There are two ways you can get advertising on the Internet. One of them is to pay for it, and the other is to get it for free. They both offer valuable benefits depending on the goals of your website. Sometimes it can come down to your budget as well and you may not have as much money as you want to pay for your Internet advertising.

Here are 13 free Internet advertising ideas that are guaranteed to get traffic to your website.

1. Article marketing- write and submit articles with your website address in the resource box.

2. Blogging- post blog articles where people can come back and read them.

3. Discussion forums- join forums that are relative to the niche of your website and participate on regular basis.

4. Classified ads- search engines love classified ad directories and you can hyperlink keyword phrases relating to the theme of your website.

5. E-zine advertising- a highly read e-mail newsletter can provide you access to regular readers that you would not otherwise be able to reach.

6. Social networking- Facebook, Myspace, Direct Matches, and many more are popular places to hang out and meet potential friends and customers.

7. Social bookmarking- Stumbleupon, Digg, Propeller, and thousands of other social directories, offer excellent sources for traffic as well as search engine bait for your website or blog.

8. E-mail marketing- Building a targeted list of opt-in subscribers can pay you over and over for years to come.

9. Viral marketing- getting people to talk about your business and telling their friends is in excellent form of free advertising.

10. Free reports- you can write a report that offers useful information and give it away for free.

11. Your signature file- you do send thousands of e-mails every year so you might as well promote your business in those.

12. Joint ventures- you could swap e-mail messages to each others list to generate new subscribers and sales.

13. Business cards- Vistaprint offers 250 business cards for free where you can put your business website address on them.

This is 13 free Internet advertising ideas that cost you nothing more than your time to set them up and maintain them. Paid advertising is good in that it can generate immediate results, but it does come at a price.

Free advertising on the Internet is great because in many instances it can reward you with long term traffic that you could not get once you stop paying for it. Hopefully you will be able to use some, or all of these free Internet advertising ideas, to build your business online.