Nonetheless it should appear evident to anyone with a grain of salt in her head, there a tons of Web sites, articles and books that still promote old fashioned and outdated online marketing tactics.

Many of these bring more damage than good to those of employ them, and these ones listed here are only a fraction of the many other useless tactics still employed by millions of people in the hope of having more traffic and getting extra visitors to their sites.

There are indeed many more incredibly useless emarketing tactics that are of absolutely zero value to an online publisher (e.g.: keywords and description meta tag optimization) and it is hard indeed for any newcomer coming into this field to be able to weed out the old, fake and cheaty from the effective and up-to-date tactics that really work.

So let's start weeding out from the bottom:

1) Affiliate Programs - Everyone has them, and the competition has saturated the net. Everyone is promoting an affiliate program hoping someone would buy or join up, but the problem is that these affiliate programs are often advertising to someone who is already a member and there is very little product sales on Web sites that are not professionally designed and maintained.

2) MLM Progams - The premise is simple: buy something, then get someone else to buy somthing, any they do the same thing; and everybody makes an infinate amount of money. Problem. Very few in those downlines will do anything, and the rest will eventually drop out leaving you with earning nothing. They'll move on to find another program and start over.

3) E-commerce Sites - Internet stores are too abundant and they sell the same goods as Amazon or Best Buy. Why should anyone search the internet to find you when they can go to the 'big guys'? Your e-commerce site is a waste of time and money unless you have unique products that can't be easily found somewhere else.

4) Re-selling E-books - Most of those who sell ebooks offer you the right to resale them to others. Problem, the internet market is over-saturated with those same e-books. With some sites giving them away-why would anyone buy them from you?

5) Safelist Advertising - Safelists are groups of members who have 'opt in' their email address to receive advertisement email from fellow safelist members. Although the members are safe from using spammed advertising, this form of marketing is not effective because everyone just simply mass-deletes their emails without reading them. Everyone wants others to read their ads, yet no one reads other people ads. Those safelists that claim to send 2-4 million emails per day are nothing but scams. Your email ad goes nowhere, and no one even reads it. If you were really sending over one million emails a day, then you would receive over one million emails in return. Your email account couldn't handle that much volume. A targeted safelist involves only those who are in your interested field.

6) Posting To FFA's - FFA or 'Free For All' pages will post your ad in one of seven categories on their page. The idea is that the 1000's of others that post to these FFA pages will see your ad and click through to your website. The problem is that everyone that goes to these FFA pages only posts ads and there is no one actually reading any of these. Furthermore, your ad will rotate off the page after those that come behind you to post their ads in the same category. On top of all that your email account gets flooded with 100's of emails trying to sell you something.

7) Free Classifieds - Free online classified ads a seem to be the magic pill to bringing in targeted visitors. These sites will let you post your ads for free so that all visitors to their website will see it and click through to your website. The problem is that new technology now enables one to blast their ads to 1000's of classified pages without having to visit any of them. In a nutshell, these free classified pages get 1000's of post and no visitors to read your ad.

8) Pop-up Ads - Whenever you visit a popular website you get a another window that pops up selling something or inviting you to sign up for a newsletter. These pop-up windows were a great marketing tool because websites can sell to the same visitor twice, or capture their email address to sell to them later. The problem now is that the web has become so saturated with these pop-up ads that they slow down page loading speeds, annoy the visitor trying to trying to search for something important and waste valuable bandwidth space. A website that has a lot of visitors with pop-up ads that appear every time each page is loaded will tie up their ISP's server causing more frequent maintenance shutdowns. The problem has become so bad that net surfers are rushing in droves to buy software that actually kills pop-up windows. Additionally, AOL has decided to stop using pop-up ads altogether and other major ISP's are soon to follow.

Edited and reprinted with permission
by Tremel Ennis - BuildStar Wholesale Resources
http://www.ibuildstar.com/site_map.html

(Robin Good: I have no connection or partnership with the company or the author of this article. I receive no compensation for the products he sells and I do not personally endorse any of the actual marketing tactics employed. Nonetheless I found his article to the point and useful for the many novice online marketers out there.)