Well, there’s no such thing as a free lunch they say – and if you’re looking for free classifieds, to get free traffic to your website, then maybe you need to work out what the deal really is….
Simply put, by offering a free classifieds service, a website will bring itself lots of free traffic. But, will it bring YOU free traffic? Well, actually, yes it does! And, as they’re free classifieds, it’s cost you nothing but a bit of time. Once you’ve written out your ads and posted them in a few free classifieds sites, you’ll start to find easy ways to store your adverts so you can just copy/paste them in…. you’ll also keep a list of where to place your adverts.
If you’re lucky, you will also have some method of tracking your adverts in place, so you know what’s working and what’s not. But, the main thing is that you ARE advertising your website or blog somewhere. This is probably one of the biggest things for new people – promoting their website…. most won’t know what to do, or where.
Free Classifieds Strategy
What you really need is a simple strategy to follow – and hopefully track. Now, I don’t want to get into big strategies…. that’s a whole new post for another day. But, take this as a basic working example:
- Identify a few, good free classifieds sites to advertise on. In the US, most people gravitate towards Craigslist, but outside of the US there are other/more popular free classifieds sites that are used.
- Register with your first handful of good sites. Don’t try to find a list of 1000 free classifieds websites, really, you’ll just over-whelm yourself and never get round to doing a thing!
- Identify which website/blog or affiliate product you want to advertise.
- Write out your advert: Give it a title (any title at first, but then work on making it more compelling) and a description (again, at first, just do it – then improve it next time and continually). Get your url you are going to send people to when they click (this might be your website address, or it might be your affiliate link – if it’s an affiliate link then try to cloak it so it’s not an ugly looking referral link)
- Log onto the classifieds websites and post your advert
Free Classifieds Strategy
Your strategy has to be achievable. Achievable for you. Now, I don’t want to make this complex or you’ll do nothing…. and that’s the worst thing you can do.
For now, just register, write out an advert, post it. See how that feels.
Beyond that you need to look at how well that went. Firstly, don’t expect a rush of traffic, clicks and sales – it doesn’t work like that. Having posted, you really need to leave it a week or two, slowly slowly catch ye monkey as they say.
So, a week later, you have some results – maybe you made some sales. Hurrah. So, that works. Brilliant. Maybe you “got told off” or even had your advert removed, look at why that was…. each site will have littel rules that you might have broken. Find out what they are and see if you can avoid that next time.
So, now onto stage 2. Stage 2 of your free classifieds strategy is where you really need to find out where those sales came from. This bit can be dull and long-winded… and sometimes you simply can’t actually tell.
The first level of this is to find out if you can see:
- How many views did your advert get?
- How many clicks did it receive?
- Which adverts were the ones that made you the sales?
If you have your own website, all this stuff is easy to track, you can use Google Analytics and some ad tracking software (you can even get some of this free). But, with some affiliate programmes, you can’t track all the way through to the actual sale, which is annoying.
You have to learn when you can improve your technique – and when there’s nothing you can do except to continue doing what you’re doing. Sometimes, at the stage you’re at, with your budget and skills, you have to accept that although there might be a better way out there, today it’s not for you… but one day you can move your game up a notch.
What’s Better Than Free Classifieds?
Targetted, paid for, traffic is better than free classifieds. And this needn’t cost the earth.
If you’re finding you’re getting results from the free classifieds, it’s maybe time to invest a bit of those profits back into paying for premium listings, or top position, on those websites. Most free classifieds websites will have this feature.
Most classifieds websites will charge you per feature/per advert. So you place your advert, pay, and that’s the end of it. But there is another way.
If you’re promoting any work from home offers, especially affiliate programmes, then there is one classifieds site which can produce outstanding results. It does come at a cost, but an exceedingly small cost. With Bizz Wizz you simply pay a straight forward, one off, fee of just $24.99 and you can advertise and promote any products for a whole year. Now, by anybody’s budget that’s affordable – you can make that back easily in just one sale of most products – and, as the service you’re paying for is a WHOLE YEAR … just think how many times that means you can give it a go with different wording, different sections, etc. It really is a no brainer to me. Bizz Wizz is also awesome for testing markets. If you have three potential products you could promote heavily, then by simply advertising all three on there for a week or so can help you to decide which one is most likely to be profitable to put more energy into promoting. It takes just as much effort/time to promote a dud as it does to promote a winner! So I see BW as one of my tools to help me pick a market.
This is a MUCH cheaper way to test your market than using PPC methods.
Free Classifieds Sites and Affordable Classifieds
As I said before, there’s no point in your early days in trying to hit 1000 different free classifieds sites, you’ll just burn yourself out and achieve nothing. Simply work with a few to find your feet, to improve, to start getting the money coming in.
Apart from the obvious Craigslist in the US, here are a few to get you off to a good start. Join them all now:
- Adland Pro – post your ads 3x a day for free
- Vivastreet – a top board for the UK market. With Viva, you get a weekly email that you just have to click on to make your advert appear at the top of the listing again, if it weren’t for that I’d often forget I had ads!
- US Free Ads Classifieds
- Adpost
- Bizz Wizz – just $24.99/year for unlimited biz opps and work from home opportunities, ideal for affiliates. Targetted at this readership, you know your ad will be seen by thousands of opportunity seekers.
Free Classifieds – Scam?
No, they’re not. Free classifieds produce traffic for the websites hosting them – and for somebody starting out, or wanting to test the market, they can prove an invaluable source of places to advertise for free.
Once you’ve got started, you might choose to move into PPC advertising (with Google Adwords for example), or you might be quite content with the regular flow of sales you get from simply copy/pasting into free classifieds, especially if you take advantage of their extra (paid for) features when you’re able to.
Make Money Online
You can make money online by finding something to promote as an affiliate – and using free classifieds. Zero cost… just time, patience … and a little bit of extra learning over time. Yes, there are better ways, but it’s “a” way – and doesn’t cost a thing.
The post Are You Still Falling for the Free Classifieds, Free Traffic, Scam? appeared first on homeworker directory.
