Your biggest asset when becoming an internet marketer is to know how to get free targeted traffic to your web sites. It doesn't matter how many web sites you're promoting. Your primary goal should be to keep the cost down. It feels great to have monthly sales well into the thousands, but it also can ruin your day when you realize that most of this money goes right back into your advertising costs.

Yes, there's a rule that you need to reinvest 75% of your profit into advertising and marketing. I like this rule, but it also needs to be timely constraint. I think this rule is good for your first 3-6 months of business. After this you should be able to pull back the cost for advertising without impacting your income streams.

My philosophy in internet marketing is that if you have to spend a lot of money to keep a positive cash flow, the competition is probably too intense for this market segment. You will be better of to research a new niche market.

On the topic of free advertising, there are many free classified ad providers, but only a few sites offer truly free advertising. They all want something in return, there's no webmaster out there who promotes your stuff for free just because he/she feels like it today. One way to get free advertising is to tap into a startup company. There are hundreds of web sites that want to be the next Google. To attract new customers they give away free pay per click credits. Sometimes up to $100 worth of clicks.

Another way to receive free quality advertising is to give these webmasters what they want. In most cases it's a link from your website to their website. This can be a problem, especially if you want to keep your home page clean from too many flashy banners.

In this case try to figure out of the link back is required to be on your home page or any page from your website. If there's no requirement to have the link on your homepage, create a collection web page that is not necessarily part of your whole web site and put link back from this site. To keep the flow put a tiny link from your home page to this page and you're done.

Don't even think about to put the link on your web page and a few days later you will remove it. These days the link back verification is done automatically and they will check from time to time if you keep your promise or not. Your free ride will suddenly stop and you will gain a reputation as cheater.

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