What do you want for nuthin'? © 2002 by Dale Sexton

Sometimes you have to be willing to take trade offs or make sacrifices. I am using my experience as an example, and you may have a better way to achieve success I've been seeing.

I signed up for Tucats Ezine Ad Co-op to send free ads to a list of ezines accepting free ads. I knew what I was getting into because my newsletter is part of co-op.

http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?IM8301_coop

I knew I would be getting confirmation of subscriptions, solo ads, and monthly, weekly and twice weekly issues to my email address from over 100 newsletters and ezines. It is my trade off to getting my free ad out to over 500,000 readers.

Updates from Tucats Ad Co-op tell of people who have signed up to take advantage of free ads, then are mad about being spammed, or didn't realize they would get so much email. Keep in mind, when you sign up for something, you might want to do some reading first. You can't call it spam when you sign up for it.

You can get a free web based email address to use to sign up for multiple ezines, such as one at PageCrafters.net Free Email Service.

http://pagecrafters.net/services.html#mail

By doing this, you keep your personal or business address from being bombarded but two problems arise:

1) You have to constantly clean out mailbox, because some of ezines will drop you if your email address bounces.

2) You miss out on some good information by not reading ezines. Some of these ezines require you to read them as they contain ad code that must be used to get your weekly ads approved.

This is what I found that works best for me. I use OutLook, but OutLook Express and any other email client can be configured just as easily. Set up rules in OutLook or your favorite email client. In OutLook, go to tools, then rules. In most clients look for tools or options.

What you want to do is set your client up to filter words in subject or body of your emails. You can even filter by 'received from address'. Key words to filter may be 'newsletter', 'ezine' or 'issue'.

I've made a folder I call Mags (short for magazines) to place filtered ezines into. I now have option to read them later or look for ad codes when I'm ready to submit my free ads. Some of info I've collected is good stuff and I archive it for reference later.

All of newsletter and ezines you've just subscribed to offer at least one free ad. Most offer weekly ads. Drop newsletters you don't wish to continue receiving, but if you take one free ad, have enough netiquette to stay subscribed until your ad is shown. If you drop them before your ad is shown, it may never be shown.

There are a great many different locations where you can place ads on Internet. Literally, there are several hundreds of thousands of such FREE Ad sites, and you can find both FREE and Fee based online publications.

We have even set up a web site that links you to almost 12,000 of more popular sites that are available with almost 100 sites detailed individually to ease posting: http://emailexchange.org/freeads.html

But before you jump into posting ads online, especially if you opt to pay for an ad, you should establish a clear-cut plan to chart your responses.

The only way to chart your responses accurately is to "Key" all ads you place, whether online or in off-line publications.

Once upon a time, simplest manner to "Key" any ad was to write, Dept. No. 1234, or whatever number/letter combination you might want to use, and this allowed you to know from where you were receiving your responses.

Whether an ad is FREE or paid for, if you know if it is drawing responses then you can make informed decisions about continuing to place ads at those particular sites or publications.

Afterall, it does not make any sense to keep posting ads in sites or publications where you never receive responses. Such an effort is a complete waste of your valuable time.

Those sites that do work for you can then become focus of your online ad campaigns.

All it takes is a working "Key" chart.

For those of you that are spending monthly fees to receive web space, email aliases, etc., solution can be as easy as setting up individual email aliases for each account or each of your different ad sites or publications.