Free Advertising Free-For-All

By Arch Stanton

Advertising is very expensive. In some companies it can be a major percentage of the annual budget. For entrepreneur business owners or small business, it can be the make or break point for success or failure. At some point, everyone has to find the correct amount of money to spend to market their product.

We have all heard or seen it before. Advertising in front of large markets can cost millions of dollars for just seconds of time. A good example of that is the Super Bowl. Advertisers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per second and can easily spend one or multiple years of their advertising budget on one 30 second ad.

If only there were ways to get cheaper advertising or dare I say it, Free Advertising. Well, their is, you just have to look for it and get creative. Especially with the Internet, webmasters have become very savvy in their plight of the challenge to get their websites listed higher in the search engine listings.

This is where you can use your skills of the old fashioned barter system. Before money, trading items was a way to exchange goods and services in the world. In our global economy and on the Internet, trading small favors is a good way to get free advertising if you find a website that is willing to wheel and deal outside the box of that classic exchange of coal, the all mighty dollar.

Yes, it appears after years and years of research, it has been determined that money doesn't grow on trees. Well, not that we can find. Apples and oranges and pairs, yes. But dollar bill trees seem to be as obscure as the Loch Ness Monster. But, I digress. Lets get back to the point. If you have to get advertising and you don't have much money or a budget for it, then you simply need to find an entity that also has a need and wheel and deal.

For example, recently I visited an Investments company website. I saw a link at the bottom of their homepage named Free Advertising. They would allow you to write a short few paragraphs of text about your company of related product to theirs, and they would post it on their website. Simple. So, I looked around for how much they were charging for this service. I search and searched and finally I realized it truly was free advertising when I read their message that the cost was zero.

That's correct, zero. No charge. So, I'm thinking, ok, now I know there is not Free Advertising so there must be something that they want. Yes, I found it. They had a message that read, you may post a few paragraphs about your company on our site for no cost other than a link from your site to our homepage. And that was it. One simple link from your website to theirs and you can have free advertising.

It was a good idea. Because I realized that the Search Engines would scan their page and my Free Ad on their site would show up in the listings and become a link of its own. And, it only cost me a link to their site and more importantly, it cost zero dollars. No money out of my pocket. Wow, actual free advertising!

One company I found doing this type of Free Advertising was EQlibrium Investments and they had a page named Free-Advertising.