Most of the time, it is a wise investment to pay for great advertising. And although there are plenty of free advertising opportunities out there, it will only be as effective as your plan behind the advertising campaign.
But let’s say you understand your target audience, you have a compelling product, offer or service, and you just need a little help on the budget side of things. In the online world, even the pros can’t predict the outcome of a strong advertising campaign. Sometimes a change in wording or link color can increase clicks or purchases by 2-3%.
So it makes sense to test a lot at the beginning of your campaign - and with these freebies you can do that on someone else’s dime so that when you do invest your hard-earned money, it goes to a campaign you know will convert prospects into customers.
Local Online Directories
Google Local and Local.Yahoo.com
You can’t go wrong with free business listings from the two biggest websites on the internet. They will show your ad to people who search from your community automatically. Yahoo has an option to upgrade to a paid premium listing as well.
If you’ve ever searched for Pizza or a Dentist in your town and called the first local result at the top of the page - then you have been influenced by the power of these free business listings!
Craigslist can be both a blessing and a curse - for some businesses, it just wouldn’t make sense to place their ad next to such wildly random classified ads that could be fradulent. But a well written ad with links to a reputable site can help freelancers and other service professionals spread the word about their businesses.
Merchant Circle is a combination of a business listing site with business reviews. If you don’t have a website or don’t know how to optimize for search engines, you can take advantage of their free listing which will have a good chance of showing up in the first page or two. The free package also allows businesses to upload photos, coupons, and create a business blog (wow!).
Customers can also post their reviews of your business, and everyone knows the power of a good testimonial!
For those of you in the UK, there is a similar free business listing service called TouchLocal.
Search Engine and Link Advertising
Technically, these offers require anywhere between $5 and $50 to get started, so aren’t exactly free. Combined though, they offer $300 worth of PPC (Pay Per Click) and text link advertising for $125.
Most of these offers are for first time customers only - you’ll have to check with the individual companies to determine if you are eligible for these freebies.
Yahoo! Sponsored Search $5 for $25 worth of clicks
Yahoo Sponsored Search is second only to Google’s power - and Yahoo’s paid ads appear on a wide network of big sites, including CNN and AltaVista. They also have an extremely helpful user-interface and a how-to section. They also allow you to create several ads and they will automatically rotate them and pick the one that gets the most clicks.
Enhance Interactive $50 for $75 worth of clicks
Enhance Interactive is a niche search engine marketing company that serves ads for a variety of sites, including Dogpile, VeriSign, OpenList.com and MyZip.com. They also have testimonials from big players such as BizRate and HotWire, as well as some advertising alternatives such as paid inclusion (flat fee guaranteed inclusion in search results).
Although some companies require a minimum of up to $.10 bid per click, Enhance has a very low $.03 minimum bid per click. So the money spent with smaller search engines can potentially go much farther than with the big players.
Search123 $50 for $70 worth of clicks
According to the Search 123 site, their visitors come from portal pages, a Spanish language network, niche content sites and some branded search directories. They also are unique in that they offer free account set-up, keyword research and expansion, and account management and optimization services. None of the other search engine marketing companies do that!
Text Link Ads $25 for $125 worth of text links
Some studies suggest that text links out perform banner ads - this is especially true on blogs. Text Link Ads primarily sells text links on blogs, although they have an extensive directory of all kinds of web sites. Since you get to choose which site your ad appears on, you get far more control over where your ad appears compared to search engine advertising. Plus they have a free link buying guide or even a free recommendation service to those new to buying link advertising.
The sites in the Text Link Ads directory are focused on hundreds of small niches, and a link can be bought for as little as $15 a month or as much as $600 a month. The links also point straight to your web site, and all sites have a minimum Google Page Rank of 4, so the links will also help your search engine optimization efforts.
Barter Advertising
The Mom Pack includes sharing all kinds of advertising opportunities, both on and offline, through information swaps, link exchanges, or quite literally a packet of advertising pieces enclosed into an order shipment. Although the Members’ Agreement with Mom Pack is that you do not charge a fee for an actual Mom Pack, you can charge exact shipping fees to mail a single Mom Pack to someone that requests one from you. Generally, Mom Packs are not shipped out, but passed out at events, craft fairs, expos, doctors offices, markets, hair salons, with orders and many more places.
For businesses that target moms and are run by moms, the Mom Pack ‘community’ is a great way to help moms promote other moms.
AdGridWork is a brand new contextual advertising service that is 100% free. All that is required is that if you place an ad on their network, you must place ads on your own site for someone else in the network. Since it is ‘contextual’ they will monitor and only serve relevant ads on your site and only display your ads on relevant websites.
Similar to the above service, AdLeaf is also a contextual ad barter network - in other words, a free automated link exchange. A little experimentation is in order with both of these services to determine what kind of visitors they can drive to a website. Although more suitable for blogs, both of them offer 100% free advertising to a relevant audience.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.22 Responses to “Ten Free Advertising Opportunities for Your Business”
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May 10th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
[…] free and cheap ways to kick off an advertising campaign, read today’s Entrepreneur.com post Ten Free Advertising Opportunities for Your Business. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and […]
May 10th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
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May 10th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
[…] Piersall from Entrepreneur.com just posted a great article on Ten Free Online Advertising Opportunities for Your Business. In the article, she highlights some free advertising options for those of us who are too thrifty […]
May 10th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Hey Wendy -
Great post. I think a lot of todays bloggers and businesses look past the free alternatives and go straight into the AdWords/ReviewMe/Paid Endorsement game. Its refreshing to see someone rehash the importance of directories and link exchanges that have helped so many of us become established. Posted this one to digg
Nick Mazza
May 13th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Thanks Wendy, I bookmarked AdGrid and AdLeaf. I already have an account with Yahoo local and also Google local.
May 13th, 2007 at 11:43 am
ps I am also a member of Mompack it has turned out to be a great free networking experience.
May 13th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
You can also include Blog Posts For Sale as an option
We help sell links within blogs.
http://www.blogpostsforsale.com
May 13th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Also, don’t forget http://base.google.com and http://www.backpage.com. Those are two excellent sources of free advertising as well
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:31 pm
This is such great information. I added all of this to my “to-do” list for the next few days. I will look into all of these amazing opportunities - thanks! This is perfect to start generating advertisers for my site!
May 27th, 2007 at 8:06 am
This information provided is very helpful. I just started an online consignment shop. What can I do to make potential customers comfortable with purchasing items from my website?
May 29th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Shalonda - There are a couple of things you can do. First of all, think of making people comfortable as a way of building rapport. Go to some of the sites that you trust and get some hints from the things they have done to build trust and credibility.
For small businesses, it helps to let your site visitors get to know you better. I noticed that you ‘About Us’ page has only a little bit of info. Take that opportunity to let people know why you started your business and why you are passionate about what you do.
You may also want to consider building some interactivity into the site. A blog, forum, or product review module all send your site visitors a strong message - that you care about what they have to say.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:35 am
[…] I wrote up a post on my Entrepreneur.com blog on ten free advertising opportunities, I would never have guessed just how popular one of the ideas would be - free online local business […]
July 5th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I’m in need of information on all sites that are offfering free web site advertising and how to link it with my site. sign ann. ann.atworktoday.gmail.com
July 29th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I have built my business with these free sites. They are great
August 6th, 2007 at 6:57 am
The verdict is still out on adgridwork for me. I have been using it for several weeks, but haven’t received significant traffic from it, despite my ad being shown thousands of times thus far.
September 30th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Thanks for the great resource links. Will definitely be checking them out. Another great alternative is www.Advoyager.com.
Using free business cards from Vistaprint, email signature in your emails & word of mouth are also great promotional tools. Cafepress can be used for promotional items.
Amazon - write reviews for books etc. If you have an eBay account don’t forget your ‘About Me’ page to promote your business.
October 14th, 2007 at 7:00 am
I purchased this website in August not knowing what i was getting myself into but it looks like i failing. I have no marketing/advertising experiencing and no liquid funds to put further into this business and i have not made a penny off of it. I need help with free advertising/marketing,can you help? Monica
October 26th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Hi Monica, I have just had my site go online. Money for marketing and advertising is tight. I have found that by donating some of my products for local ticket draws for ex Run for the Cure or Children’s Summer Camp has been helpful though the results don’t show themselves right away.
Local newspaper story has also helped as long as there is a “unique spin ” to the story.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Very helpful information. I have recently reformed my business blog using many of these tips and have been very pleased with the results. Some drastic measures are necessary, yes, but the big things like code and background design are always enhanced by the little things like titles and inclusion on highly searched directories. Thanks for the reminder.
February 17th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
I am just beginning in my business and I am new to advertising.
February 26th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Wow These helped so much i can not wait to check all of them out!
February 29th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Please send me link for your website!
Thanks, Janet