Over the course of many months now I have been experimenting with all kinds different ways to make money online without spending a penny myself. Of course, if you abide by the age old dictum that ‘time is money’, then I’ve spent a damned fortune for really quite a modest return!

I’ve been through lots of affiliate schemes (and only really stuck with two of them), dodged scams a plenty and joined enough mailing lists to fill my inbox with enough spam to feed the army of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea for a year.

I’ve set up quite a few websites in tight niches, but haven’t spent enough time promoting them and getting back links to them, so for the most part they only get traffic from facebook groups.

I suffered quite a major setback at the beginning of this week when Google took it upon themselves to disable my AdSense account after some arsehole clicked a load of my ads on unconnected sites (i.e. different themes and different niches)- an unforseen consequence of giving all my sites a few reciprocal links by linking them all together. I don’t know if he/she thought they were doing me a favour, but Google certainly thought so, and now I’m barred for life from the largest and far and away the best contextual advertising scheme in the world. Great.

Luckily there are many other similar services (I’m now using Adsbanger , and can recommend it to anyone having trouble getting an AdSense account, or who just wants to serve more ads on their sites. Adsbanger pay via PayPal and have a generous commission rate of 65% for publishers) but whilst these are fine for sites in larger niches, tight niches like my archery site and calligraphy site now have no relevant ads.

Right, I hear you asking, what’s all this crap got to do with the post title? Well, not a lot, just thought I’d fill you in and give you a little background.

A few weeks ago, whilst going through the mind-numbing task of submitting my sites to directories, I hit on the idea of having my own directory, noticing that so many of these directories are obviously run by the same people, and so many of them charge extortionate sums of money for featured links. Clearly, directories are big business. I even found some directories with a page rank of just 1 charging up to $19.99 a month for premium links. Amazingly, some people are prepared to pay this just to get a top spot in a directory and perhaps 2 or 3 deep links.

Of course, I’m a cheapskate and only use the free directories. I don’t mind filling my homepages with hundreds of reciprocal links (just take a look at the sidebar for proof of this). In fact, I should charge the directories – their links are mostly in a sidebar widget, meaning they display on every page. AMS now has over a thousand pages, giving each directory a shed load of links from my site. Any way, I digress.

So I searched the net for free link directory scripts, tried a couple of Wordpress plugins, but eventually settled on a stand-alone platform called Kemana, which takes some configuring but does, eventually, work. If you try the same idea and are using a free hosting service, you need to make sure your provider allows SQL and PHP to run out of safe mode – i.e. allows full access to your databases. I’m using an account with Freeime, who provide a pretty good service for a free hosting company.

My new directory is now up and running, and I’m charging just $1/month for sponsored links and $2/month for premium links, making it far and away the cheapest search engine friendly directory around. Standard links are free for life, and all links require a reciprocal link.

As a special bonus to my readers here (not to mention to thank you for reading this far to get to the point of the article) the first ten people from this site to register and post their links will receive a year’s premium listing for free. Just add the phrase ‘AMS blog offer’ to your site description, and I’ll edit it out from your listing and give you a year’s premium listing for free. See how kind I am?

Of course, the directory is brand new and has not even been indexed yet, but it won’t be long before I have lots of links to the site, boosting it’s page rank and giving your links more kudos. So register today and lock in your year’s free premium lsiting by visiting my SEO Directory now! Yes, you heard me, right now! What are you waiting for?

SCI offers industry recognised and accredited training and support toward working from home, giving you the training, confidence and contacts you need to work for leading Fortune 500-listed companies from the comfort of your own home. If you want to be your own boss and run your own business, then the SCI 6 Hour Course is probably not the right option for you. Though it will teach you many of the skills you need to one day run your own home-based business, the SCI 6 Hour Course is more oriented toward providing the training and skills you need to work for great companies.

SCI boasts an amazing 100% success rate – that means that every one of their students who succesfully completes the certification program quickly finds work for a Fortune 500 company.

This is because SCI pride themselves on keeping up to date with all the latest changes in the marketplace, effectively tailoring their training to what employers are looking for. They make sure their students get the right skills and knowledge that major corporations require. This gives students who have completed the SCI 6 Hour Course training a massive lead over their competitors. In these current tough economic times, the training you’ll receive from the SCI 6 Hour Course will give you the edge, and all but guarantee you that much sought-after job working from the comfort of your own home, in your own time, for a world-leading company.

SCI has earned a great reputation for giving both students and employers exactly what they need. Students want first class training at an affordable price and the freedom to earn a great living right from home. Employers want students who have the necessary skills to work independently and who will help their businesses to grow.

I love the SCI 6 Hour Course because I learned valuable skills and added a great qualification to my CV. They helped me to find a great job, and now I work from the comfort of my own home. I’d recommend the SCI 6 Hour Course to anyone.

I started using The Free Traffic System at the beginning of November last year, after a Google search for ‘free automated backlinks’ led me to the site. The Free Traffic Systems allows you to submit an article to up to thirty blogs and include two backlinks per article to any website or webpage of your choice.

Now after using it for around 6 weeks I have seen great results and decided to write this short article as a review, to explain how it has helped me to improve my SERPs and thus drive a lot more organic traffic to my sites. If you’re looking to get a lot of free search engine traffic to your blogs and websites, and have a number of articles you can submit (or are able to write a few) then I can highly recommend signing up for a free account with The Free Traffic System.

I began by posting two or three articles per day on The Free Traffic System. Take a look at the training videos they provide on their web site showing you the easy step by step directions about how to use the system to build potentially unlimited free backlinks to your sites. It is advisable to ’spin’ every article to make each submission appear original and thus less likely to fall foul of the dreaded duplicate content pemalty. The Free Traffic System allows you to use ’spinning’ syntax (the [spin] [/spin] tag) so that you can spin articles and their titles without having to purchase spinning software. If you’re not sure how this works, the training videos they provide give you easy to follow instructions.

The Free Traffic System ensures that backlinks grow naturally and in a way that search engines will not find suspicious. It doesn’t post to all 30 blogs at once after you submit your article to the website; instead, they will slowly feed out your article over the course of several days until it has been posted on all the blogs you selected. This prevents the risk of having a sudden flood of backlinks to your site, which may look suspiciously spammy to search engines.

The Free Traffic System works incredibly well, and though you will not see results overnight (it does after all take time for the search engines to index new sites, then to recognise new links to it) I have personally seen a significant improvement in SERPs for several of my sites, as a direct result of using the site. The great thing is that you can choose the anchor text for your links, which allows you to focus on any keyword phrase you like. Of course, the more competitive your niche and choice of keyword thread, the more backlinks you will need to rank highly in search results. With a free membersahip of  The Free Traffic System you can submit unlimited articles, each of which can provide you with up to 60 backlinks (2 links allowed per article, to any website, with any anchor text of your choice). You may also use one ‘tag’ per article, which provides search engines with another way to categorise your article, and hence the links contained within it.

Because I am chasing very competitive keywords and therefore need a lot more backlinks, I decided to upgrade to pro membership after a few weeks. As a pro member, you may submit unlimited articles, each of which can contain three links, and tag each article with five tags. Pro members are also awarded ‘bonus’ links and an extra link contained in their tags, making each article submitted worth up to 120 backlinks.

I’m sure you can see the potential of this site, and why it is so popular!

Additionally, The Free Traffic System also gives you the option of submitting your WordPress blog to the site, to receive articles written by other users. This means that – if you don’t mind a few of your blog posts advertising other people’s websites or affiliate links – you can recieve lots of great free content for your blogs.

Just in case you missed all the links in the text, you can get your free account by clicking – The Free Traffic System.