To tell you the truth, I really feel sort of silly using free advertising forums, as they seem a bit ridiculous. But the truth is I’ve found that they actually do bring consistent traffic and sometimes even a few sales.
Many of these classified ads 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.” 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 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. Still, if you don’t like the idea of forum posting software, you can always use tabbed browsing and keep several tabs open with the various 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 see your ads instead of somebody else’s.
There is another thing to also consider. These sites actually do count for having backlinks as far as the search engines go. I mean I’m not saying they have the kind of value that will rocket your site to the top of the search engines, but they are most certainly better than nothing. The bigger ones seem to get spidered constantly. 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.
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This post was written by Robjohn on May 18, 2009
