Dirt Cheap Classified Ads can be a great way to promote your business. We've all seen the late night infomercials that say "If you make $25 selling a product from a $20 classified ad you can be a millionaire!" Simply keep taking out more ads and selling more products.
How do you do that?
Your first step is to find a source for dirt cheap classified ads.
Your second step is to learn to write effective marketing messages for your ads.
Your third step and most important is to track the results of your advertising. It doesn't matter if the ad costs you $100 if you make a profit from it! It also doesn't matter if it only costs $12 if the ad doesn't get you any results!
Where to Find Dirt Cheap Classified Ads? Dirt cheap classified ads exist everywhere! My first source of cheap ads was in the free promotional newspapers & magazines that I found at the grocery store when I was putting up flyers. These are the free magazines and newspapers that tell you what kinds of activities are happening in your area. You may also find some of the classified papers and help wanted papers.
These free magazines and newspapers are usually kept at the front of the grocery store either near the entrance or exit to the store. Often times this would be adjacent to the area where they accept flyer advertisements. If you live in a large city there may also be newspaper stands at your local street corner. In Boston where I currently live there are at least 9 different free papers/magazine stands on downtown street corners. A couple of the newsstands will be daily "pay" newspapers. The others will be free papers, classifieds, employment guides, real estate guides, weekend guides, etc. I occasionally walk around and pick up as many samples as possible for my collection. I email or call the paper and ask them to fax me over their classified advertising rates.
I've also found some great deals on newspaper circulars that are distributed by postal mail. When I lived in New Jersey there were two or three of these circulars that were sent to my home for free every month. I found advertising in some of these as cheap as $12 a week. In my tests they performed just as good as a $60 ad in the local daily paper!
Once you build up a collection of newspaper circulars you'll find companies that are conglomerates and syndicate papers in different regions. There are penny papers like "The Pennysaver" and there are free "Metro" newspapers. You can start your research with NationwideNewspapers.com a web site that lists newspapers all over the country. You can purchase classified ads for less than $50 anywhere in the USA.
Develop Effective Marketing Messages that Capture Reader's Attention
With classified ads you are paying by the word or by the line. When you are starting out you should start by keeping your messages short and simple.
For my first classified ad I took a message that I had already tested on flyers and put it in a few newspapers. I tracked the results to see which ads performed well.
My first ad was:
Help My home business is booming. I need a few select people to help part-time from home. Will train. Contact 
877-236-3488
or www.benfitts.com
While this ad did attract calls it was not the most effective ad. About half the people calling the ad were looking for a JOB. The good thing was that the other half of the people was pretty decent candidates. I had several strong leads develop from this ad.
I also learned from a friend a REALLY simple way to advertise. My friend took out classified ads that ONLY contained a web address. My friend buys descriptive domain names and only includes that information in the ad.
So for example, I setup this domain just for an example of a descriptive opportunity domain that is meant to pique the reader's interest:
http://www.SecretHomeBusiness.com
I've got domain names for products as well as for the opportunity. My domains only cost me $9.95 per year so I can register a bunch of them and test them out. You should probably test them first by doing a survey. Take a bunch of possible names and put them on a sheet of paper or 3x5 cards. Then ask friends/family to select which one they like best. You can even take these to a public place like the mall and get some unbiased opinions! You may even find a new customer or distributor in the process!
The best way to learn to develop classified marketing messages is to... READ the classified ads! If you pickup the papers regularly you'll start to recognize some of the ads. It is pretty safe to assume that if someone spends enough money to put an ad in the paper every day for a year that the ad is getting results. I even know a few people that take out multiple ads in each paper per day!
Get the Most Bang for Your Buck by Tracking Your Results It is really difficult to succeed in your advertising if you don't track your results! You should be able to track which messages you use, and which newspapers you advertise in. It is a wonderful thing when you realize that a dirt cheap ad that costs less than $20 does better than an ad that costs $100!
I've already mentioned that I track ads by using Affordable Domain Names. I use a different web site address for each advertisement. I always use .com domains in my classified ads. If I take out an advertisement in the newspaper they have to type it in and I run a risk of them doing it wrong and going to the .com instead. I don't want to risk them going to someone else's web site!
I also track my ads using cost effective toll free numbers. I use a really awesome toll free system that starts at only $2 per month. I pay only 6.9 ¢ per minute. I can direct it to voice mail, route it to my telephone, route it to a different number based on time of day or geographic location.
By using a new toll-free number and domain name for each ad campaign I can track which ads are most successful and which advertising locations yield the best results. I keep an Excel Spreadsheet which tracks which ads are having the most luck. If you don't want to get as sophisticated you can get a simple spiral notebook or journal and keep track of your results in there. It doesn't matter how you do it, the important thing is to track your results!
Conclusion Dirt cheap classified ads can be a very effective way to promote your business opportunity or your product. The key is to test your ads and track your results so you can find which ads work well and which are failures. Another trick is to not spend too much money at once so if your advertisement is a failure you haven't wiped out your budget. Using special domain names or toll-free numbers can allow you to track the results of the same advertisement in different newspapers. With a small budget and a little patience, you can be achieving success in no time.
Benjamin Fitts the Custom Card Guy is an entrepreneur who got started on the internet back in 1993. Ben has the skills necessary to run large corporate web sites but prefers instead to apply them to internet marketing and promoting his Send Out Cards business. With Send Out Cards, Ben has found a business with a product he enjoys promoting because he can give away custom greeting cards and bring smiles to the faces of people around the world.'
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