Friday, January 23, 2009

Using Free Classified Ads to Drive Traffic to Your Site

By Alex Wu

Remember the day when the only way you could sell something was to place an ad in the paper and then sit back and wait for someone to call you? Those days are long gone. With the internet being the most widely used information service, you can not only sell the items in your garage, you can actually start and maintain your own business by using FREE classified ads.

I am sure there are many doubters out there as normally you would never believe when someone wants you to believe that you are going to get something for nothing, but in this case, it is actually true. All you have to do is a Google search and you will find that there are more than 10,000,000 sites out there that would just love to put your information out on the web for free.

All of this creates an opportunity for you to go into business. If you are worried about having something to sell, don't because you don't have to sell anything to have a business on the internet. Here it comes, "I don't have to pay anything and I don't have to sell anything to make money on the net?" The answer is yes and while I have your ears all perked up, let me tell you how.

It is no secret that we all need money right now. The economy is worst than it has ever been and everyone is trying to make an extra buck in any way that they can. This is where the free ads come in. You start up a niche blog about whatever, it really doesn't matter for this example. Then you line up some advertising and of course have some affiliate banners going on your site. All the while, you are posting free classified ads all over the web.

On this site, you have advertising that has been paid for on a monthly basis and you are driving traffic to your site that is now creating a higher rate that you can charge to the advertisers. You are also going to have affiliate links posted on your site that will generate money each and every time someone clicks on one of them and opens up an account or spends money. What have you sold? Nothing, yet you are creating income.

Of course, you can also use this to work your own business. Say you are selling baseball cards. You are obviously going to have your own website up but you need to create traffic so that you can make some money. You are going to go to as many of these sites as you can and post your business to try and drive traffic.

The key to the whole thing though is good keywords. This is what drives the engines and gets your site at the top of the page. If you don't have the right keywords, you will number 12,000,000 instead of being number 1. The whole way to make money on this is to have the highest ranking page when they search. I am not talking about Google here either, all of these free sites have their own internal search engines that people use once they get there. You have to make sure your listing ends up on the top.

We have just touched the surface here but as you can see, free classified ads present an opportunity to make money in various ways. With one internet ad, you can literally reach hundreds of millions of people. A classified ad had come along way from being a 3 line write up in your local daily paper.

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