Free Advertising Methods

Running your own business means needing to advertise and promote your products/services. If you fail at advertising your business effectively, then that could very well put you out of business. Advertising can be expensive but most businesses starting out set aside whatever dollar amount they can afford to advertise with and work off of that. But if you’re not in the position to pay for advertising at all, there are free advertising methods that you can use to help promote your products/services.

These free advertising methods are simple, but should be effective if you use them consistently. I’ll list them in no particular order, and I’ll follow up with a short description of each free advertising method. They are: email marketing, free ezine ads, free classified ads, placing your web address and maybe a short description of your products/services in your email signature, write business related articles for free article directories, post messages on several message boards with your website’s address in the signature of your posting account and of course word of mouth advertising.

As you can see all of the methods I gave are all done online, well except word of mouth advertising which can be done online and offline.

Email marketing is basically sending information about your products/services to a list of people who opted into receiving emails from your business. In order to have people opt into your email newsletter this will have to be an option on your website.

Free ezine ads are basically ads that people sign up to receive. There are numerous websites that will allow you to place your ad in their system, and your ad will be available to all of the ezine subscribers. The subscriber count varies, but there are some websites claiming that their ezine subscriber list is at 1 million.

Free classified ads are somewhat similar to free ezine ads, but the main difference is that there are no subscribers. People only see your ad when they do a search on the free classified ads sites. 

Placing your web address and maybe a short description of your products/services in your email signature is extremely simple and if you do a lot of emailing, then this method could be very effective. The idea is when you email people for any purpose you’ll be advertising due to your email signature. People will read your email and they’ll see your website’s address and if you add a short description of what you do, then that’ll be even better.

Writing articles for article directories is a method that can and most likely will help your business tremendously. If you can write articles that are informative you must try this method of advertising. Simply find an article directory site through a search, make an account and post articles about whatever you like. In your byline, which is a short paragraph about you as the author just put in your website’s address and what it is that you do. Your traffic will increase more and more as you post your articles.

Posting messages on message boards with your website information in your posting account signature is golden because it can open up a discussion on the message board as to what your business is about. This isn’t always true, but if you build a good reputation around the message boards, people may ask you about your business and what it is that you do.

Word of mouth advertising online offline can catapult your business to higher levels. Unfortunately this has to be done without you initiating it for this advertising method to be genuine, but once people are talking favorably about your business online or offline you will experience great results that no advertising budget can buy.