ARTICLE
Whether you operate a website or a brick-and-mortar business, you can boost your business by advertising online.
You can start by posting your Internet ads to free classified ad service websites such as www.craigslist.com, www.37mileads.com and www.kijiji.com.
Craigslist and www.37mileads.com practically allow you to post anything except offensive material. Kijiji however has more limitations, it doesn’t allow you to post ads purely for driving traffic to your website, so if you own a web store, then you might be out of luck by posting there because your ad will only get deleted in the end. They also do not allow links within your ads.
www.37mileads.com is the least restrictive of all of the three ad listing services. It’s newer than the other two, but seems to get it just right. It has the simplicity of Craigslist, but none of the restrictiveness of kijiji. It even lets you post your ads to state-wide or nation-wide, which is not possible on Craigslist.
Where Craigslist fails in disallowing you to post to a small unknown areas, www.37mileads.com gives you the option to post to any town in America, and with just an extra click of a button, also to other towns within the vicinity of a given radius. www.37mileads.com also allows you to format your ad in HTML, and allow as many links in your ad as needed.
Another benefit of the www.37mileads.com is the ease at which an ad can be posted. There is no registration required. You pretty much don’t need a website, or pay for hosting service to have your colored ads be seen by the rest of the world. Link your ads together and you’d have your own website instantly (since your ads would never expire)! Also there are no ads on the site, which means you won’t have to worry about annoying competing ads taking attention away from your postings. Lawyers should be flocking to this site.
The three sites are all very well search-engine optimized, which means since your ad will have a high chance of being seen by other web surfers if you post it on one of these sites.
Other methods of promoting your business for free on line includes submitting your website to variable search engines such as Yahoo and Google. However this method takes a long time to pay off when your website is new because it takes time to get indexed in a search engine, and even if you are indexed, it will still take time for you to improve the page rank, which means, your site will probably not be seen by many people for quite a while.
You can also try talking about your business on various message boards, but depending on the popularity of the message board and the posting policies, the return on investment here is rather unpredictable. But hey, if you can generate a buzz through a message board, good for you.
Consider signing up with Helium.com and AssociatedContent.com to publish self-written articles about your business. Because these sites already have good Google ranking, your promotional articles have a good chance being seen than a piece written on your own website with a lower ranking if topic of discussion is very general.
And last but not the least method is to make your own commercial and put it on youtube and other free video hosting sites. Again, with the popularity of these services, and the number of people posting to them, you are again a small fish in the big ocean.
Using only one of the above mentioned methods will probably get you no where, but combine them together, you might have a free but powerful ad campaign going.
