Does Free Advertising Work? - You Bet, if You Do it Right!

You Need at Least Two New Email Addresses

I'm a big fan of multiple email addresses. You need one for every purpose and you need two before you start posting ads to free forums, directories, classified ad sites or FFA pages.

When you post ads you will receive "confirmation emails" that your ad was posted. You will receive hundreds of confirmation emails and promotional emails. It will be necessary to clean out your email inbox every week so it doesn't get full. Many advertising sites require you to verify your email address so you can use a special email address just for that. Use another email address for sites not requiring verification. Never use your personal email address or business email address for free advertising submissions.

Many sites require you to register and then send out a verification email. If you use the same username and password for all of them, it is much easier.

Post your Ads on a Tuesday at Midday

I am not going into the statistics on this, but ads placed on Tuesdays at mid-day get more hits. My own PPC campaigns bear this out. Ads placed on Fridays don't do as well. In fact, I usually turn off my PPC campaigns Friday and Saturday nights and on holidays. Of course, it depends on what you are advertising. I can think of some items and services that might be more popular on the weekends.

Keep Focused

It is hard not to be attracted to offers and ads. If the advertising is so good, why are they advertising it. They should be using their own ads. Ad submission software is not as effective because few real people visit most of the sites. Posting manually or with the help of a typing program are the only methods that really work. I set up my own template and copy and paste from it. I also use the pro version of Roboform to keep track of sites requiring passwords and user names. So, it really isn't necessary to spend money for a typing program. Each site is different so when you start posting you can start to develop your own template for ad submissions. Generally most sites will accept ads of 25 words or less, but many will accept much longer text.

How to Place Your Ads

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Always place your ads in the right category. If it is a home business or work at home opportunity place in "Business Opportunities", "Work At Home", Home Business, MLM, and etc. If allowed, place ad in several related categories. ALWAYS include your site URL either in the ad text or in a form box.

Your goal is to find many classified ad sites that bring positive results. A site that gives you a visitor each day or at least every second day is a keeper. Don't post ads to sites that do not return visitors. Your goal is to find many classified ad sites that continuously deliver visitors.

The more ads you post to different sites and track results, the more and better sites you will find. If you post consistently, you cannot fail because your results WILL get better every day. The process only goes in one direction. It is all up to you as your effort will determine how quickly you find good advertising sites.

How Often Should You Post?

An ad on a high traffic site may only stay at the top of the list for only a few minutes. Sometimes, they are on for two or more weeks. Check out the site before you post again because there are sites with few postings and it wouldn't look good if you had multiple postings and you could be banned.

Each site lists its policies regarding accepting ads and posting frequency. There are some sites like Craigs List and Tribe that have fairly strict rules. Don't try posting a work at home opportunity to Craigs List until you read my blog because if you don't do it right, they will ban your IP address. I have a blog on my website regarding posting to those sites.

How to Find Good Free Classified Ad Sites

Put yourself in the place of someone searching on the internet. If you have a business opportunity, search for related terms such as "work at home" or "home based business". This is just an example, you could use a keyword builder to come up with hundreds of phrases related to your opportunity. Do searches on Yahoo and MSN and they will have other keyword search suggestions. These keyword suggestions are often very useful Visit every site that comes up in the top twenty matches and look to see if they have classified ads.

Also look for bulletin boards, forums, small town directories, community ad sites, associations, and club directories. Use all the major search engines. This is more work, but the object is to find classified ad sites where your ad will be displayed for a longer period and with fewer competing listings. It's sometimes better to be a "Big Frog in a little pond".

Always Track Your Ads

If you have your own website, you need to add a piece of code to your website to track all your visitors. It is important to know how many and where they came from. There are many free services available, just do a search for ad tracking. If you don't track your visitors, you will not be able to determine which sites are good.

There are many free and reasonable ad tracking services out there even if you do not have your own website. My suggestion for free ad tracking is hotshorturl or TrackThatAd. Many affiliate programs have codes that you can add to your urls to track visits and that used with a free or paid url shortening service will give the information you need. Bear in mind that free url shortening services sometimes go out of business. A paid service that is very reasonable at $6 a month is Adlandpro. Adlandpro also has free classirfieds.

Repetition

I didn't say it would always be easy and it will take work. The ads need to be placed during the active hours of the day and in the evening you need to log in, check and note which web sites sent visitors. Repeat over and over and eventually you'll have a number of good classified ad sites delivering visitors to your website or affiliate links.

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