The online marketplace offers a lot of advantages for the users, who do not have wads of cash to spend on marketing their products and services. But not all the marketplaces are created equal. While some online sites levy heavy fees, there are other free sites that offer incredible resources for sellers and marketers to make optimum utilization of free listing websites. Whether it’s a product or service, the free listing site is an easy way to present your services and products in front of your targeted customers. So, it’s important to put time and effort into choosing the best free listing websites that will help sell your products and advertise the services free of cost.
Here are some listing ideas that won’t cost you a dime and will help sell your product and services online with free listing websites. They are sure to rock your sales easily.
Related: Tips To Generate Free Organic Traffic To Your Website
Listing Idea #1- List on Top Classified Sites
Be it selling something, offering some services, promoting a product or for whatever reasons under the sun- free classified sites are an amazing platform where businesses and individuals can advertise their products and services for free. But, it all comes down to how much time you are willing to spend on creating, posting, updating and deleting ads. With tons of free classified websites, it is important to choose the classified sites that have a great set of features. To help save you time, I am compiling a list of 5 best free classified websites available in India.
Among the above mentioned 5 classified sites, Craigslist is an international player, which is functional in more than 50 countries, including India. Sulekha, AskLaila, VivaStreet, Clickooz and Gumtree are also high PR sites that help grab customer’s eyeballs.
Below is an example of a listing of one residential project of my real estate client, SBP Group on Locanto and this ad is getting a good response. I list ads related to housing projects on the basis of various categories such as flats for sale as you can see in the screenshot.
Apart from saving you money in advertising costs, they open up a global market for your products with an easy to navigate user interface, which is both mobile and search friendly. In contrary to other offline marketing strategies, ads on these sites are easier to create and take only a few minutes.
Listing Idea #2- Use the Power of Local Business Free Listing Websites
If you’ve any product or service that is geographically-specific, you should list your business on local listing sites like Yahoo Local and Google Local. Especially, Google Local is a powerful way to list and verify your business through a confirmation process. This confirmation can be done either via a phone call or snail mail. But, ensure you provide the accurate and up-to-date public details like company’s address for Google Maps appearances, working hours and other business related information.
Also, listing your business with Google Places increases the likelihood of your product or service to be found more easily in Google searches. It also shows up on Google Maps. If you’re into selling B2B products, add a listing on free listing websites like IndiaMart and Indian Yellow Pages. But, if you sell directly to customers, sites like Justdial could be the best way to attract huge traffic. This kind of free listing sites improves your product exposure by driving targeted traffic directly to your website.
Listing Idea #3- Post Images or Creatives on Photo Sharing Sites
There are a number of high domain authority photo sharing sites that are still very effective in driving a massive amount of traffic to your website, which is showcasing your products or services. They are completely free to use, but what you need is a passion for constantly adding value to whatever you’re doing. Here are some top photo sharing websites that always come to our mind first.
Be sure to add relevant hashtags and descriptions to properly categorize your post. Follow others in your niche and also try to comment, like and engage on people’s posts as much as possible if you really want to get your product out there.
Listing Idea #3- Reach Droves of People with Social Media
With an ever-pervading power of social media, your business products or services can instantly reach droves of people from across the world at free of cost. To fully leverage the power of social media you should start with the profile creation on:
Photo sharing websites like Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram are also social media sites. These free listing websites are the best source to list your service on your profile page. You can also create a separate page for any of your specific product or service. In order to gain the early user traction, you need to engage with your targeted audience to gain loyalty so that this audience can convert to your customers at a later stage. The key here is the frequency of posts. Stay active on social media and regularly share your business updates, product or service launch information related to your industry. Also, research for groups in your niche that has a wide base of audience. Sharing your posts across such groups will help promote your brand or business.
When I launched www.ajayarora.in Facebook and Reddit brought me about 45% of total traffic.
As you can see in the above pie chart, Facebook with 136 sessions is driving a major portion of the total traffic and whereas the contribution of Reddit is also hard to neglect.
Listing Idea #4- Create High-quality Content for Popular sites
Every business or user who needs to sell or promote his/her product should include this method into their online marketing strategy. Undeniably, the most effective way to market a business online is to build a blog page where you can post and share high-quality content on a regular basis. It is a good way to connect with your consumers directly, but remember the key to blogging or content marketing is to keep your stream updated as frequently as you can. It is, of course, a long-term strategy that won’t yield results overnight, but building or posting noteworthy content helps drive traffic by peaking the interest of Google. Top PR sites for article submission are:
For blogging, free to use and high authority websites like Blogger, WordPress, Squarespace and Weebly will also help you garner the attention of customers. If you’ve fairly new domain with little authority build up, marketing your content on Medium and Quora will get some early traffic. These two free listing websites are also powerful tools for gaining traction on Google’s SERP’s that help you reach the big portion of existing audiences as well.
Listing Idea #5- Engage Users Through Q & A’s
When people are battling to solve their pain points, they look up to specific forums on the web. Q & A ‘s sites are a kind of place where you can find new customers. These networks are very influential as you can get a good amount of traffic through them. Here are 5 great sites with the biggest number of users and the largest number of posts:
But, the question here is how these free listing websites can help you promote your product or service online?
For instance, if you want to promote a Lead Management Software, lets say Konneto which is a very famous Lead Capture and Management Software that helps people track conversions and manage online and offline leads. First step is to create accounts on these Q & A’s sites and search for your product or service. Then you need to search for keywords relevant to your product. For example, in this case keyword can beLead Management Software or Lead Management or CRM Software etc.
During search you’ll find a lot of questions where people might want to know about the trusted or top companies selling similar kind of product or price/features comparison list between different products. Next step is just to simply start answering and recommending your product. This is what I usually follow when I promote any products or services. Isn’t that simple?
Listing Idea #6- Join Relevant Forum Discussions
Others than above questions and answers sites, there are some free to use forum discussion sites can help you interact with both real and potential customers. Forum discussion is one of the best ways of engaging and interacting with other people online. Below is a list of some forum websites with good user base:
Apart from the above forum discussion sites, I personally use Common Floor, 99acres and Realty Fact to promote products for my real estate clients. This means that you need to research about the forums relevant to your niche. At such forums or you can say free listing websites, you can share announcements about your new product launch or speak about the features and benefits of doing business with you. So, the people who are possibly interested in buying may see your ability to communicate effectively with the like-minded people and this very thing may entice your visitors to become buyers.
Bonus Idea #7- Showcase Useful Product Information on YouTube
With over 30 million visitors and 5 billion videos watched per day, YouTube is a great resource for marketing your business online. It makes a great sense to upload about your product on the go. You can focus on creating helpful video tutorials showcasing the tips or how to’s on using your product. You just need to focus on adding more value without thinking much about garnering profit. A short 2 min video works perfectly and you can also add a recorded testimonial of a client with this video. The quality of the recording and overall content should be very high.
Always ensure you drop a link inside the description with relevant keywords in the title as well. Try to come up with something more creative and interesting that can go viral and strike the right chord resulting in a high amount of leads in your inbox.
Wrap Up
There can be just more than 7 listing ideas and to promote your product or service. Some of the strategies and free listing websites described above will yield results instantly. While some of them might take weeks or months to get you out there in the beginning.
You may not want to splurge in marketing or promotion, but you have to invest in time. Besides me, who just started with zero marketing budget, I have come across a lot of businesses that achieved high conversions without spending a single penny.