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
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.
MerchantCircle.com
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
Mom Packs
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
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.
AdLeaf
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.
