Monday, December 29, 2008

The Low Down on Free Classified Ads

By Alex Wu

You have something you want to sell, or maybe something that you want? You do not want to pay to advertise it in the local paper. Well there are a few papers that let you advertise for free, and there are many more online sites that let you advertise 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.

When you decide to place a free classified ad on the Internet, do your homework and find out which ones rank highest on the search engines. You can use Alexa toolbar for this, or just do web searches as if you were looking for something on the Internet classifieds. Once you get the results make a note of the top ten results as these will be your most looked at classified ad websites. You should advertise on more than one.

If you have smaller items you may want to hit a larger audience. So advertise in local and global. The choice is yours just make sure you add shipping into your price. Read other ads to get a feeling for how they should read. See how fast the ads move, that is to say how quickly items sell. This is important for you to know what to expect.

You can eve post a picture with your ad of a product that is for sale, like a bike or a car. This adds more interest to your ad and draws more attention. Why pay money and not have the same options? It just seems ridiculous.

The ads can run anywhere from 7 to 30 days depending on the website, so it is worth checking into it. If they have any stats as far as how fast people are able to sell on their read them, if here are testimonials read them as well.

Make sure you make your method of payment expected clear in your ad Give an e-mail address rather than a phone number. I would suggest signing up for a free account just for this purpose. Then you will not get any junk mail. Keep it simple, and let the ad work for you. - 15478

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