Are You Using Classifieds To Your Best Advantage?

Brand & Marketing

Jan 19, 2011

863 Views

Classifieds

Classifieds are small, short text adverts that millions of people are reading every day.

So they are an important promotional method that are easy to set up and can be very effective in sending you visitors and sign ups.

The great thing about online classifieds is that they are mostly free.

As with any free advertising method, this brings an advantage and disadvantage.

The most obvious advantage and the main reason you should use classifieds is that it costs you nothing... so you can use this method even if you have an advertising budget of zero.. Any sign ups you get from posting a classified ad is 100% pure profit with no expenses to consider.

So if you post a classified ad and attract 1 sign up you get 100% of pure profit. There's not many advertising methods that offer that benefit and that alone is incentive enough to use them. It gives you the maximum return on investment because your investment is a little time actually submitting your advert to the sites.

Being a free source of advertising, it does also have a disadvantage that all free advertising has. Unfortunately, the traffic it will generate to your site is going to be small in number and very often it will not be the most targeted. And because of this, you can not rely on just classifieds to generate all your visitors and sign ups.

The important thing to realize is the limitations of classified advertising. Although the site may have tens of thousands of readers each day, the adverts are separated into categories, and sub categories. This means that people can easily look for the sort of ads they are interested in and ignore the rest......which means many will be ignoring your advert.

To get your ad seen by as many people as possible you should try to place your ad under as many categories as possible - but it has to be relevant or the site may not let you post there.

In this way you are getting your ad in front of far more people than if you simply placed it under one category.

The other thing to do (if the site allows you to) is place different ads in the same category. So you can have 2 or 3 adverts all written slightly differently but all pointing to YOUR URL that you should have created and then redirected to your referral link.

In this way you may get people who ignore your first ad but then read the second and visit your site. So you actually gain a visitor you would not have got if you only had one advert posted. If you use this tactic under each of the many categories you post in you can dramatically improve your chances of getting more visitors.

Using this technique you can actually have dozens of different adverts under many different categories all on the same classified site and therefore have much greater exposure in front of your potential visitors and customers.

The next thing to do once you've comprehensively posted in one classified site is to move on to the next one and do the same thing.

Although there are millions of people who read classified sites each day they are not all reading the same site.

In fact most of the classifieds sites actually have a relatively small visitor number so if you just stick to one you are seriously reducing the amount of people who will see or read your advert.

You have to take the time to post on as many sites as you possibly can. If you only post on one site you are almost certainly wasting your time.

If you use an established and popular classified ad site you can only expect around 500 people to actually read your ad in a month with a 0.5 to 2% sign up rate.

But post on 10 or more other sites with the same visitor numbers and percentages and you can see how it's possible to increase your sign ups to over 25 a month.

With just a little effort you can make a decent number of sign ups on a daily basis just from free advertising so long as you post as many ads as you can on as many sites as you possibly can.

You really want to be hitting these classified sites as soon as you can. Even if it takes you a whole day or even longer it is worth doing. The more you post the more visitors you get and the more sign ups you can potentially get.

With classified advertising, it really is just a numbers game. You have to give yourself the best chance of "winning" by posting on as many sites as you possibly can. Some sites will have a very high reader number and may send you 10 or more visitors each day, but others will have much smaller numbers and may only send you 5 visitors a week.

Advertising on just one or two sites is going to make classified advertising almost useless.....but if you post on dozens or even hundreds of sites classified advertising suddenly becomes very powerful.

Managing your adverts!

Finally, you have to make sure the adverts you post are kept up to date and do not expire.

Different sites have different policies as to the length of time they allow your advert to remain on their site. Generally there is a set time that your advert is posted before it expires and gets deleted from the site. This time ranges from around 7 days to 30 days.

Because of this you have to keep on top of things and make sure you regularly re-submit your ads to ensure they are always displayed. Normally the site in question will send you an email to let you know that your ad is about to expire so you can then go back in an re-submit it and keep it "Live" for another week or month.

Keeping ALL your adverts constantly updated and refreshed is one of the most important things you can do to maintain a steady flow of traffic to your referral link...and over a few months you will get enough sign ups to have made the work involved worth while.

If you have a budget for it using an advert submission service will save you time in getting your classified ad submitted to thousands of sites.

There are a lot of these services out there with very competitive pricing. Simply search for these services using these search phrases.

Classified ad submission

Classified ad blaster

Classified ad services

Marketing tip:

Remember to always put a CAPITAL LETTER as the first letter of your URL in any advert you submit.Your advert text must never 'sell' or try to 'close' the deal but ONLY present the benefits or create a desire to know more.

Don't forget about offline classifieds. Local and regional newspapers offer cheap classified ads and they can be a source of several new sign ups a month.