There are various ways for internet marketers to brand themselves and get their site & services recognised. Some of the main ways to do this, include advertising via: banner ads, search engine marketing, article marketing, email marketing and traffic exchanges.

As an internet marketer, we are one of the very, very many out there. How then do we ensure that our sites & services are the ones that are "seen" by the customers we are targeting? Every internet marketer wants to succeed, that's one load of competition! The answer to this question lies in learning how to use the various traffic exchange services that are available to us. This can leverage highly increased branding and income. The key here, then is in knowing which button(s) to press, (and how & when to press them). The information below aims to address some of these issues:

1. Press releases

Press releases are a really good way to get your service recognised. There are more than 700,000 media contacts on the world wide web. Utilising this option can actually allow you to reach many areas of the market you are targeting, including your competition. This can be useful in terms of increasing the possibility of making partnerships. Joint Ventures are a mode of exchange that is becoming increasingly popular in internet marketing recently. This is uesful if you already have a list of potential clients as a joint venture will enable you to promote another marketers product to your list whilst they promote your product to theirs.

2. Search engine marketing with Article Ads

There are a couple of strands to consider here, obviously, the more engaging your advertisement is, the more appealing it will be to possible customers. The more high - quality, original keywords and relevant text it has, the more appealing it will be to search engines. Article-ads are like theatrical banners, as such they can drive quality, targeted traffic to your website. If you have not used this type of ad before, You may want to seek professional help for this. Remember to succeed in the internet marketing industry, you need targeted traffic and if you are going to pay for advertising, you want to ensure that the ads you put out have either been tried and tested in the free ads services by yourself, or you may decide that you need professional help to get the copy just right to maximise your returns.

3. Search engine registration

One of the best ways to generate free, targeted traffic to your site is to get listed in all of the major search engines. In submitting your web site to various search engine directories, you will help to maximise your chance of gaining traffic. This works along the same lines as being listed in a telephone directory. Problem is that the web is so much bigger than the local phone book! The primary databases of major internet marketing companies can be located in over 1000 additional search engines, many of which use the larger ones like Dmoz, Google, Yahoo & MSN to gather their results. There are different views on the best way to achieve rankings with the larger search engines but one of the most constant is in having your site listed in Dmoz. If you can get this huge human edited directory to accept your site then many of the search engines will see it as being one which provides relevant, useful information and this is a sure fire way to get higher rankings for your keywords when customers are searching. It can be difficult to get commercial sites listed in Dmoz so you may want to establish a small but very informative site that provides the kind of information that Dmoz will see as beneficial, and then link that site to your main services one. This takes time but is a long term benefit that is worth investing in for any site.

4. Click Exposure

The premise behind this is that With just one click of a button, people will be directed to your website. Basically you sign up for Keyword advertising, and your banner will pop up on other user’s screens or websites. This is fine if they do not have pop-up killers, (which of course most surfers do invest in these days). It can still have some benefit but you need to really research the company you are planning to buy from and the steps that they take to deliver your traffic.

Another form of this is to invest in pay per click advertising, where your ad will show alongside, or above the organic search results for the keywords you buy. If your ad is appealing enough, this can generate a great source of targeted traffic to your site. Pay per Click again needs a lot of testing to ensure that the traffic you buy generates enough sales to make the cost worthwhile. There are many companies who offer this form of traffic generation these days and it may be as well to test your ads on some of the cheaper ones before you progress to the big boys.

5. Email Advertising

This can be the safest, quickest and most cost-effective advertising procedure. Email messages that are sent directly to a double opt-in email database can generate huge amounts of targeted traffic for your site. It is most effective if you have your own double opt-in list of clients that you have built a relationship with. However, some marketers have a lot of success with alternatives such as credit based safelists, where people have opted in to receive emails from others in return for sending their own and credits are earned for opening the emails. The popularity & recognition of your internet marketing business will increase with each click through that you achieve, so again the aim is to make your email ad appealing enough to get people to visit your site and sign up to your own list, or buy something from you.

6. Web-site Linking

8. Traffic Exchanges

If you have a limited budget available for advertising your site, it is advisable to sign up to as many free advertising services as possible and use these to get your ads tweaked to the point where they are generating traffic for you before you invest in buying services. Although this is time intensive (and you do need to invest time to make this work for you), at least it will enable you to save up your advertising budget and then invest it in the services which are already proving to work for you. It also gives you the benefit of testing which ads are working before you pay out for sending them. Remember when you sign up to a double opt-in safelist that the email address you use will receive a lot of emails and needs to be able to cope with this volume. Good luck with your advertising!