Do free classifieds really work? The truth is, sometimes they do and sometimes they do not. Marketing is all about numbers. The more methods you use to advertise, the more visitors to your website you will get!

Two of the best ways to currently bring traffic to your website is with pay per click search engines such as Overture and Google along with solo ads in ezines.

With that said, free classified ad sites do still work! What is important is that the product or service that you are promoting should be something that the advertiser can benefit from. Remember this, it must be a product or service that advertisers need! What I mean is that many website owners see other ads while searching for their ads to make sure they are being displayed. The trick is to find out what website owners need and your traffic will greatly increase.

If your budget is tight and you need to use inexpensive advertising on the internet then nothing is cheaper then free classifieds. There are many websites that offer classified ads, some have been around a while and have built up alot of traffic, while others are not worth your time and effort. To determine what classified ad sites to post on, do a search for keywords such as "list your free classified ad" and "free classified ads" in the search engines. The top search results will be websites that offer the best opportunity for your ads to get viewed and since the major search engines like Yahoo and Google are already getting targeted traffic, then there is a good chance that your ad will get crawled by the search engines and thus help to increase your link popularity.

One of the tricks to free classified advertising is quantity and testing. It is critical to test every ad that you run. And, you may not like this, but you need to submit hundreds of ads every week. That is why it is important to find classified sites that work for you. Once you do, you can then concentrate less on posting ads and more on finding new classified ad sites that produce results for you.

Do not spam free classified sites. Classified ad sites have guidelines as to how often you can post. It is important to follow these guidelines exactly or risk being banned from placing classified ads.

Have you ever wondered why free classified ads are free? Let us think about this. When you post a free ad you will receive a confirmation email telling you that your ad was posted. This means you could receive hundreds of confirmation emails every week, depending on your classified ad marketing campaign. What usually comes along with those confirmations? If you said advertisements, then your right!

I would like to suggest that you set up a free email account with Yahoo or Hotmail and once a week delete all confirmation emails so your inbox does not get full.

Guess what else happens? Your new email account will start getting filled with junk emails due to people stripping your email address from your online ads. But, that is ok if you think of junk email as opportunities. Take a quick look through your junk email before you delete it and respond back to the emails that are not confirmations, with one of your classified ads. I like to ask for more information while I am replying with my ad. Your purpose should be to try and get a dialog of emails going and build up a relationship.

You will be surprised at how many opportunities become available using this technique.

When posting to free classified sites you must not get distracted by advertising that says: "submit your ad to thousands of sites" or "post to 1million sites with our software". You will find alot of these offers attractive, but think about this, If their service is so effective then why are they not using it themselves? Why in the world would anyone advertise effective advertising? The fact of the matter is this, submission software is useless because they post to sites where no people visit and good classified sites have protection against submission software.

The only proven method to use for successful classified advertising is by posting manually. Posting with tools such as TypItIn and AdWizard will save you time and effort.

Just remember to come up with original titles and ads and do not forget to test, test, test.

Copright 2006 by Joe Rispoli