Online advertising can be costly; however, there are quite a few techniques for online advertising that are absolutely free. While there may be some upfront costs for the preparation of online advertising materials (unless you prepare them yourself), the fact that there are no monthly fees or cost-per-click fees associated can save you tons of precious dollars that you would normally spend on online advertising. The two most highly productive online advertising techniques that don't cost anything are obtaining an organic search engine listing and distributing expert articles with the rights to republish the articles. Other low-to-no cost online advertising options include link exchanges, banner exchanges and participation in online forums.

Organic placement in the search engines is a form of online advertising that doesn't cost you anything except perhaps the upfront costs of search engine optimization. To maintain the position in the search results, you need to continually monitor your search engine advertising results, but most likely you can maintain the position yourself rather than paying ongoing fees.

Participating in online forums about online advertising is an excellent way to get new ideas for your online advertising and for new search engine optimization techniques that are effective as the search engines change their ranking rules. Such networking activities keep you in touch with internet business gurus who share their challenges and strategies opening up new avenues for obtaining expertise rather than relying solely on trial and error.

Another online advertising technique that is virtually free and extremely effective is distribution of expert articles about the industry for which you provide products or services. When using expert articles for the purpose of online advertising, you produce articles that have valuable content and include a resource box that directs readers to your website for more information or related products and services. This method of online advertising is exceptional for promoting your business or for promoting affiliate products and services.

There are a couple of advantages to using expert articles for online advertising. First, other websites will publish your article so you will benefit from their web traffic which will be driven to your website increasing your own website traffic. Second, link popularity, the number of links from other websites to yours, is a factor in search engine optimization that is considered by most search engines when ranking your website in their search results. Because link relevance is also important to search engine optimization, it is best if you can get your expert articles published on websites whose topics are related to yours.

The question then becomes, how do you get your expert articles republished? There are a couple of ways to go about that. First, you can contact relevant websites by phone or by email with a free content offer. Successful website operators know the value of content for their websites and if your expert articles are of a high quality and provide beneficial information for their target audience, they will most likely be pleased to republish them. When they publish your articles, you effectively get free online advertising. The second technique for distributing your expert articles is to post them on free content sites or in industry-related forums.

The Warrior Forum at warriorforum.com/forum is an online advertising related forum that has discussion boards that are useful for networking with other online advertisers and even for building joint ventures. They also have a free content section, called the Warrior Article Database, where you can post expert articles with the rights to republish. There are even links to free ebooks and a free online advertising section where you can post advertisements to be viewed by other forum members. There are a number of other forums online including industry-specific forums as well as free content websites that will make driving traffic through the use of free online advertising techniques easy.