I'm Glen Jon the author of the following and thought I'd post this article, all though it has been published many times before on other sites.

There is no easy way out. If you don't want to spend any money online advertising, your alternative is to spend time with free ads. Either you spend money or spend time. I find it better when I don't have to spend money. Some folk think that spending money is better, however what happens to most folk who spend money is pathetic. They usually never make a profit. I regret to say this, but it is the stark internet truth of today. Of course there are the skilled few that out smart "the world of pay per click and news paper ads." The bare fact remains that the vast majority of people spending money on advertising usually go in a hole online.

The cost of everything now days is disproportionate to the actual average income. Why spend money on advertising only to break even or lose your shirt. Believe me it hurts when you lose your shirt. An actual 3% return is only reflected in 3% of who you reach. Setting up PPC (paid per click) ads only guarantees that someone will click and you have to pay. The people that click may or may not sign up for your list. The infamous 3% is merely a representation of people that actually got to read your sales material.

First you must get someone to click your PPC ad, then you must get someone to submit their email address, afterwards you must get the prospect to confirm. Then they may see your email that could get lost in a spam filter. Hence you have a scenario like sperm fertilizing an ovary. Only a very small percentage reach and make contact. Maybe not as difficult, but the picture is more like .001 percent of every click becomes a sale. Yeah that's right. don't let these so-called gurus fool you. No matter how intriguing you think your sales material is, today you can still lose your shirt on paid ads. This is why I promote free advertising.

Free advertising cost you nothing but time. You automatically make a profit upon any sale because of the fact that you spend no money.

The main thing you must control in free advertising is tracking. If you don't track, you have no way of knowing where to accentuate your effort. You don't want to waste time advertising something somewhere that bares no fruit. Tracking allows you to see exactly what is working and when it works. This way, you can "make the most of your time."

Thank you for opening our eyes to contemporary reality of the Internet. After reading your article I've realized that making money online is a challenge. But nevertheless there are some profitable opportunities:)

what types of free advertizing do you use? i would be interested to know what they are

There are many creative ways to increase traffic to your website. Creating content that is helpful and useful. Simply cobbling together information from another website will not generate traffic. If you hate the thought of generating content yourself, or your team is not writing-savvy, consider outsourcing this end of the task.

I suggest Article Marketing for that !

The easiest way to drive traffic for your site in free are through SEO, you can do either link building and social bookmarking.

Free ads are a total waste of time. Search engine optimization or social networking or article marketing yes those work. But free ads???

Investing your time is more affordable than investing your hard earned money. Free Adds is definitely a way to make money online but the amount you will make out of it will be very negligible. Instead of going out for Free Adds, you can use different SEO methods like Forum, Community Postings, Social Bookmarking, Twitter Updates and Article Submissions. This well help you more in catering potential customers online as compared to Free Ads....

I don't think there is any more efficient way to drive traffic than PPC. Many people shy away from PPC because they have been burned. But usually that's because they went about it all wrong.

I begin with a small test (budget $20) on Yahoo and see if I get conversions. If I do then I move over to Google and run several versions of my ad (do a split test). Then I select the best performer and run that against a new version. Do that a couple of times and then scale it all up.

Not every campaign will be successful, but if you test small you risk little and when you find a good converter you can make a bundle.

Article writing can be added later to help get organic traffic to your landing page. Time-consuming tasks like that are best done AFTER you know you have a proven winner or a product and campaign.

I agree with theartfuldodger's opinion about ppc. It will bring traffic to your site but you have to be very careful about how you start off. Testing the water is the best approach and staying on top and understanding all that's happening is the only way from getting badly burned. I've tried it a bit but I was never able to make it worth my while. I'm going to start all out with social marketing. I have been developing a good network and intend to use it for traffic. I have done article marketing forever and will continue to do that as it's something I enjoy doing.