Monday, December 29, 2008

The Low Down on Free Classified Ads

By Alex Wu

When you want to advertise you want to go the cheapest route. In the local paper there are some things that can be put in for free like lost animal listings. Most everything else you have to pay for. Online however there is a wealth of websites that you can advertise your business or services for free.

The Internet is the best place to go for free advertising. They can target large local markets, and state wide markets and even further. They have large advertisers that place linked ads on their classified pages and that is how they make their money.

Personal ads can be listed, autos for sale, pets for sale, or anything else that you want to advertise. Many of the newspapers have online classifieds so you do get more exposure, but, for free exposure you cannot beat that. The profit is all yours. That is unless they let you advertise for free and then want a percentage of what you sell, but most do not work like that. They earn their money from the advertisers that place ads on the classified pages, like click ads.

You can use the power of the whole internet to sell your products or service. Look at where the most popular free classified ads sites are on the Internet, do a search and find out which ones are easiest to find in a Search Engine search, that is where you want to post.

When you are ready to place your free classified ads, make sure that you write a good advertisement. Be brief, informative, and give a good description of what you are selling. Use an e-mail address rather than a phone number for a contact, as your phone number can be all over the web and you will receive calls you do not want.

Make sure that you read the terms of service on each website so that you know what is expected of you and how long your ad might run, and if there are any restrictions as to what you can advertise. Also read the fine print to catch any hidden costs.

These ads can stay up from 7 to 30 days depending on the requirements of the classified ad site. Some have more restrictions than others do. Look for one that has links to local sites, and one that is high in the search rankings.

Check the word limits on the pages to see if there are any, most do have a word limit, but there are those rare few that do not. Also look at the terms of service, ads may start out free, but have a cost later. So be sure to know what you are getting into. If they ask for a credit card then you know it is not truly free. - 15634

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