With regards to "IM'' or Internet Marketing you must understand that traffic is everything.
You can have a great website you build yourself or one that you paid thousands of dollars to have professionally done. You can be marketing anything from toothpaste to gold watches you can be charging thousands or giving your product away it does not matter if you have no one visit you website. Traffic is everything.
If your new to the web you may have already made the same stops that I made along the way to this point where you are reading this article.You may have spent a few months with the traffic exchanges clicking frantically at timed adds to build credits you then traded for people to look at your adds.
It took me a while to catch on, maybe it didn't take you as long but guess what? If people are clicking your add so that they can get you to click theirs do you think they are looking to buy whatever it is that your marketing? So you may get traffic but in effect you are paying them to look at your site, of course you get views but they aren't interested. Some folks even have programs that change the pages for them all day while they are at work, they never even see your page. So you don't sell much or if your like me you don't sell any.
Along the same lines and crippled by the same problem are "safe list", with all the problems surrounding spam nobody wants to send unsolicited e-mail for fear of prosecution. Some clever folks decided "hey sign up here and agree to accept e-mails form others and they will accept your e-mail, it works on credits"
same thing exactly only you open your e-mails for credits instead of going to a site and clicking for credits. Everyone who sees your page is already marketing something of their own that they want you to buy.
So the trick is to get people to come to your site that are interested in what your selling. There are tons of ways to get free traffic to your site including article marketing, SEO (search engine optimization), syndication marketing and many others. If you've been using some of the safe list or click exchange sites and you have not been making any money, you may want to start using some of the techniques available to get free traffic. People who are interested in what you have to sell.