By Terry Dean

It now costs $299 to even get Yahoo to look at your page...and that doesn't even guarantee a listing.

Other search engines are beginning to follow suit. Overture started a revolution in search engine positioning by charging per clickthrough.

Other majors are either partnering up with them or they're going to at least a partial Pay-Per-Click positioning system. Hundreds of small PPC's are growing up...

Free classified ads don't work. Free-For-All Link pages haven't worked for years. Free banner advertising networks take more traffic away from your site than they provide. Free traffic networking systems (which work like Multi-Level programs) produce very untargeted traffic.

Free advertising appears to be dying a horrible death online...

Or is it?

The truth is that the death of free advertising has been greatly exaggerated.

Some of the very best forms of advertising are still free...and will continue to be free for years to come.

Even though I have a pretty nice sized ad budget now, a good percentage of my income still occurs through good old free advertising. I average over 1,000 unique visitors a day to http://www.bizpromo.com without spending a single penny for them.

Free advertising is alive and well online.

It's just not handed to you on a silver platter anymore.

You can't just "sign-up" somewhere and expect to receive thousands of free visitors running to your site begging to buy your products. You have to work at "free" advertising because every type of advertising will cost you something.

Advertising costs you time or money. You can pay for an ezine ad with your money, or you can work to find ezine publishers who will joint venture with you (which costs you time).

Here is one of my favorite forms of free advertising still working wonders in 2002...and for years to come:

1. Articles

You've probably heard this before, but I'm going to repeat it here. Creating short 500 to 1,000 word articles can easily be one of your most powerful forms of free advertising online. It doesn't just get used in one way. It can be used to build your business in multiple ways.

Any free information I create is used for five different purposes:

- Published in my free ezine Web Gold
- Posted to My Web Site for Search Engine Listings
- Submitted As Articles to Other Ezines
- Offered as Content on Web Sites
- Compiled into Free eBooks

The most important skill you can learn in any type of online marketing is writing. You can use it to drive traffic to your site, make sales when they get there, and create backend email follow-up systems.

You can't search the web for Internet marketing very long before my name starts to come up. I'm everywhere...and a lot of that simply has to do with my writing. I search the web sometimes and see my ugly mug pop up on someone else's web page.

A webmaster I've never heard of has posted a directory of my articles on their site...every one of the articles linking back to me and generating free traffic.

Some people don't believe in giving away anything free...Well, I have to disagree. My reputation, my web sites, and my traffic has been built upon the principle of giving value first...and then making the sale.

I could stop advertising and writing TODAY and still will generate well over 50% of my traffic for years to come...all because of free articles.

What happens if you stop advertising today?