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Marketing with classified ads By David Callan Offline you'll have to pay for almost all classifieds you post, however online there are thousands of free sites which will allow you to post your ad and of course there are plenty of low-cost sites which will also except your ad. Apart from the fact you can get free classifieds online, online ads have a few advantages compared to offline ones. The Internet has a much much larger audience than your local or national newspaper has so more people can potentially see your ad and act upon it. You can post your ads online and you could have feedback and sales within a very short time as usually people just have to click on your URL for more info rather than make a phone call or send a letter. Ads that are placed online are much cheaper than their offline counterparts, this is because space is not tight on the Internet as it is in a magazine or newspaper. A user looking for a particular product can usually perform a search for a particular word or phrase from the classified ad site whereas offline people have to manually scan through the different categories. A disadvantage of online classified ads to the webmaster is that it can be quite time consuming to do especially if you want any sort of success with them, which you obviously do. However many good pieces of software are becoming available which can automatically submit your ad to lots of these sites, they aren't cheap but if you're interested try doing a search for 'classified ad software' or something similar on Google.com or Yahoo.com. Let's get on to the good part, how to make the most out of posting to classified ads. Stay specific, always post to the most appropriate category or categories there are, this way you'll be posting to an area where people will actually be interested in your product, this is vital. Remember especially with free classified sites that a lot of other webmasters will be trying to promote their products and websites with ads too so you'll have to repost your ad regularly to stay near the top of the bunch, nobody will even see your ad if it's at the bottom of another 50 ads, will they? Now on to the actual copy of your ad, since few classified sites allow you to post graphics you'll have to rely on your headline to grab the attention of the people scanning the ads in front of them. You can do this by using words like 'free', 'secrets', 'how-to' and other words which will make them curious to find out more. If you can, include your keywords in your headline as some classified sites will use the headline as the link to your site this in turn will help you when the search engines examine your link popularity. Always target your market, if you sell a product for webmasters mention 'webmasters' in the headline and body, next you should mention what your product will do for them (i.e. the benefits of it. - how will it make their life easier). I have read this in numerous places and now you're going to read it too, the idea with classified ads is to generate interest and not to actually sell anything there and then, that's far to hard to do, you want to get the reader wanting more information and you should give this to them through your website or autoresponder. This is why your ad body should always be short, concise and to the point, a big long page sales letter will scare people off. Follow the above few tips and you should see some results, before you go I want to put this to you. Which is better paid or free classifieds? Well for me paid classifieds have always produced much better results, I think this is because advertising in "Free Classified Sites" has now become an almost automated task which means not many people actually visit and respond to classified ads. Submission spiders are wonderful creatures but aren't often interested in clicking on your well-crafted classified ad. Two of the best places where you can place fee based ads which do bring
results are AOL.com and Yahoo.com. Good luck!
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