I started out doing mostly free advertising. After doing Internet marketing for several years I understand the importance of spending money on advertising as well.

I try to get a balance in my online advertising mix now that I have been an Internet marketer for several years. There are benefits to doing both paid advertising and free advertising as well!

Free advertising provides you with many long term traffic benefits.

1. Article marketing is great for this because your articles can be archived online and create backlinks that stay there for many years.

This is a good form of free advertising because you can write and submit your own articles. Anyone can become an article writer by mastering a handful of basic techniques.

2. Email marketing is another proven strategy for marketing online. As you build your list you can contact people via email and this does not cost you anything except the time to write the message.

You will spend around $20 a month for your autoresponder. Once you get a list of thousands of people your monthly cost may go up a little.

Another strategy that works well is to do ezine advertising. Many Internet marketers offer you a chance to promote to their large list of email subscribers. HBAds has a program where you can reach over 2 million opt in email subscribers via ezine advertising for less than $30.

Paid advertising is good for getting immediate traffic!

3. Pay per click advertising. This is the quickest way to take your targeted keyword phrases and get on page 1 of the top search engines.

Google AdWords dominates this form of advertising, but Yahoo Marketing has some excellent pricing and the quality of traffic is very good as well.

Payperclicksearchengines.com is a good source for learning about PPC advertising and finding some excellent buys.

4. Social media can be done with both free and paid advertising. Blogging is free to do.

Purchasing ads on Facebook is becoming a very popular Internet marketing strategy because of the millions of people who are on Facebook every day.

I like article video marketing. Article Video Robot is an easy way to develop a video from an article. You can even submit your video to numerous online shared video sites including YouTube.

You will have to determine how you are going to promote your products and services online. In the end you will want to get a balance of free and paid advertising to help achieve the best results for the money and time you are spending.