Both types of links have their benefits and drawbacks. Which type you use will be based on your site and your traffic – and you should ideally test both types to see which performs best with your particular demographic.

In general, text ads tend to pull a lot more clicks than image ads, because people have become "banner blind." That means people have learned to ignore banners, because they know they're ads.

Text ads are a part of every website, so they're harder to ignore. This is one reason why AdSense is so successful. Of course, some sites could benefit from a few image ads. If your site is primarily text, you might be able to make it look more appealing through the use of a few graphical banners.

Choose attractive banners with a clear call-to-action, such as banners that clearly state, "Click here for ____!" New Internet users may not realize they can click graphics, so it's important for banners to have this kind of call-to-action.

Just be careful not to overdo the ads on your site. Two or three graphics per page is plenty. If you put more than this, you risk your site looking like a banner farm, and visitors may leave before they even have time to read any of your content.

Text links are generally more effective than banners. They can be blended in with your content and can look more like recommendations than ads. For some reason, people prefer to buy through recommendations rather than blatant ads, so text links can help you get a higher click-through ratio than you might get with banner ads.

Coding a text link is very simple. To create a text link on your site, you need to use the "a href" code. A simple text link code might look something like this:

Here's where the text you want hyperlinked will go.

Coding a banner link is only slightly more complex. You still use the "a href" code, but you also have to use the "img src" code along with it. It should look something like this:

So the first URL in that piece of code is the URL where you want your traffic to go. The second one is the URL where the image is being hosted on your server. This will make the image show up and when the user hovers his or her mouse over it, they'll see that it's clickable.

Make sure you test your links to be sure they're going to the right place. If you accidentally link to the wrong place, you could end up losing a lot of money in commissions or sales, so it's very important to make sure your links are in working order.

One major thing to consider is the FTC. Any earnings claims you make must be backed up with verifiable proof. This means you should keep extremely accurate records about your earnings, and you should be prepared to offer this information to the FTC if you're ever investigated.

Don't automatically assume you'll never be investigated. All it will take is a few buyers to complain that they didn't make the same $50,000 in two months that you claimed you made and you really might be investigated. Always have proof to back up any claims you make.

The screen shots themselves aren't enough, because the FTC knows those can be faked. You might have to provide affidavits, bank account records, and tax records. So make sure you really have all of your ducks in a row if you're going to offer screen shots or claims about your earnings.

Also, never use screenshots from someone else's account as proof of "the kind of money that can be made" with your technique. For one thing, it's not right to steal images from other people. You might get into trouble for theft of their intellectual property.

Plus, you have no way to prove that their screen shot isn't faked! That's a big gamble to take, because if you happen to be investigated, you'll have no way to back up your claims. You certainly can't tell the FTC, "Oh, but I stole this image from the website of James T. Guru. Go ask him about it!"

If you do use them, make sure you black out any customer data, like their names, email addresses, or credit card numbers. They deserve privacy. And be sure to black out any sales that didn't come directly from the technique you're teaching.

A lot of marketers seem to forget this, and the FTC might find your tactics dishonest if you fail to show only the money you earned specifically from the technique you're teaching. If you can back up your claims, and you have all of your banking records and tax documents in order, screen shots can be a great way to convince people to try your product.

When people see an account full of hundreds of payments, or they see a very large amount of money made in a relatively short period of time, they get eager. People who aren't earning much money desperately want to change that. They get dollar signs in their eyes, and they want to know how you did it.

Screen shots can help convince people that you might really be telling the truth when you claim you know how to make $50,000 in two months, or you can get a website onto the first page of Google for a competitive term, or you can get 10,000 visitors to a brand new website in just 30 days. Screen shots help make it more real.

Just remember – always keep records. Make sure your screen shots can be validated and verified. And be very careful to show accurate information. You don't want to give anyone any ammunition to use against you, especially the FTC.

Keeping accurate records and being very careful to show truthful information could be the difference between losing everything you own and staying out of trouble if you're ever investigated.

The first thing you should learn is that the headline is (almost) everything. If your headline is terrible – or worse – boring, most people won't even read the rest of your sales letter. A headline needs to be exciting, enticing, and intriguing.

It needs to grab the attention of your visitor quickly. Your headline might have shock value, ask a compelling question, or be the beginning of an extremely interesting story. "Six months ago, I was living on the streets of L.A., homeless after my Adjustable Rate Mortgage soared so high I couldn't make the mortgage payments, but now I'm living in a sky-rise apartment twenty stories up that I paid seven figures for…"

This makes the reader want to know more – how did this person go from being destitute to being wealthy? Good sales copy usually tells a story that the audience can connect with. Copy ideally shouldn't tell a fictional story, though.

You certainly don't want to run into any trouble with the FTC or an attorney general with something to prove. Good copy gives people a reason to keep reading. If you tell an interesting, compelling story that's somehow related to the product and how it will affect them, it will naturally appeal to your visitor.

Every single paragraph should lead into the next paragraph, drawing the reader further and further into the pitch. Consumers usually buy based on emotion, and then they justify their purchase with logic. They rarely buy based on logic alone.

They don't buy a product because of the features – they buy because of the benefits it will provide to them, the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) factor. If you're selling a car, you can't tell the buyer that it has Corinthian leather seats, ABS brakes, and a superior sound system.

You have to sell them on the fact that their neighbors and coworkers will be envious, girls will flock to them, and they'll feel like the king of the world whenever they drive it. Then they'll buy based on the fantasy you've just given them, and they'll use logic to justify their purchase later.

Within each online sales letter, you'll want to have a main headline, numerous sub-headlines sprinkled throughout, and aside form the written storyline, you'll want to add sections of benefit-driven bullet points that break up the monotonous text.

Don't forget the call to action at the end and a Post Script (PS) or two that sums up the order in case they're bona fide skimmers who hate to read. Go to some of your favorite sales pitch sites and emulate their style and approach. Bookmark it for your "swipe file," where you borrow ideas (not content) from the original author and use it on your own target audience.

Internet marketers have recognized the popularity of videos and regularly use video as a means of promoting their business and capturing more sales. What many Internet marketers don't know is that video sharing sites like Youtube are a very good way to perform market research.

The search function on Youtube is very similar to the search function contained within a normal search engine. However, the search feature used by Youtube is much less sophisticated than the complex algorithms used by the search engines. This is really great news for video marketers because it means you can easily dominate the Youtube search results.

Before you submit your video you'll need to do a little keyword research like you would if you were optimizing a page for the search engines. Once you have selected some keywords that you would like to target add some of the keywords to your video's tags and title.

If you have done everything right, your video should be able to pull in some really nice traffic to you website. But the feedback you get from channel viewers can actually be just as important as getting traffic. Market feedback is a classic direct marketing technique that is achieved in real life by using costly things like polls and surveys.

Your videos actually give you the chance to pull in tons of market feedback without spending a dime on polls or surveys. Market feedback allows to get a more precise glimpse of exactly what is that your target market wants and how much they are willing to pay for it. This information is priceless.

You will frequently receive video comments that tell you whether or not your video was interesting or helpful. Many times you will receive negative comments that will tell what you did wrong. Except for the comment spam that you will inevitable receive, almost all of the comments you receive will be useful to you.

The most ideal comments are those that request additional videos. These comments are your target market telling you exactly what they want! Offline businesses pay a small fortune for this kind of information. Youtube users readily offer up this kind of information to Internet marketers at no charge.

Online videos are a truly fantastic way to promote your business and get more traffic without spending a great deal of money. But remember that your video submissions can actually help you improve your existing marketing strategy and develop new product ideas.

You may be wondering what's so great about that, when thousands of other sites allow you to do the same thing. But Squidoo is unique. Not only do they make it incredibly easy to create a web page, ripe with graphics, content, and interactivity, but they allow – and even encourage you – to use the page to make money (very different from the marketing ban you face on MySpace).

A few other web 2.0 sites allow a minimal amount of marketing to take place, such as HubPages. But they're far stricter about the number of outgoing links you can have, and they have other rules, which make it harder to use the site for your own personal profiting potential.

Squidoo is actually far more conducive to making real money than any other site that has come into popularity in recent years. This is the biggest reason Squidoo has risen to fame so rapidly and why Tiffany Dow penned the eBook Social Networking on Squidoo, which was endorsed by an endless supply of guru marketers thanks to its step-by-step instructions on how to market the right way on Squidoo.

Squidoo has finally created a site that can be used for commercial purposes in addition to being a valued consumer resource and wealth of free information. Thousands of smart marketers have flooded to the site to take advantage of the free tools available to them.

Of course, with the influx of honest marketers, a wave of spammers came to try to take over. This caused Squidoo to temporarily experience a sharp decline in the search engine rankings of its pages at Google, and a sharp drop in traffic to boot – known as Google's Squidoo Slap.

Squidoo was quick to take action, removing some of the tools (such as iFrames) that made it easy for spammers to abuse the system. They also banned four major spam topics from the site. This was frustrating to a lot of honest marketers, but it made it harder for spammers to abuse the site.

They also instituted some policies with regards to quality of lenses, requiring a more substantial amount of content to be published before the lens would show up in searches on the Squidoo site itself. This also helped deter spammers who would put up a lens with just a paragraph or two of keyword-rich spam text and then a bunch of outbound links.

Squidoo can be used in many ways. You can promote services, products, or affiliate items through your lens. You can have multiple accounts and on each free account, you can have an endless supply of lenses.

You can cross-promote your lenses. Build one master topic lens, and then branch out to build a number of more targeted lenses. Squidoo helps anyone be an expert on any subject, and Google love to Squidoo is once again rampant, helping lenses acquire page 1 rankings in the SERPs for many competitive keywords and phrases.

People who sell on eBay also love to promote their eBay stores or auctions through Squidoo, using built in eBay modules (building blocks) that Squidoo offers. Some modules give the lensmaster a share of co-op earnings through AdSense and some module profits. But you can also use text and image links to funnel traffic directly through to your own domain.

In order to have the best chance at being profitable, you have to learn to be extremely vigilant about your campaigns. You have to monitor them carefully, and always end campaigns that stay unprofitable for a long period of time.

One of the first things you should monitor is your CTR. If your click through ratio is very poor, your ads will cost more. It will take more money for the same number of clicks your competitors might get if they have a better CTR.

If your CTR is too low, you need to tweak your ad. You need to look at the text your competitors are using, and attempt to make it better. Try to get inside the minds of your visitors, and think about what they're looking for when they search for a particular word or phrase.

Use AdWords' split-testing setting to test multiple versions of your ads, and use the best ones.
Keep an eye on your quality score (QS). If your score is too low, then you need to do a few things to get your quality score up.

The higher your QS is, the less you'll have to pay for your clicks, and the more profit you can potentially make. The quality score takes several factors into account for its ranking algorithm, and Google doesn't release the details of every single one.

They give you a little general advice, but it's not really enough for most people to dominate AdWords right out of the bat. After a lot of experimentation, many experts have come up with some guidelines than can help improve your quality score.

Make sure you have each campaign's keyword phrases on the landing page itself. Don't use the keyword "golf carts" if the word "carts" doesn't appear anywhere on the page. That could bring your quality score down.

Your landing page shouldn't be a single page with no internal links. Google doesn't seem to favor single page landing pages. Add links to relevant products, articles related to the niche, or pages such as a privacy policy, terms of service, and a contact page.

Keep your campaigns to a few highly related keyword phrases each, such as one for the product name only, another for long tail phrases, and a third for more broad keywords. You should make sure you target those keywords in your ad.

If you have "golf clubs," "golf bags," and "golf club warmers" as your keyword phrases, you should try to use at least one of those phrases in your ad. You might have something like "Golf Clubs, Bags, and Accessories" in your ad. The words people search for will appear in bold in your ad, so the more you have in your ad, the more likely it is to be clicked.

Finally, you should carefully track conversions. Make sure you have a way to track which traffic came from AdWords if you're sending traffic from more than one source. Conversions are ultimately the most important factor in the success or failure of your AdWords campaign.

Then people started complaining about the ridiculous amount of spam messages they were getting from marketers. Some people would receive dozens of daily spam offerings for everything from Viagra to ringtones to payday loans, and everything in between.

Those people started to complain to MySpace, so to salvage their reputation, they got a lot stricter about enforcing their rules. One of the first things they did was put a limit on the number of friends you could add daily. This seriously hampered a lot of people, who were used to adding hundreds or even thousands of people per day to their spam lists using those automated programs.

Then they started cracking down on bulletin spam, banning some users who abused the privilege. Users would find themselves banned within hours of sending out their first bulletin, which cause many marketers to simply give up trying to make money on MySpace.

But smart marketers found out you could still use MySpace to make a great deal of money if you used it properly. Gone were the days of sending out bulletin spam, spamming affiliate links on guestbooks, and spamming the MySpace forums. But you could still promote your offerings tactfully on MySpace.

You should offer MySpace users real value in return for being your friend. If they're just on your list for marketing purposes, make sure you provide them with plenty of free incentives to get them to stay.

Once you've made friends with people, you can direct them to your own websites outside of MySpace. You could ask them to join your forum, sign up to your newsletter, or visit your blog. Once you get your friends to start networking with you outside MySpace, you're free to market to them however you choose.

MySpace won't interfere with your marketing efforts off their site, even if someone reports you for trying to sell them something after they joined your email list from your own private website. Just keep in mind that there's always a chance you could be banned from MySpace for using any kind of marketing there.

Although you can greatly minimize your chances, due to their terms of service that prohibit blatant marketing, there's still that small risk that you should keep in mind. The financial rewards generally makes it worth the risk.

This means the visitors to your site generate the majority of the content on the site, as opposed to the site owner or writers creating the content. A perfect example of web 2.0 is Squidoo. Squidoo is a social network, which is a type of web 2.0 site.

Although the site does post some of its own content, such as the lensmaster tip blog, the vast majority of the site was built by individuals creating their own pages within the site. When a user signs up to the site, they're allowed to position themselves as experts on anything from A-Z (they even have a separate section for R and X rated pages that are kept from the general G-rated public).

They create a unique page on the Squidoo domain, with all sorts of information about their niche topic. They can create or join groups and post in the SquidU forum to communicate with others in the community.

One of the oldest types of web 2.0 sites is the forum. Forums are almost as old as the Internet itself, and they were one of the first types of web 2.0 concepts. Other very old web 2.0 predecessors were guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, and classified ad sites.

These days, web 2.0 sites are more complex. Rather than simply posting messages on a forum, users can typically generate their own profiles, create their own custom pages, and have more involvement in creating the site and its content.

There are many different types of web 2.0 sites. MySpace and Facebook are two well-known social networking sites. Blogger is a very popular blog platform, which allows people to develop a type of online diary or journal.

Twitter is somewhat like a blog, only users post very small snippets of content in each post. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg allow users to post their favorite links, and allow other people to vote on those links.

Squidoo and HubPages are two sites that let people create pages of information about specific subjects, a bit like a one-page website about a particular topic, similar to Wikipedia. The basic function of web 2.0 sites is to allow users to post their own content to the site.

Web 2.0 sites can be leveraged for marketing purposes if used correctly. The key is to immerse yourself in the community and become known as a real person rather than a nameless marketer hoping to cash in on their pooled traffic generation.

Unfortunately, because social bookmarking is freely available to just about anyone, it has become widely abused. Many social bookmarking sites are spammed by internet marketers looking to generate some quick traffic. Spamming the social bookmarking sites can easily result in the loss of your reputation and credibility.

Each submission you make to the social bookmarking sites needs to be carefully reviewed beforehand. Submitting articles laden with keywords is a common form of social bookmarking spam. Articles that are very dense with keywords have a tendency to not make sense. The articles and web pages you submit need to have real value to those who will end up reading them. It's next to impossible for keyword dense content to be of much value to anyone other than the person who submitted it.

The keyword density of your content submissions should ideally be between 6%-8%. If you constantly submit high quality and informative content you will eventually receive a substantial flow of traffic. To make matters worse, Yahoo and Google hate spam and are taking great pains to eliminate junk content before it can be widely distributed.

Creating and mass submitting junk content may seem like a great way to get free traffic but in reality you are just wasting your time. The extra time spent on creating meaningful and user friendly content is well worth the investment of time.

Purchasing private label rights content is a great way for webmasters to leverage their time and outsource their content creation. The trouble is that private label rights content has a way of being viewed as duplicate content. Using duplicate content can get you into trouble with the search engines and can even lead to the impression that you are a spammer.

If you purchase content that is available for other webmasters to use, it is absolutely imperative that you rewrite the content somewhat before you use it as web content. If you are pressed for time then consider hiring an article rewriter who will usually rewrite content at the cost of about $2 an article.

If you have desperately been seeking a means of increasing your web presence but lack the funds necessary for professional SEO, then social bookmarking may be just what you are looking for. But because social bookmarking is freely available to anyone it is very easy to abuse. If you are going to use social bookmarking as part of your overall marketing strategy then you need to take the time to create quality content. After all, the last thing you want is to become seen as a spammer.

Viral marketing campaigns work in much the same way. The marketing piece spreads through word-of-mouth, as people tell other people about it. Viral marketing can come in many forms. On the Internet, viral campaigns are typically in the form of videos or reports, but they may also come in the form of audio or images.

Video is probably the most viral of the various media methods, because people seem to get more excited about videos. But text reports can also go viral very quickly if the information contained in them is exceptional.

The best forms of viral marketing give away extremely valuable information for free. If you promote a dog training guide, create a short precious video about potty training a puppy. You don't want to give away everything, but show one really good element that makes people realize you're not all about the fluff and filler.

If you're using text as your viral medium of choice, then it provides the perfect opportunity for you to profit through a freebie. Viral reports usually have links sprinkled throughout them, either to your direct offers or affiliate items, but they still provide real value to the readers.

If providing an interesting or informative marketing piece is the most important part of viral marketing, getting the piece in front of people who will spread it is the second most important thing.

If no one sees the piece, there won't be anyone to spread it around. You need to figure out a way to get your piece seen by enough people that it will go viral. If you're using videos, you can usually get enough views to a video to start a viral campaign just by submitting the videos to a few video sharing sites.

If your information is valuable enough, people will probably flock to it. But sometimes it takes a little more than that and you'll have to use social bookmarking, forums, and other methods to bring the initial wave of targeted traffic.

If you offer a really high-quality report or video for free, you'll usually have no trouble getting it to go viral. Post it in a forum as a freebie, send it out to your list, but make sure it states clearly that you encourage your readers or viewers to share the download link, or else they may feel like they're doing something wrong.