Getting Traffic and Sales From Free Advertising
I actually feel kind of silly at times using free ads forum sites. They seem a little ridiculous. But the reality of it is that I’ve seen good amounts of traffic and sometimes even sales from posting ads.
Many of these free advertising 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.” This just means that I make a thread with one of my ads in it, and then I keep coming back and replying to that same thread over and over again with the same ad or a similar one. 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 two main keys to success when posting to free ads forums is to use great ad copy and to just be consistent and keep coming back to post my ads whenever I get the chance. Another cool thing is that there is forum posting software on the market that automates the whole process. Otherwise it can get a little tedious at times. 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. Again a few of these classifieds sites also have big traffic. They might as well be looking at your advertisement.
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 a lot of dirt-cheap freelancers and virtual assistants around. Well it’s something that might be worth trying.