How to Find Free Web Advertising
A great benefit of the Internet is that it leveled the playing field for entrepreneurs. Even with zero advertising dollars, you can get your product or service seen by potential customers. Free web ads can be worth their weight in gold, if used creatively. While free web advertising is not hard to find or set up, it can be time consuming. There are a few tips and tricks for getting started quickly and efficiently.
When creating a free advertising campaign, you first have to have a place to which your prospective buyers will “go”. Whether it is a brick and mortar store or an Internet site, your goal is to drive traffic to a “destination”. If you do not already have one, you need a website.
- Get your website listed on the major search engines. There are services that will allow you to do this for free. A web search of the keywords “free web submission” will pull up dozens of sites you can utilize.
- You can sign up for a free local business listing on a business networking site, such as MerchantCircle and take advantage of their free “promote your business” section.
- Once you have your platform (website and/or listing), you can go ahead and build traffic by networking with others on that same site or on web forums. You will be amazed at the connections you can make, for free.
- One of the best ways to get free web advertising is to exchange links. You can find products and services that complement your business and offer to let them place a link to their website on your site, in exchange for a link you your site on theirs.
- A web search will turn up literally hundreds of online companies that specialize in free advertising. Most of them offer free classifieds. It is time consuming and your ad is sometimes lost amongst hundreds of others, but it is worth trying, if you can find a way to make your ad stand out.
- There are also a number of directory services available that provide free directories of the free classifieds sites. Some of these companies also provide rankings of the most popular websites. This will help you choose which free advertising site to use.
Remember that you get what you pay for. While free ads can be very effective, they take time to post and may get lost amongst paid ads on the same site. That said, if you have the time to post by hand and can create an eye-catching ad, it can be highly effective and very profitable.