Like many want-to-be entrepreneurs, when I started marketing on the Internet years back I wasted valuable time, money and motivational energy because of some misconceptions. Let me explain this further.

Most people start a home based business with a limited budget. Primarily for that reason they need to find inexpensive or free advertising methods. I did the same. This is a good way to begin, but the problem comes when you assume that spending more money on advertising will increase your sales. Business online or offline just does not usually pay off on that kind of assumption.

Paid advertising may increase your traffic flow to your web site without increasing your sales and therefore your profits. So instead of increasing revenues, you might dramatically increase your expenses, which in turn means a higher sales ratio is needed to pay for the higher expenditures (i.e. a lower ROI).

It would be much easier if you could assume that paid advertising meant higher quality traffic to your web site. Sadly this is not always the case. There are reputable Internet companies who work hard to achieve quality website traffic and marketing leads for their customers. They are just hard to find.

So when does it make good business sense to use paid advertising? Free advertising methods such as publishing keyword rich articles can take a long time to build consistent traffic to your top affiliate programs. The traffic you do generate can be higher in quality because it may be more genuinely opt-in. Paid traffic can be useful when you need to get the word out on a product or business opportunity quickly and your opt-in list is too small. And some forms of advertising are just not available free.

A word to the wise: Make sure your weekly or monthly budget has a firm limit on the amount you want to spend on advertising. You can also budget your time resources to be spent on free advertising methods which are often more labor intensive. When you are ready to invest some money on leads for your top affiliate programs, match the method to the result you want to achieve and then check out a variety of sellers. If their “help” or “support” pages do not tell you, ask them how they obtain their traffic and if you don’t like the response then move on.

The only guarantee about online advertising is that if you do nothing at all you might as well start buying lottery tickets – you will get rich faster! Always do something, whether it is submission to search engines, writing articles, publishing ezines, blogging, or tweeting.

Should you pay for advertising? When you have money in your budget and you have done your homework then give it a try. Track your results by the money you earn with your top affiliate programs and you will soon know whether it pays for you. 

About the Author: Craig Friesen is CEO of  TopAffiliateProgramsMakeMoney.com where he provides creative resource articles and reviews online business ideas and top affiliate programs. Craig’s most popular business opportunity recommendation is the Plug-in Profit Site where you can get your own money-making website set up in 24 hours!