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Advertising on a Shoestring Budget When You Can't Afford the

by: Glenn Haertlein

The best way to make money with your website, no matter what the business, is to get it noticed. To get it noticed, you need to advertise. But how do you do that when you're on a shoestring budget that's so tight you really can't afford the shoestring, let alone the shoe you took it off of? Well, there are three things you can do that won't cost you a dime. And you can get started with them today.

First, get yourself signed up for several hits-for-clicks sites. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, a 'hits-for-clicks' site is a site from which you surf the net and get points for viewing websites. In return for surfing, you get points. You use those points to get exposure for your site(s). Most hits-for-clicks have free signups and most will let you enter up to three (sometimes five) URLs into their system. Here are some hits-for-clicks sites I use:

Fontoon (http://www.fontoon.com/?refid=3446)
StartXchange (http://www.startxchange.com/index.php?referrer=htack210)
TrafficG (http://trafficg.com/index.php?member=htack210)
Profit Charger hits (http://profitchargerhits.com/www.profitchargerhits.com/?refid=10717)
Traffic Pods (http://www.trafficpods.com/index.jsp?ref=htack210)
MyTrafficStorm (http://www.mytrafficstorm.com/?ref=385)
Traffic Swarm (http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?329064)
SurfMaster Club (http://www.webideas4u.com/team/htack210/smcp1.shtml)

Second, you need to get yourself a good browser that allows you to do tabbed browsing. What's a tabbed browser? I'm glad you asked! A tabbed browser, simply put, is a browser that lets you browse several sites at once using tabs instead of separate windows. To get the most out hits-for-clicks sites you need to surf from the hits-for-clicks site's start page. The more you surf, the more points you get. The more points you get, the more exposure you get. You could surf from each one of your hits-for-clicks sites one at a time, but you'll make better headway surfing from as many of them as you can at once. Now imagine how cumbersome it would be to have each of the above sites open in a separate window! Having each site open in a separate tab in the same browser window is much more convenient because then you can move from tab to tab and surf several sites at once.

"What are some good tabbed browsers?" you ask. Well, one that comes immediately to mind is Netscape 7.x. It has tabbed browsing built in. All you do is open one site, hit CTRL+T (on the PC) or COMMAND+T (on the Apple), open another tab, open another site, and so on and so on. Then, all you need to do is tab between the sites all in the same window. Another tabbed web browser that comes to mind is CrazyBrowser available at crazybrowser.com (where else?). Crazy Browser works in much the same way as Netscape 7.x and allows you to open whole groups at once. So, if you organize your hits-for-clicks sites in one folder under Crazy Browser, you can opt to open all the links at once and Crazy Broswer will open each one in a separate tab.

Okay, so now you're surfing! You're gaining points and building exposure for your site. That's great! But guess what? It's still not enough. There's one more thing you need to do in order to get the most bang for your click.

Third, you need to build your hits-for-clicks downlines in order to get more points for your clicks. Hits-for-clicks sites thrive on getting more people to sign on. It's how they make their living. One way they do this is through referrals. As an incentive for their current customers to get them more customers, hits-for-clicks sites often give extra points for referrals. "How am I supposed to do that," you ask, "when I'm already clicking my fingers to the bone?" That's where free rotators come in.

A rotator is a web device that let's you put several URLs in one place. The rotator then takes those URLs and rotates them. In other words, when the user happens upon your rotator address, he or she will see one of several sites you have entered. Let me illustrate. Let's say I have a free web rotator that I signed up for at pageswirl. I log in and I put in several sites:
http://gman.167aday.com
http://solutions.juvio210.com
http://www.juvio210.com
http://pageswirl.com/?aff=htack210

When the user goes to my rotator site, he or she will see one of these sites. They will come up at random and I can weight the sites. In other words, I can cause one site to be seen more often than the others.

"Okay. So how does that help me?" you ask. With a free rotator, you can input the referral links for your hits-for-clicks sites along with the main site you're using to promote your business. Enter the free rotator URL into your hits-for-clicks sites. Make sure that your particular hits-for-clicks allows the use of rotators. Many do. Some do not. And some only accept rotators from certain providers. (For example, Profit Charger Hits only accepts Pageswirl rotators.) With the free rotator installed, you're getting referrals, building your clicks-for-hits downline, gaining more browsing points, and getting more exposure for your site. And what's nice about all of this is that you don't have to pay a dime!

When it comes right down to it, the sites that advertise the most, get the most hits and have the potential to make the most money. And with hits-for-clicks sites even people with little or no advertising budget can get the word out. So why are you still here? Get out there and start surfing!

About the Author

Glenn Haertlein is the webmaster of Everyman's Computer Page (www.juvio210.com), a history teacher and a freelance writer.