Believe it or not, you can get something for nothing. There is, indeed, free advertising on the internet. Knowing where it is and how to use it can really help promote your internet business, when you’re operating on a shoestring budget.
Very good sources for free advertising are the internet classified ad sites. Craigslist.com is the most well known. Another very well trafficked site is backpage.com. When you visit these sites, don’t be put off by the fact that there are a lot of ads. Craigslist gets millions (yes I said MILLIONS) of hits each day. If you take a few minutes to explore the site, you’ll see that it’s rather straightforward, and it is also international. You can advertise in hundreds of cities, in the United States, and dozens of foreign countries. That’s one heck of an audience for your product. Backpage.com is not as extensive and specializes in many USA cities as well as some Canadian locations.
To advertise in Backpage, I highly recommend that you create an account with them. It’s very easy to do, and it will streamline the process, in the long run. I also strongly suggest that you follow their rules and terms of service, otherwise you may find your ads pulled or even become banned. Their terms of service are not that difficult to work with, so there shouldn’t be any problem.
Craigslist is the more desirable site for the simple reason that it receives millions of visits every day. It’s also more well known (at least for now). However, the downside to CL is that they do have more stringent policies about ad placing, and they are not 100% free, anymore, when it comes to job advertising. CL now has a policy of charging for ads in about two dozen of their more popular cities. Still, that does leave you with over 400 other cities that are still free of charge to advertise.
An important factor to keep in mind, when advertising on Craigslist, is that they do keep track of the ads, and if you post too many under the same email or ip number, they will consider it to be spam, and your ads will be bounced. A good rule of thumb is to keep your postings to under five and make each ad unique in some way. A good method is to add a random set of numbers at the bottom of your ad. This makes the ad seem unique to the CL spider bots.
Never underestimate nor discount the power of these free classified ads. The main reason why there are a lot of them on these sites is because they do work. The next thing you need to master is the art of writing an effective ad. I will be discussing that in a different article.
See you at the top!
