What you are about to read… could save you months, if not years trying to figure out for yourself what works and what doesn’t work with Internet Marketing.

I’ve been marketing on the Internet for years and part of that time was spent spinning my wheels trying to market using ineffective and inefficient methods. After reading this article, you’ll be able to avoid the mistakes I made and move on to methods that actually work.

Number 1: Reciprocal Link Exchanges

The concept of Reciprocal Link Exchanges is a very good one, but because of abuse its become a waste of time. For example, when you link to a third party website they in turn link to your site, being a win win situation for both parties. Now because of the Search Engines low regard for Reciprocal Links and high regard for one way links, what is now happening is that the Reciprocal Link partner is on many occasions removing your link weeks down the track in order to get a one way link at your expense.

Number 2: Traffic Exchanges

Traffic Exchanges are more of a gimmick than a marketing method. The way they work is that you view other web sites and are awarded credits that are used to get other people to view your web site. For example, say you surf for one hour and view 120 web sites this could give you 60 page views of your site.

The main problem is that they’re not actually visitors looking at your site, they tend to be other Internet Marketers using tabbed browsing to go from one site to the next every few seconds in order to gain page views for their own website; making the whole exercise pointless.

Number 3: Safe Lists

A Safe List is a group of people who agree to receive other member’s email promotions in exchange for being able to submit their own ads. You usually use two email addresses, one for administrative contact and the other a throw away email address where all the other member’s promotions are sent to. Almost no one reads the email promotions sent to the throw away email address but everyone wants to send their email to the Safe List.

So what we have is everyone trying to sell their products or services to members of the Safe List, but no one reading the emails, because they’re not interested in purchasing products or services, they’re only interested in marketing their own goods. Do you see how pointless this is?

Number 4: Save Your Money, Don’t Buy Article Spinners

There is Software on the market that helps you transform an existing article into an original article, usually by replacing key words or phrases to others of your choice.

For the most part this Article Spinner Software makes the articles appear to be written by someone from a non English speaking background. The article is not likely to be approved by the admin of Article Directories and even if they are approved, people are unlikely to follow the resource links for more information.

Do yourself a favour and manually write quality, original articles for submission to Article Directories and Ezine Publishers.

Number 5: Free Banner Exchanges

Free Banner Exchanges, as opposed to “Paid” Banner Exchanges are pretty much useless.

There are three main reasons for this, one is that free Banner Exchanges are almost always placed on untargeted websites not related to the Banner; the second problem is that they’re almost always placed “below the fold” and are not seen by Website visitors and the third reason is most network members of free Banner Exchanges tend to have no visitors to their websites which means almost no one will see your Banner Ad.

Number 6: Mass Submission Software

Submitting to hundreds or thousands of free Search Engines and Classified Sites can be very tempting, but if no one visits those obscure classifieds or search engines then you wont get any visitors to your Site. So don't bother with the Mass Submission Software and only concentrate on the high traffic sites, such as Craig’s List, Google, Yahoo and Msn.

Number 7: Only Make Legitimate Comments On Blogs, Guestbooks and Forums

This is similar to the point above, if you intend to promote your Site using Blogs, Guestbooks or Forums; avoid using the mass promotion software for these types of sites because all it will do is make you look like a spammer and your comments will quickly be deleted.