March 22 2009
Getting Traffic and Sales From Free Ads
Tagged Under : advertising, free advertising, promotion, traffic
Ok, so I feel a little silly using these free advertising forum sites. But the reality of it is that I’ve seen good amounts of traffic and sometimes even sales from posting ads.
Many of these free 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.” This just means that I make a thread with one of my ads in it, and then I keep coming back and replying to that same thread over and over again with the same ad or a similar one. This automatically sends it to the top of the forum which is where you ads really get seen. Not only that, it accumulates the most views and has the most replies as compared to the single ad threads, thus making it look really popular.
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 only thing that it takes to be successful when posting to free advertising forums, is to come up with good ad copy and the just keep attacking the forums, posting my ads again and again whenever time permits. There is automatic forum posting software that makes it breeze too. Otherwise it can get a little tedious at times. However, if you don’t want to use software to post ads, you can used tabs in your browser and keeps a bunch of tabs open with all of your forums.
On top of posting ads at the forums, I also post to some the free classifieds sites as well. Some of these classifieds sites also have huge amounts of traffic, just like the forums. They might as well be looking at your advertisement.
There’s something else worth considering here as well. These sites actually do count for having backlinks as far as the search engines go. Of course these are not like links from the home page of some big authority site, but still, they do count as far the search engines go. The more popular ones are always getting spidered by the search engines. So giving a little thought to the anchor text you use for your links doesn’t really hurt.
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 no shortage of low-cost virtual assistants and freelancers eager to this type of thing. Well it’s something to consider anyway.

