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Posts Tagged ‘free ad sites’

Finding locations to place free ads is a continuing process.  The Internet does not stand still.  Sites that may work for you one day will be ineffective the next.  New sites crop up continuously.  The more practice you have looking for these sites, the more efficient you will become with the process.

The mistake a lot of newcomers make when starting free advertising is that they get a list from their upline and only use that list.   Here is an analogy that I use quite often.  I am a avid fisherman, I fish winter, summer, spring, fall.  When I go on the lake in the early morning and see a bunch of boats in one location all with their rods over the side, should I go to that same spot or find a new spot that is not being over fished?  If I go to the popular spot the fish look at my bait and swim on by; but if I pick a new spot away from the crowd the chance of that same fish taking my bait increases.  Can you see the point of this analogy and free advertising?

It is all right to check the spots out that your upline gives you, but you need to find your own.

So how do you do this?  It is really a matter of going to the search engines and typing in phrases like “free advertising sites, free classifieds, free ad sites” or any relevant words.  Once you pull up a list write down (or copy and paste to notepad) all the sites on the first three pages.  This is the list of where NOT to place your free ads on at first!  Eventually you will place ads here but not at first.

Why do you do this?  Two reasons.  First, it will save you time in your search process.  If you see you have found one of these recommended sites on your list, move on.  You are not there to search for the small fish, but the big fish!  Second, writing down these sites will save you countless hours of putting your ads on sites that are crowded with other ads for the same service and it might even save you from giving up on affiliate marketing.  I have known too many would be marketers who come into this business place their ads all over the Internet on just such sites only to sit back and see no results and become so discouraged they give up.  It doesn’t have to happen to you!  I want you to put your first ads on effective sites, so you will know that affiliate marketing does work.   It will take you some time to find these “hidden treasures”, but once found you will spend less time putting ads on the Internet and more time making money.

The task of coming up with search terms to use to find these “hidden treasures” is simply this:  Put yourself in their shoes (the customer).  What terms did you use when you were looking for a work at home opportunity.  Write them down.  Then go to every search engine you can think of and search for free ad sites using those terms.  For instance, “work at home opportunities” place that phrase into Yahoo, Google, 7Search, Miva, and you will come up with some new advertising sites that are not listed on all search engines.  Use terms that describe your particular skills.  Maybe you have worked in an office before use the terms that best described your duties.

Now look at that free advertising list that your first made, you know the list of free ad sites everyone else uses, and see what ones are not on there.  Those are your personal “hidden treasures”.

Remember the Internet is in constant flux; it changes hourly.  New sites pop up every single day.  So repeat the process  to build your own list of free ad sites.

Nancy Kraska Owner of Home Work For You, Better Business Resources. Avid reader. A food-alcoholic. Sometimes Crafter.

Free Advertising and Web Site Submission

No matter if you are using free advertising or paid advertising all online advertising is composed of four basic elements.

1. You need an ad
2. You need a website address (URL) to point the ad to or an email address
3. You will need to prepare for the posting process
4. You will need a location to place the ad

Most affiliate programs have pre-written ads for you to place at various ad sites. You will need to read the guidelines for each program to make sure you follow them. Use the URL given to point the buyer to the appropriate website. If you have a website of your own, some affiliates will point their ads to that URL.

For most people writing these ads is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even though most programs have their ads set up, there are still some that don’t. Take a moment to thoroughly check out the website you want to promote, then take a few key points and you will have your ad. Write them down in notepad, and play around with the wording until you like the ad. Then try it out. Just remember it is not rocket science, if you have ever written an email to a friend you can write an ad. It really is that simple!

Whether you ad is designed to point to a URL or an email address, all free or paid ad locations require that you submit an email address to the ad site in order to post an ad. That is why it is highly recommended that you have a secondary email address for just this purpose. When you post a FREE ad on any of these sites your email address will get harvested for all sorts of emails, including spam. At no time use your primary email address when submitting to any free ad site, always use your secondary.

In addition many sites require that you submit an address and a phone number to post an ad, most times you will get away with just putting N/A in the required fields. There are some issues involved with this type of service that you will have to resolve for yourself, but remember that what ever information is given to this advertising site, is in reality giving the hosting company of that site a lead for their business offers. Some people do not give real phone numbers or addresses to avoid just this type of junk mail, but it is not recommended.

Once you have started to place your ads on these free sites you will need some type of tracking system. This is a very important step. You need to know which ads are producing and which are not. This is a very simple piece of code that you can put at the end of each url and it should tell you where the ads are coming from. For example: http://NKraska.MyWorldMoms.com/?SOURCE=blog; if you were to click on this ad it would take you to my sales page, but it will tell me in my account stats that I had a click from this post. It is that tiny bit of code at the end: (/?SOURCE=blog) that tells me where the customer clicked on my ad. Different affiliate programs have different code to track, so always check with the program. This particular code will not always work with individual affiliate programs.

All of your affiliate programs will have a stats page to show you where your clicks are coming from. It is a good idea to make a spreadsheet of some sort on your desktop with all the ad sites, and login information as you sign up. Then as you get further into free advertising you can set up your own system to keep track of your click throughs.

Nancy Kraska Owner of Home Work For You, . Avid reader. A food-alcoholic. Sometimes Crafter.

Stay tuned to Part #3—The Quest for FREE Ad Sites!