Many new marketers are taught about advertising their campaigns or products using Google Adwords - Pay Per Click. If you’re not familiar with PPC go to www.google.com and take a look at the ads on the right hand side of the page. If you click on an ad the person who listed it is charged a certain amount (anywhere from 1 cent to several dollars). But there are free options too.

Do you think outside the square? Or do you follow everyone else in their mainstream PPC ventures? Let’s face it, many marketers are starting out with very little money to fund their advertising. If marketers had loads of cash to spend, why would they be searching for the illustrious internet marketing fortunes. You see my point.

If you’re prepared to get creative with your internet marketing advertising then be prepared to learn about HTML. I see sales pages everyday saying “you don’t need a website, you don’t need to know HTML etc etc”. Do you think the “gurus” don’t have websites or know how to design a webpage? If you are new to HTML then go to www.nvu.com and download the free HTML software. Play around with it! Don’t be afraid, trust me it’s easy to use.

Now, there are many ways to advertise your site or products for free including classifieds, forums and banners. Lets look at a few.

1. Free Advertising Blog - I signed up and noticed the site is owned by Mike Filsaime (I wasn’t surprised). Even less surprising was the fact that there was an upsell to purchase unlimited advertising for $197. The free version allows you to post once a week and you can’t use graphics or HTML. But, I can tell you this site has a pagerank of 2 and over 18,000 members. So having a link to your blog or website is beneficial.

2.  US Free Ads - I’ve been a memberof USFreeads for a while but haven’t used it to it’s full potential. It’s popularity has really grown and this site won’t break the bank. Of course you can advertise free but I do recommend signing up to the premier service which is only $9.99 a month. You can post your ads in HTML with graphics and post whenever you like. They also have an additional service whereby you can pay an additional fee for a featured ad. Currently the cost is $11.96 for 2 months and your ad is displayed above all others. Some ads are getting hits in excess of 90,000. USfreead.com currently has a pagerank of 5 and an Alexa.com rating of 4976 which is very good.

3. Link Referral - I spent a bit of time playing around with this one and it’s best if you’ve got a site of your own to promote. The free signup will allow you access to the forum and obviously the more you post, the more you are recognised and generate traffic to your site. OK, I got a bit carried away and started helping people with their questions - I easily lost about 3 hours of my day! This site has a pagerank of 5 so if you can spare at least 1 hour a day you can build your reputation easily. There’s also a site listing page where you can rate other people’s sites and they rank yours - hence driving traffic to your site.

4. InetGiant - Another free classifieds service. Just looking at business opportunities there are over 50,000 post. This is a popular site indeed. A little less visual than USFreeads but there are a lot of posts none the less. They too have an upgrade service for featured ads but if free listing is what you’re after you can’t go wrong. Inetgiant also has a pagerank of 2.