After a career as a professional musician and band leader in the Miami South Florida Area I decided to see if I could make some money with this new internet thing. After years of trial and error I started to get the hang of it and now I am completely financially independent because of my various online businesses. The goal of this blog is to chronicle my continued marketing experiences. I focus on real examples of what works and what does not work.
Google does not give us a recipe for getting our sites ranked. We have to use our own experiences to see what actually works rather than theory.
I hope you enjoy the blog. Please let us know what you think in the comments area. We appreciate your feedback.
We have promoted over 4000+ classified ads for our customers at Classifiedsubmissions.com. We have had an opportunity to see what works and what does not work.
One of the main reasons we have written this ebook is to share our valuable experience so that our customers and anybody else interested in advertising their business through classified ads can find success.
1. Promote a Landing Page With An Opt In Form Not A Big Corporate Site.
You only have a few seconds to get your prospect’s attention. If you send them to a big corporate site with different links, about us pages, different products, company history etc. then prospects will most likely just click away.
You need a clear simple landing page which has one clear focus and that is to get the prospect’s email address so you can follow up.
The entire goal of an opt in landing page, also known as a squeeze page, is to get the prospect to give you his email address.
Then your autoresponder can follow up indefinitely every few days with follow ups giving your prospect more information on your product or service.
The reason these pages are called “Squeeze Pages” is that they totally focus on getting the prospect on taking one action they “squeeze” the prospect into giving you his email address.
Squeeze Pages Do Not Try to Sell Anything They Totally Focus on Getting The Prospect To Subscribe to a Newsletter.
Often they offer a free giveaway or bonus to entice the prospect to subscribe.
This bonus can be a free ebook, like this one, or even free software, free coaching, free tips, free valuable information, just use your imagination.
We suggest asking for email only when creating an opt in form. The more fields of information you ask for the less opt ins you will get.
For example if you ask for first name, last name, email address, where did you hear from us, blood type, best time to call, sexual preference, blood type and then put a complicated Google Image Recaptcha form on your opt in form you can be pretty sure nobody will opt in unless your offer is incredible.
The More Info You Ask For The Less Opt Ins You Will Receive
Bottom line you need to make it as simple and compelling as possible for people to join your newsletter.
Also, you want your landing page to have one focus, that is to get the email of the prospect. Save the selling for your follow up emails.
Here is a sample landing page:
Here are some characteristics of an effective landing page:
All text and opt in form should be above the fold. This means prospects should not have to scroll down the page to see the opt in form.
Give bullet points with real compelling reasons why people should subscribe to your newsletter
The form should have one clear focus and call to action, to get the prospect’s email. There should be no other distracting information on the form.
Have some sort of giveaway to entice the prospect to subscribe such as an ebook or software or maybe something creative that fit’s your market perfectly
On the submit button do not just put “submit” put what the prospect will be receiving. For example “Send Me Free Software.”
Have a compelling picture or better a video illustrating people why they should subscribe.
Ask for the prospect’s “Best Email” in the form. Do not just put the default “email” in the email form. You want the best email of the prospect. The one they monitor all the time. If you just ask you will surprised how many people comply.
Do not ask for too much information. Just ask for the email only or perhaps name and email. The more info you ask for the less opt ins you will get.
Do not put a captcha form on your opt in form! Make it easy for people to subscribe!
Set your autoresponder to “single opt in.” This means they will not have to click a confirmation link to get your follow up messages. The less you ask your prospect to do the better.
There are a number of landing page services but many are quite expensive. One of the simplest and most reasonable ways to get started is with Getresponse.
One of The Simplest Ways to Get Started is to Get A Combo Landing Page Creator/Autoresponder System With Getresponse
Getresponse is offering a combination autoresponder and and landing page creator for less than what most landing page creation companies charge for landing pages alone.
Of course, everything I have said here applies if you are promoting your business and you are looking for ongoing clients. If you are trying to sell your car or your bicycle just put an ad for your car or bike.
However, many of the tips below will even apply for selling individual one time sales.
2. Have a Fantastic Offer!
Your offer is everything. There is no sense in paying for advertising if your offer does not offer overwhelming value for the prospect.
Ask yourself honestly “am I offering a legit fantastic deal for my customers?” Rack your brain to come up with ideas to make your offer better.
Spy on your competition and see what they are doing and if you can do the same or better.
What bonuses can you offer your customers? What special deals can you offer them? What are you offering that your customer is not offering?
Think what you would want if you were your customer and give your customers just that and more.
Even if you are promoting an affiliate offer you can still offer special bonuses. Successful affiliates set up web pages with bonuses if people order from their links. Get creative!
A Fantastic High Value Offer Does Not Need As Much Traffic to Succeed!
Spend time making your offer the best it can be and it will dramatically affect your results and save you big money in advertising costs
3. Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up!
Most prospects are not just going to go to your website and buy right away. It has been proven that most prospects need at least 7 follow ups before they purchase.
This is why we suggest you concentrate on getting the prospect’s email and just their email at first.
Once they are subscribed to your newsletter you can follow up with them for weeks to come with your autoresponder follow up series.
If you do not know what an autoresponder is please see this article.
Our autoresponder series follows up for over 1 year!
We would suggest starting with at least 7 autoresponder follow up messages. Then you can add on as you go.
We generally set our autoresponder messages to 4 days apart. You do not want to bug them every day but you still want to keep in touch.
The autoresponder messages should not be hard pitches. They should be giving your prospects valuable information and building your credibility.
Follow Up Messages Should Not Be Hard Sales Pitches But Should Contain Valuable Information For Your Prospect While Building Your Credibility
The idea is to get as many prospects as possible into your sales funnel as possible. Do not worry about sales at first. Just focus on getting as many subscribers as possible and follow up, follow up, follow up!
Do Not Expect Sales Right Away. Just Concentrate on Filling Your Sales Funnel. The Sales Will Come. Hang in There!
There are many autoresponder services. This ones we use and recommend are: Getresponse and Aweber.
The title is the first part of your ad that your prospect will see. Take some time to come up with some killer titles! You want to entice your prospects to click on the title to see your ad.
Look through your competition’s ads and see what ads entice you to click. You can get lots of good ideas spying on your competition.
The Title is The First Part of Your Ad That Prospects Will See. Get Their Attention!
There is nothing wrong with imitating success. However, you do not need to copy them exactly. Modify the titles to suit your particular niche.
Do you get lots of spam emails? You know spammers are often masters at coming up with some creative tiles.Go through your emails in your inbox and see if there are any titles that arouse your curiosity.
Then modify these titles to suit your business.
Here are some tips to help you come up with some winning titles:
1. Keep it short and sweet. The perfect length for a headline is 6 words. For example. Donald Trump. Good or Bad?
The less people have to read the more chance you have of capturing their attention.
Backpage Easy Ad Submitter- This software will submit your ad to all400+ US cities in a variety of categories automatically. Just input your ad, and your contact details and submit your ad to one of the highest traffic classified ad sites in the world. Solves image captchas and clicks your confirmation email links as well. See here to learn more about Backpage Easy Ad Submitter.
The Free Ad Forum Pro Submitter– This is the pro version of our free classified ad submission software. It will submit unlimited ads to ANY category and to ANY city in ANY country database on TheFreeAdForum.com
Also submits much faster and you can include up to 7 pictures and a YouTube video with your ads. No proxies, or captcha services needed! No ghosting of ads since we own TheFreeAdForum.com. By far the easiest and most hassle free software we have created so far! Learn more here.
ClassAdsCom Easy Submitter– This easy to use software will submit your ad to 500+ cities in a variety of categories to one of the busiest classified ad sites in the world on autopilot. Learn more here
Global Free Classified Ad Submitter-This easy to use software posts unlimited ads to any category on one of the highest traffic classified ad sites in the world. Follow our simple instructions and your ads go live 99% of the time. Visit here to learn more.
TheFreeadforum Free Submitter (Free Software)- This software will submit your ad to 50 random cities in the thefreeadforum.com Jobs/Business Opportunities section. This is completely free software. Visit here to learn more.
Global Ad Reply Reverse Advertising Software-This easy to use powerful software delivers real eyeballs to your ads every time! It will reply automatically up to 300 ads per session on one of the highest traffic classified ad sites in the world. Visit here to learn more.
Free Global Classified Ad Submitter (Free software)– Posts up to 500 ads per day on autopilot to US cities on www.freeglobalclassifiedads.com. No captcha or proxies needed. Super easy to use and completely free software for a limited time. Visit here to learn more.
Some of the software is free so you can get test them out before purchasing the paid software. We offer a 100% money back guarantee on everything we sell so there is no risk.
6. Run Your Software 24/7 With a Remote Windows VPS
A remote windows VPS is simply a Windows computer just like any Windows computer you would buy but it is hosted in a remote location usually by a web hosting company.
The advantage is that you can log into your remote windows vps from ANY computer even a MAC or an outdated Windows version like XP and access the server.
Once you are logged in you just operated the computer like any Windows computer. There is no difference.
You can then set up your software and start running campaigns. Then just log off the remote windows computer and the software keeps running.
You could log in from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, set up your campaigns, click run, and then log off and go to the beach. We do it all the time ourselves.
Here is an article which goes into detail about running classified ad posting software on a remote windows VPS.
7. Just Pay For Upgraded Ads
Sometimes it is just worth it to pay for upgraded ads. For example with our site www.thefreeadforum.com you can have your ad in rotation on the homepage of the site for an entire year for just $10.
This is an insanely low price for advertising. Yes, it is a bit more long term but the ads on the front page are getting quite a few views.
Plus it is simple. It still takes time to even run software but placing an upgraded ad takes just a few minutes.
You need to analyze if the upgraded ads are getting views. On thefreeadforum.com there are ad counters there so you can see yourself.
On routine inspection you can see that ads are getting hundreds of views. For $10. for the year this is definitely worth considering. You can still post free ads with the software as well.
Backpage and Craigslist are notorious for ghosting or deleting free ads and you never really know why. It can be very frustrating.
However, have you ever considered paying for an upgraded ad on Backpage?
Here is a screenshot of the Backpage upgrade options:
It is really quite inexpensive. It varies according to category and city but for the Biz Opp section in a Medium sized Florida city it costs as little as $2.28 for 4 weeks.
You also have the option of moving your ad to the top every day for 26 days for just $1.02. This is very, very cheap and Backpage is the number 2 site after Craigslist.
You need to pay with credits using a site called buycredits.com. Learn more here.
Sometimes it is worth it to just pay for an upgraded ad. You can save quite a bit of time and hassle.
8. Look For Hottest Listing Sections And Promote Your Ad to The Top
Some classified ad websites have a hottest listings section which displays the most viewed ads on the site on the home page of the main ad site.
We have such a section on www.thefreeadforum.com. It displays the 10 ads which are getting the most views.
Savvy marketers will promote their ads to get on the top of the hottest listings and they then have a more or less permanent link on the first page of a very high traffic site.
This position is even better than a paid ad because your ad is NOT in rotation it is permanently fixed on the first page of the site as long as it has enough hit counts.
As of the writing of this ebook 2000 visitors to your ad will get you on the top 10 list. You would have to have over 70,000 hits for the top position but 2000 views gets you right in there comfortably. Here is a screen shot of the hottest listings.
Be on the lookout for most popular listings or hottest listings sections. Check out how many view counts it takes to get on the list and promote your ad until you have a solid top 10 position.
9. Try Reverse Advertising. It Works!
Are you selling a product or service that would appeal to those who are currently advertising on classified ad site?
What if you could contact directly every single person who is placing an ad in any category on a very busy high traffic site?
And what if you were 100% sure each person would see your message because they themselves are eagerly waiting for a response to their ads.
This is called REVERSE ADVERTISING. You are advertising to those who are already advertising.
Depending on your product or service this can work extremely well.
Actually it can work better than posting classified ads.
Sometimes classified ads get lost amongst all the other ads. It can be challenging to stand out and to get your prospect’s attention.
However, if you deliver a targeted message right in your prospect’s most monitored in box he will most likely see your message.
This method works extremely well for those selling advertising services. Who better to promote advertising services to than those who are currently advertising?
For example if you are posting a classified ad and I have software which will post that same classified ad automatically to hundreds of cities perhaps you might just be interested.
So how do you send your message to those who are currently advertising?
We have created a software called “Global Ad Reply” This software will automatically respond to classified ads in ANY category on one of the most popular classified ad sites in the world.
10. How to Stop Your Links From Being Blocked on Popular Classified Ad Sites.
Many popular classified ad sites and even Facebook make it a habit of blocking links. What type of links are blocked?
On Backpage almost all url shortening services are blocked. For example bit.ly or tinyurl or virtually and such service where people use a common domain to shorten their urls.
If you are posting to Backpage and get a message like this:
Nine times out of ten this message means that your link has been blocked. Notice that I used a tinyurl link.
I did this on purpose just for this example. I wanted to get the Oops message. And Backpage did not disappoint. There it is.
You may also get the same message if you are promoting a very popular affiliate program and you are using the direct website link of the program.
Facebook will also block similar links.
The best way to get around this is simply to purchase your own domain name and re-direct your domain name to the affiliate link.
This way you are not promoting the direct affiliate link or short url but you are promoting your own domain name. Not only will you have an easier time posting ads but your links will look much more professional.
There is another method which does not require purchasing your domain name.
You can simply sign up for a free blog at blogger.com and create a blog post on the free blogging platform.
Then you just promote the blog post. This can be especially helpful for those who are promoting affiliate programs. You can put extra information about bonuses you are offering and an opt in form.
We think you are still better off promoting a proper landing page and opt in page but it is another technique to consider.
Here is a blog post and video which explains how to set up your own free blogger.com blog and use a free blog post to get past being blocked on popular sites.
11. Just Use A Service And Let Them Do All The Work For You
You always have the option of just paying somebody to post ads for you.
Here is what we propose to do for you each month with our classified ad posting service. We will submit your ad to the following:
550+ Classified ad sites
85 + Search Engines
250+ Web Directories
80+ ffa sites
50+ Message boards and Forums
500,000+ Networked Sites
Manual Submission to Some of the Highest Traffic Advertising Sites in the World.
New! Your link included in rotation to our 100,000+ opt in subscribers per month!
New! Guaranteed Opt-ins!You must give us a landing page with preferably email only or name and email opt in form (2 fields max), preferably single opt in and we will promote your landing page until you get some opt ins
We do not guarantee how many opt ins you will get because this depends on your offer but give us a good landing page and we will make sure to get you some action!
It may be worthwhile considering hiring a service to promote your ads for you. Then you can concentrate your marketing efforts on other areas that most suit your talents.
You can sign up for free for the Coolmarketingsoftware.com affiliate program here.
Here is how you re-brand this ebook so that your copy will have your affiliate links embedded into your copy.
1. Sign up for the 2 affiliate programs above. You will be asked to choose a user name. Your user name is your affiliate id. You need to sign up separately for both affiliate programs. It is free to do so.
2. Go to our online re-branding page here. Input your affiliate id where it asks for your affiliate id.
Then just click Re-brand my PDF and you will be able to download your own copy of this very ebook with your affiliate links embedded.
3. Then , give away, share on social media, do YouTube videos, blog posts, solo emails, and promote in any legitimate and legal way possible this ebook.
If readers of the ebook click on the embedded link you will receive commissions.
Even if somebody orders 1 year later you will still receive credit.
We hope you have found this blog post helpful. You are welcome to re-brand this ebook and give it away to your list and social media followers.
You can even use this ebook for an incentive for people to join your opt in list.
The only thing you are not allowed to do is sell the ebook or change.
550+ Classified ad sites
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