Introduction
As everyone who is marketing on the internet knows, your business cannot possibly be successful if the people who should be buying your products or services dont know that it exists. It is therefore imperative that you promote and advertise you business as much as possible, and whilst using free advertising is the strategy of choice for most marketers (especially newbies), it is not necessarily the best one in every situation.
One reason why this is the case is the fact that, in reality, free promotional methods are not free at all. No matter how you promote your business, there is a price to pay in terms of either the money you are spending or the time that you are expending to market without shelling out any cash.
Another important factor to consider is that so-called free promotional tactics usually take some time to be effective. If you want to start pulling money into your business as quickly as possible, using advertising or promotional media that do not cost money is not going to be the best way of going about it.
As an example, many newbie online marketers see article marketing as an ideal way of promoting their business, and whilst writing and publishing articles is one very effective way of promoting an online business, it is not perfect. For most people who start to write articles to promote their business, it is the first serious writing that they have had to do for many years, so it is a time-consuming process (the time-cost element again).
Furthermore, once those articles are published online, it takes time for them to drive traffic to the site which the article writer is promoting too.
In short, whilst sending visitors to your website using strategies like article marketing that do not cost money work pretty well eventually, they do cost time and they dont work especially quickly either.