If Internet Marketing were a college major, in Lesson 1 of “Internet Marketing 101” you would be taught to give away free ebooks:

* As a promotion for your main product * As a bonus to enhance your product offering * As an incentive to build your email subscriber list

Anyone who’s into Internet Marketing is familiar with this fundamental technique. Practically every ebook you read teaches this.

I boldly declare that I disagree with this strategy! I know this goes against many of teachings of top marketers, but I say – don’t give away free ebooks - and I’ll tell you why…

Reason 1 Giving away ebooks written by someone else is like owning a candy store and offering everyone who comes into your store a free sample of candy from store across street. You essentially are promoting your competitor’s business for free.

Reason 2 If you’ve written a free promotional ebook, what incentive are you giving other marketers and publishers to promote it? Going back to reason 1, is it really in their best interest to distribute your product? You may not realize it, but you are losing money from what’s known as opportunity costs.

There are many ways to drum up business, but focus of this article is use of viral techniques you can use to create leads for your business.

Viral marketing comes in many shapes and sizes, but best way to get started with viral marketing fast is to use traffic exchanges.

The problem that people run into with traffic exchanges is they try to use some self-replicated website, thinking that if they just show page enough, someone will buy.

Sorry, but this doesn't work. I have used traffic exchanges for years, and I can tell you straight up that they work and work for one purpose only: LEAD GENERATION.

So, how do you use traffic exchanges for lead generation?

It's actually quite simple. All you have to do is set up a simple page like this with an opt-in box.

http://www.azwebcity.com/jimmyboyd/safelistpoppage.html