Free is good. Free is great because it doesn't cost anything. That's probably why so many marketers have a tendency to gravitate towards free methods of promoting their site. It makes perfect sense.However, what many Internet marketers forget is that nothing is free -- absolutely nothing. It's a simple, fundamental concept of economics: "There are no free lunches." If you spend time implementing a free marketing method, you've still incurred a cost: your time.
And many people forget that time is your most precious resource; you only get so much of it no matter what you do. So, consider that, depending on what your time is worth to you in dollars, it may be more "expensive" for you to use free marketing yourself than to pay someone else (or another company) to market for you.
Furthermore, remember that you can make your time more valuable by using it only for your most important business activities and therefore making your business more profitable -- yet another reason to pay for marketing and let someone else take care of it for you.
That said, let me recommend a few popular "paid" marketing services. You might be surprised at how much money you "save."
Goto.com - It's a pay-for-rank search engine. Basically, you set up an account and you place a bid on certain keywords. When someone searches for one of those keywords, your site shows up in
listings ranked based on how much you bid in relation to other people who bid for keywords. You pay only when someone clicks on link to your site, not when it listing is shown. Visit GoTo.com
Yahoo.com - In case you don't know, a listing in Yahoo's directory can bring you hundreds of visitors per day. It used to be free to request inclusion in Yahoo's directory, but now they've moved to a fee-based system for businesses. The cost to submit your site to Yahoo for review is $195, no small sum for a small business, but it's dirt cheap when you consider how much traffic a listing can bring you. Visit Yahoo and how to suggest a site to Yahoo.
