How I Use Free Ads to Get Traffic and Sales
March 8th, 2009To tell you the truth, I really feel sort of silly using free advertising forums, as they seem a bit ridiculous. But the fact is, I have discovered that they really do bring in regular traffic and sometimes sales and clicks as well.
Many of these free online advertising sites get tons of traffic. So if you get in the habit of posting to them regularly, you ads will certainly at least get seen, and you just might be a little shocked at the results.
Other than writing killer ad copy, there are no big secrets to making it work, but here are a few little tricks I use to maxmize my results:
First of all, if the forum allows it, I always make a “mega-thread.” What I mean is that a make a thread with my ad in it, and then I keep coming back and replying with the same or similar ad to that same thread. This of course pushes it to the top of the forum which is exactly where you want your ads to be. On top of that, this type of thread will amass the most views and contain the most replies as compared with the plain old regular threads. It then has the appearance of great popularity.
Another little trick is to rate your own threads at highest rating (normally five stars) which helps give the appearance of credibility.
And finally, I reply to others’ popular threads with my own ads, thus increasing my exposure.
I find that the two main keys to success when posting to free ads forums is to use great ad copy and to just be consistent and keep coming back to post my ads whenever I get the chance. There is automatic forum posting software that makes it breeze too. Otherwise it can be a little boring and tedious. Still, if you don’t like the idea of forum posting software, you can always use tabbed browsing and keep several tabs open with the various forums.
I also post to the free classfieds sites along with the free ads forums that I post to. Like the forums, some of these classfied ads sites also have huge traffic. They might as well be checking out what you have to offer.
There’s something else to consider here too. These forums and classifieds sites count for backlinks when it comes to search engine optimization. I mean I’m not saying they have the kind of value that will rocket your site to the top of the search engines, but they are most certainly better than nothing. The bigger ones seem to get spidered constantly. So using anchors with good keywords for your links can’t hurt a bit.
One final thing to think about: Though I’ve never tried it myself, I’ve often that if you get some profitable tactics going with the free ad sites and get a little system down, you could then outsource the posting and really dominate these sites. There’s a lot of dirt-cheap freelancers and virtual assistants around. Well it’s something that might be worth trying.