Free Advertising Tactics for Getting Traffic

Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 8:42 am

: Image by ginnerobot via Flickr

I actually feel kind of silly at times using free ads forum sites. They seem a little ridiculous. But the fact is, I have discovered that they really do bring in regular traffic and sometimes sales and clicks as well.

Some of these post free ads sites get huge amounts of traffic, so if you make it a habit to post ads on a regular basis, your ads will get seen and you just might be pleasantly surprised 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 bumps it to the top of the forum. 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 thing I do is always give my own threads a five-star rating which provides instant credibility.

And lastly, I also reply to popular threads that others have posted using my own ads and gaining even more 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. Another cool thing is that there is forum posting software on the market that automates the whole process. Otherwise it can be a little on the tedious side. 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. 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 is another thing to also consider. The backlinks from these classified sites and forums do count, at least a lttle bit anyway, when it comes to SEO. 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 using anchors with good keywords for your links can’t hurt a bit.

One final thought I have: I haven’t tried this yet myself, but one were to get a profitable system down with the free advertising sites, it would then be possible to outsource the ad posting and really crank up the heat. There’s no shortage of low-cost virtual assistants and freelancers eager to this type of thing. Well it’s something to consider anyway.