Free Advertising

A cynic would say that there is nothing free in life, that everything has a cost. Free advertising does have a cost and that cost is your time. Sure there is no monetary cost, but advertising for free will eat up a lot of time for the result you get. Still, when you are starting out, you have more time than money so spending time to advertise is a better choice than spending money.

Before I get too deep into where you can get free advertising, we need to define what advertising is. Advertising is a way to sell your product or opportunity without you personally making a sales call or presentation. It is your marketing message given out in your absence.

Advertising is meant to do one of two things or both: Gather leads for your product or opportunity and or create an image for your company. Good display advertising should do both. In classified advertising we are probably just asking for leads. These are two ends of the spectrum and there are many possibilities in between.

Print advertising is not the only game in town either. You can advertise on television or on youtube. You can also advertise virtually on line, which can be similar to display advertising or can do much much more. Media advertising is not the end of the road either, because you can deliver your advertisement directly to your prospect. For instance, putting a business card on the bulletin board in the grocery store or hanging flyers on the front door of homes.

So you can start to see how advertising can be either truly free or kinda free. You will have to spend money to print flyers or business cards but there is no cost beyond that. There are also many free classified sites online that you can make use of. You probably will get very few leads this way but the leads will be free.

Let’s talk for a bit about what makes a successful advertising. I had talked about demographics and asking for what you want in another blog. You can apply these to advertising also. To get the best response to an advertisement, you need to advertise where the viewers are interested in what you are advertising. For instance, if you sell children’s books, you may look into advertising in Parents magazine. This is an example and advertising in Parents would have a cost, but you can see what I mean.

Your advertisement must also be carefully crafted so that you are asking for what you truly want. For instance: “Sell household products for profit. Free information: SM, Box 5432, Chicago, Illinois 60652”. The responses to this advertisement will be people who consider themselves sales people, and who are not put off by the idea of selling household products.

These days, you can also create a web space for free or very little money and direct people to visit. Many people use twitter or facebook to get out a marketing message, which are both free. Do a google search on free website for more possibilities. I will write more about advertising in future blog entries.