If you are on a shoe string budget and don’t have the money to pay for online advertising, then you are definitely going to be looking to get your free ads out on to the internet. There are many great places to achieve this, such as free classified sites and advertising forums. Free classifieds are great sites, however they limited in what information you can and cannot post on them. However free business advertising forums are far greater to get that free exposure for your website or product. And here are the reasons why.
Depending on the ads site you are using, many sites will allow you a hyperlink with anchor text to your website or product (something that is not always possible to achieve on free classifieds sites). This can usually be achieved by placing your hyperlink in your signature below your name. Also there are many sites that will allow you to also place a few hyperlinks (usually 2-3 is acceptable) within the main body of your text.
However, this being said it is vital that you don’t link spam, the moderators of the forum, as well as the search engines will dislike this, and you may have your adverts deleted from the forums and not indexed by the search engines.
Therefore using forums with your hyperlinks is a great method to back-link to your website. Here it is important to then consider using keywords that you have researched which are highly relevant to your niche. This will also help to increase your ranking on the search engines for your chosen keywords. Keyword research is another topic not covered within the scope of this article and if you are interested in finding out more, there are many great articles available here on this site for you to research further.
Another reason why it is great to use free business advertising forums is that if you are familiar with HTML or BB coding, which are really simple and easy to learn, then you are able to really customise the look and feel of your adverts (something that is really limited on the free classifieds sites). You are able to post pictures of your products, embed video and sometimes even add a limited amount of scripts within your adverts. However the availability of these various functionalities will vary from site to site.
Search engines love forums and they are crawled regularly, so if you have an advert that is designed well around your chosen keywords you could have your advert appearing within the top 10 results of Google and other search engines within a day, which is a fabulous reason as to why you should be doing forum marketing.
The other benefit of forum marketing is that you can post full length articles to a forum, and are not limited by word length (something that definitely happens on free classifieds sites). You also open yourself up to discussion with potential customers or visitors to your site, because that is what forums were originally intended for; open discussion. So it is vitally important that you stay subscribed to the threads you create with an email address that you regularly check. You definitely do not want to be missing out on questions and interest on your adverts.