Free Classified Advertising: The Single Most Important Factor - By: Michael A Jones

Free classified advertising! What a bargain. Plaster your ad all over the internet for free. Tempting isn't it. True, it doesn't cost you any money but what about the time investment? The fact is, free classified advertising can be costly if it absorbs precious hours of time and you don't see anything for it. On the other hand, free classified advertising can be very effective if done properly. It is amazing though when browsing classified ads how ineffective many of them are. How do you know? Because if you check the free classified ad sites regularly you don't see them again. Ads that remain unchanged month after month are there because they are working. Why? Because they are working. Do you know the single biggest mistake advertisers make when using free classified advertising? If you can identify this major error, you are likely to see a huge difference in the results you get from online classified ads. Here it is: The biggest, single mistake advertisers make is: ****Trying to use a free classified ad to SELL!**** Am I crazy? If it's not to sell, why would advertisers do free classified advertising? Let's elaborate. How many words can you use in a free classified ad? How many lines are you allowed? With the majority of classified sites there are strict limitations and this applies even more to newspaper classifieds. Really, can you explain enough or convince the prospect within a few words in a classified ad to make a sale? Of course not. Often to close a sale you need to give a convincing sales pitch. You need to highlight benefits, benefits and benefits to the potential customer for the product or service you are offering. You cannot possibly do that in a few words. Yet time and again you see higher priced items for sale simply stating item and price. What do you think the response rate is for ads like that? So how should you approach a free classified advertising campaign? By using your classified ad as bait, not as a sales pitch. The whole purpose of your ad should revolve around this one factor, capturing the interest, anticipation, even enthusiasm of your prospect and motivating them to take the next step. What is the next step? That's up to you. Your classified ad could be used to get more subscribers to your mailing list. So offer a free gift in the headline of your classified and and then put a form on your landing page for prospects to enter their name and email address. Or you may want the prospect to click through to your sales page which has plenty of copy to motivate them to buy. Whichever option you decide on, make sure you use free classified advertising to simply hook the prospect, not sell them. This involves concentrated and deliberate thinking solely about your headline. Every word counts in a headline. Craft it, sweat a little over it, and test it. Remember, people act on emotions. In your headline, can you touch the prospect's hot button and get them emotionally involved so they actually want to click through to the next step? Be sure you clearly differentiate in your mind the difference between features and benefits when it comes to the product or service you are offering. It is very easy to forget this and make the headline revolve around a feature. Every feature has a corresponding benefit. Center the headline around the benefit, not the feature. What's in it for the customer? Just make that message scream out loud and clear and you should have no problem with free classified advertising. At the same time not all benefits are equal. Make a list of the features with the corresponding benefit shown alongside. Now look over that list and isolate what to you is the strongest possible benefit to the customer. Don't allow minor issues and side benefits get you sidetracked. You want to magnify the number 1 bar none benefit if the customer buys your product or service! Select some emotionally charged words to emphasize it and then craft your headline around them. A final word, make sure you tell the prospect what they have to do. Statistics show there is a higher click through rate when you tell the client to 'Click Here for . . .' or in some other way indicate what they need to do. Don't assume they will anyway. Words such as 'Click Here' or even more emphatically with a sense of urgency, 'Click Here Now!' are almost guaranteed to get you a better response. Make the focus of your free classified advertising capturing not selling your potential clients, emphasize the number 1 major benefit to them, and then tell them what to do. The results could be amazing! Copyright (c) 2009 Michael A Jones