There's Power in Little Classified Ads
Author: Simon Baxter

What is a classified ad?

A classified ad is akin to the newspaper or magazine classified ad section except it is much cheaper and the Internet makes it much easier to get your classified ad seen in thousands of places. But the same rule applies whether offline or online, if your ad is not compelling enough you will not receive the responses you had hoped for.

Online you have a choice of placing free or paid ads, the general rule here is, place free classified ads until you find one that works, then roll it out to all the places you can find free and paid. When I say one that works, I do not mean an ad that gets you sales, you will very rarely place a classified ad that will result in a sale from the ad alone.

If your goal is to pre-qualify your prospects and get them to request more information from you, or visit your Web site, that is a result. A classified ad is too small for you to actually make a sale from, but lead your prospects to your Web site and your killer sales letter, capture their e-mail address on your Web site and there you have it -- a prequalified targeted prospect to follow up on, time and time again until you turn that prospect into a customer.

What more could you ask for? You do follow up on your prospects, don't you? No, well that's another lesson needed to be learned.

What to include in your classified ad

1.                   You need a killer headline, one that includes the No. 1 benefit for your prospect.

2.                   Give them a reason to ask for more information. Maybe offer a free, limited-time bonus.

3.                   Decide whether you wish to include an e-mail address to allow your prospect to request more information (this could             be your autoresponder e-mail address). Or...

4.                   Get your prospect to visit your Web site and collect their e-mail address from your Web site. (You have set up your   Web site to collect e-mail addresses, haven't you?)

5.                   Set up autoresponder follow-ups, seven in all spaced two to three days apart. (It is a known fact that most prospects             need to see your ad at least seven times before they will buy), when your prospect sends an e-mail to the             autoresponder address in your ad, it will trigger your autoresponder to send a series of predefined e-mails spaced             three days apart (or however you have set it up).

A great many of classified sites are small, with limited traffic, but if you place 1,000 ads on 1,000 classified sites and you only get one response from each site, that's 1,000 responses. That's a good number of prequalified leads, probably mostly for free. Imagine how much you would have to pay for 1,000 prequalified hot leads (not days old), complete with e-mail addresses.

Before you get overly excited and start placing ads on all the classified sites you can find, there is just one thing to remember. You will only get these kind of results from testing your ads to find the one that pulls prospects like a train. If you are not testing your ads then you are losing money. You have various options open to you for testing your ads with classified sites.

·                     You can use a different e-mail address or autoresponder address in the body of your ad for each classified site.

·                     Or use different subject lines in your ads. Examples are:

For more info send an e-mail to youremail@youremailprovider, include "advert one" in the subject line.
For more info send an e-mail to youremail@youremailprovider, include "advert two" in the subject line.

And so on.....

·                     Use a specialized ad tracking company, such as http://www.roibot.com or http://www.adminder.com.

Some classified sites allow you the option of selecting to receive notification of any hits to your ad, if this is offered select this option, it is usually offered for free.

It is important to remember that you do not spam the classifieds by submitting every day. Be sure to check the site's submission rules and only post again after the time limit of your ad has expired.

Article by Simon Baxter, a marketing consultant and reviewer both online and offline. He is a people's man and derives great pleasure from helping people reach their goals. His Web site Affiliates Resource Center http://www.netincomesite.com/ helps affiliates to do just that.