6 Free Ways To Make Money Online

Regardless of whether you are operating an online or offline business, it's important that you reduce your costs, thereby increasing your profits. Although advertising is an investment in your business and not an expense (if done correctly), you should be on the lookout for free methods of marketing, and free ways to make money online.

Once the sales start to roll in, you can then invest some of your profits into paid methods of advertising. But let's focus on some of the free methods for now.

1. Article marketing is probably the most effective free way to make money online (and my favourite). Writing articles does take up a lot of time, but I feel that there's nothing more satisfying than creating quality content that can help people solve a problem.

Once you submit your article to the article directories, you will begin to get targeted traffic from people that are interested in what you have to say. Web masters and ezine publishers will also pick up your article to use on their site or in their newsletter, which will give you even greater free exposure. Don't forget to research keywords and place them in your article. This will enable your article to rank well in the search engines (more free traffic).

2. Blogging is also an excellent way to drive free traffic to your web site. You can set up a blog for free, add regular content, link to your main site, and promote affiliate products. Make sure that you "ping" your blog every time you add content. This will alert the blog directories that you have made a new post, which will bring in the traffic. The search engines love blogs because of the fresh, regular content. So if you are consistent with this method, you will be getting picked up by the search engines more and more.

3. SEO (search engine optimization) is simply the on-page and off-page optimization of a web site. You optimize the content on your site by placing well-researched keyword phrases that target the right audience. With off-page strategies, the idea is to get tons of back-links to your site (from article submitting and a linking campaign) so that you rank well in the search engines. If you can get on page 1 of the search results for your keywords, you will get massive amounts of free traffic.

4. Forum participation gives you the opportunity to ask questions, learn, and also to help other people. If you have a link to your web site in your signature file, not only does this give you back-links to your site, but it also allows people to click through to your site. Make sure that you contribute useful information, rather than blatant advertising.

5. Linking is a campaign of creating links pointing back to your site. One-way links are much better than reciprocal links in terms of ranking with the search engines. So apart from submitting articles with your link in it, you can submit your URL to link directories either manually or with submitter services or software. Or you can approach high-traffic web sites that are related to your niche and ask if they will link to you. The benefit to them is that they have useful content and links to offer their customers. So it's win-win for both of your businesses.

6. Traffic Exchange sites allow you to surf members' web sites in exchange for advertising credits. These credits give you views or visitors to your site. The best use of traffic exchanges is to promote your own compelling lead-capture page to get opt-in subscribers. If your page is short and attention-grabbing, you will get more people signing up to your offer, rather than losing them with a long sales page. Once you build your list, you can follow up until you make the sale, and then consolidate that with back-end sales.

Free ways to make money online usually involve more time and effort. But if you work these methods on a consistent basis, the long term results are often better than the paid methods. And you'll also increase your bottom-line profits by reducing your advertising costs.