When you don’t have any cash to spare, but still want to make your way in the net, there are a handful of recourses you can use to spread your links around. The huge advantage of free services of course, is that they cost you nothing to use and so any gains you make is all profit.

• Forums. There’s no better place on the Internet to strut your stuff or ask for help. They’re the internet equivalent of wandering down to the local pub and having a few pints. You never know who you’re gonna bump into, and just how useful those contacts will be. Some of the more useful forums to join are Bloggeries, Digital Point (beware of shifty people) and anything relative to what you’re writing. Smaller communities are often better quality. Larger communities, like larger cities, end up attracting scumbags and scammers.
• Social Networks are a highly regarded way of getting your pages indexed in google, and getting the attention of the casual web surfer. They are, however, difficult to use effectively and you get better results when someone happens to submit your writings without you begging for it or asking for an exchange. Stumbleupon is a personal favourite, other bloggers fantasie about reaching the front page of digg. I suppose it gives them a warm little feeling inside, but digg doesn’t appeal as much to me.
• Blog Engage is a social network that is similar to digg, but deserves a special mention for itself because it is just for blog posts, and nothing more. That shows a lot of potential for bloggers to promote themselves without competing with youtube videos and news articles.
• Entrecard. The infamous Entrecard is free, but if you’re going to get anything out of it you have to put into it.
• Search Engines are the holy grail of free traffic. They bring you the people who are actually, actively searching for you. Unfortunately, like Monty Python’s grail, you’ll find yourself going through al sorts of jokes, antics and quests to gain this source of traffic.
• Directories. They may help you with your keywords, and quality is more important that quantity, but don’t expect many people to find you thorugh them. Normal people search the search engines to find what they’re looking for, after all.
• Statcounters, including statcounter.com itself and google analytics, are invaluable free tools if you want to know how your place in the net is being used. There are a multitude of them out there, but the two mentioned above are free and will work for any type of site. Statcounter is best for low levels of traffic, which Google Analytics is more use for larger sites.

And in the spirit of free things, I have decided to offer free blog reviews and ctitiques to help the new fellows on the block get some feedback on how they’re going. All you’ve got to do is ask HERE (<– click)

If you’re not doing something you genuinely believe in, then you’re never going to make the best choices about it. You may be trotting along just fine, but you won’t actually be getting anywhere. You’ll be thinking of fast, short term, patch up solutions and not your long term benefit, to the detriment of your websites and your state of mind.

In the real world, take the foolish practice if winter shearing as an example. Wool is worth more in Winter because everyone is cold and wants more woolly jumpers and socks to keep nice and warm. Wool is normally shorn around Summer, when nobody wants woolly jumpers and the sheep are glad to lose their thick fleece.

There are those out there, who probably don’t like their Merino’s terribly much, that think “Why don’t I shear these darn sheep in winter, get more money for the wool, and the ewes will be cold so they’ll seek out shelter for their newborn lambs. More money and more lambs means more profit!”

They forget to realize that the now freezing cold ewes have been stressed by this decision, and now have less energy to put into milk, so lambs are more likely to die. Less lambs means less sheep in the future. So ultimately, it’s a stupid decision to make.

The same applies to online endeavors. If you constantly scrabble for quick bucks, then you will lose some of your credibility, and potentially many or your repeat business. Pay-Per-Play advertisements which play automatically, and PayPerPost sponsored posts cheapen your website and aren’t long term strategies when it comes to increasing visitors and earning a quid on line.

You have to do what’s right by your website and your visitors, and they’ll do what’s right by you in return.