Free Advertising

 
Where to find free advertising 

Here is a quick outline of some of the most common free advertising channels for you, your product, your issue or your business for free.

Free classified advertising

There are a number of both online and offline media that offer free advertising. Many small local newspapers will give free ad space.

The most popular online classified advertising site is Craig's List, which describes itself as a provider of "local classifieds and forums for jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events.

There are also many websites that offer free advertising, but you need to exercise care in using them because they can become a source of email addresses for spammers.

eBay and other auction sites would not be considered a source of free classified advertising because they charge a fee when someone responds to an ad by buying whatever is posted.

Related article: Using Craig's List for Free Advertising and Business Promotion
 

Free advertising in the social media

"Social media" is a term that has recently been used to describe online vehicles, tools and programs that promote information sharing, discussion, and "community" among Internet users.

The most prominent social media channels are video sharing sites like YouTube, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, online games and popular personal programs like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

For an in depth look at how the social media can be used to promote and advertise, click on  Facebook Advertising and Creating a Facebook Business Page For Online Branding and Using MySpace Links For Commercial Advertising And Promotion .
 

Free advertising through article publication

There are now hundreds of sites on the Internet that accept articles written by almost anyone.

There are two benefits to the authors of these articles:

Authors are usually permitted to include links back to their websites, which help increase traffic by those who read the articles.

Backlinks improve website rankings, since inbound links are among the most important factors that determine how high a website is placed in SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages (sometimes called Search Engine Ranking Pages).

The best known article syndication site on the Internet today is www.ezinearticles.com, but there are hundreds of others.

If you don't like to write, or don't feel capable of writing a credible article yourself, you can visit sites like www.elance.com and www.guru.com to hire inexpensive ghostwriters.