Hubbers should note that the generated links will counts as coming from the one website so overuse will result in your hubs being flagged as overly promotional by the hubpages algorithm.

 The service is "Freemium" - that is, you receive a certain level of access for free and can pay for add-on upgrades. A free account is credited with 1000 points worth 100 ad impressions so is not to be laughed at.

It is a different form of promotion but can be run simultaneously with your usual SEO and backlinking practices.

If you are interested you can sign up here and give it a go.

Please add your thoughts, comments and experiences below.