Millions of people around the world are desparate to find some extra money, to alleviate the effects of the global crisis. Many are turning to the internet to find that Pot of Gold

Thousands of people have done it and achieved freedom from money worries. So what is their secret? How do they get a steady stream of visitors to their website and how do they persuade them to click the “Buy Now” button? Probably the two most popular approaches are Google Adwords and Search Engine Optimisation.

Google Adwords carries millions of small ads every day, for every conceivable product or subject imaginable. So it must be the way to go, right? Sure, many people are making a good living from Adwords and a few are make a fortune. But, if you’ve tried it, then you’ll know it ain’t easy.

This is one of the most competitive (and dirty) markets around. First, you have to aquire a detailed knowledge of how this thing works, then you have to spend time constantly herpes testing and tweaking your ads and you have to be prepared to spend money before you find the right keywords and the most effective ads. You can set a daily limit to your spending but just twenty dollars a day will mop up 600 bucks in the first month.

Most popular keywords cost anything up to 2 or 3 dollars per click, so $20 won’t buy many clicks and, at an average conversion of two or three percent, you will not get many sales per day. Two more problems are likely to occur with an Adwords campaign.

There are only about eight slots for ads on each page of Google, so the competition for these slots, particularly on the first page of results, is very fierce and often very sneaky. Each of the eight “tenants” of those valuable places on Page 1 are striving to get to position one, which, on average, gets over 70% of the traffic on that page and the only way to do that is to push the others down. All the Adwords users on the second and third pages are also fighting to climb up the greasy pole.

It is now possible to buy software that will allow you to spy on details of competitors’ campaigns and to see what keywords they are using and even what they are paying for each keyword, so you can potentially bid slightly higher and gain a higher position. If you manage to get a respectable position on Page 1 or 2, you can bet that some of your competition will be using these tricks against you. Even if you have gained a comfortable position on Page 1 of Google, it is a constant struggle to maintain that position.

There is an alternative approach to running a successful Google Adwords campaign. You can employ a specialist team of experts, with the experience and the time to do the whole thing for you. Unfortunately, you need to be in a position to spend a few thousand dollars a month to get them interested. That’s why I say that Google Adwords may be one of the most difficult ways to make money on line, certainly for a newcomer with little money to risk.

So how about Option Two? Search Engine Optimisation. Surely this is the ultimate solution!

You learn how to design and build a web page which meets all Google’s guidelines (and I’ll tell you what they are) and then you get on Page One, with a page which costs nothing to be there and wait for the money to roll in. How cool is that?

This is all you need to do. Find a suitable keyword phrase (preferably 4 or 5 phrases) which gets at least 100 searches a day and which does not have many heavy hitters in the competition. 1,000 searches a day is obviously much better but is likely to have strong, well-established competition.

Then you need to get a domain name which incorporates the main keyword or phrase and build your web page so that it includes the keywords in the Title of the page; in the Description of the page; in the URL of the page; in the Headline of the page and in the Anchor Text of all links to other websites. That’s not too difficult, is it?

Google measures the importance of web pages by noting how many other sites refer to the content on that page. If these other web sites are themselves considered to be important, these links are very valuable. The more important these other sites are, the more weight Google gives to these links. I can tell you, getting these links is hard work.

There are countless  ways to achieve  communications, some paid, some free. Needless to say, I favor using free methods although some people might have a different taste.

I deliberately love the feeling of seeing a commission coming in and knowing that 99.99% of the total amount of that compensation is pure profit.

So maybe I do not get 10,000 visits per day to my website, but each on I get is 100% without charge so I probably make more money than many PPC users who at the end of the day have to give up a big chunk of their revenue to Google AdWords.

But let us focus on the main issue I want to discuss in this article: what is the best way to build and  accomplish a flow of transactions… for no cost.

I know that you have probably heard about different theories and strategies designed to produce free customers, from social bookmarking to blog commenting etc, however, although several of the usually recognized free methods do offer a certain level of effectiveness, there is only one that can truly become both a huge short term and a long term source of transactions.

This often underestimated method is no other than article marketing, and I would say it is not only underestimated it is also underused because many people discard it because they tend to think that producing customers,  through article marketing is too hard, and they fail to realize a couple of important details:

1.- Article advertising provides you with the highest quality transactions,  money can buy, only you are getting it for free.

Indeed, think for a minute the level of conversions you can reach from a visitor driven to your site from an article. This is a person who already spent a few minutes reading your article and then he or she clicked through, meaning that up to some point he or she greatly agrees with you.

This level of predisposition can hardly be achieved through a two line ad, where the visitors often clicks through just out of curiosity and each time they do your bank account is getting hammered.

What this means is that you need a lot less article traffic than you need other sort of transactions in order to get the same number of conversions.

2.- Article marketing provides you with quality one way links to your site, which is the foundation of a higher rank in the search engines and ultimately a great source of free targeted traffic.

3.- All these effects are permanent, so the more you do, the more you will get both instantly and over time.

Now, certainly if you were to pursue the benefits of article marketing by writing 20 articles a day with the goal of building a stream of communications and 700 on way links within the year, I would certainly agree… this is too much work.

But, if you do the same by writing just one article per day, but submitting that article to 200 directories, then you would be creating around 7,000 independent sources of traffic to your site plus an equal number of one way links that would in turn help you suck a great deal of natural traffic from the search engines. Then you can really sit back and enjoy a real avalanche of communications with just a little work.

In order to do this however, you cannot go submitting your articles to each directory on by one, because you will be 1 month older by the time you are finished submitting just one article.

Alternately you should use an article submission software that can do this mechanical and painstaking job for you in one click, and save a ton of time and profit while you get the best of both worlds: massive immediate traffic and one way links to your site.