Top 15 Free Advertising Sites for Business Owners & Marketers

“Business only has two functions- Marketing and Innovation.”- Milan Kundera.

Free Advertising Sites for Business Owners & Marketers-COVID-19 has proved aptly by showing how well we have adapted to the digital counterparts of our daily activities, irrespective of whether it was leisure or work.

One of the things that were already online but managed to sustain a lot of traction during the pandemic has been online marketing and advertising. Compared to other industries that suffered significant downtimes, online advertising experienced downtime of only 9% in 2020.

Owing to this wide-scale digitalization, new advertising opportunities have opened up for business owners and marketers, even on free advertising websites when used correctly.

So without further ado, let’s dive right into what free advertising can offer you and what are the major websites that you can use in 2021 to drive more leads and conversions for your business.

Importance Of Advertising For Business Owners

In today’s world, a business that does not market or advertise is almost similar to non-existent. This is because you will not reach your target audience and generate any money for sustaining and growing. Promoting a business through advertisements is essential because of the following reasons:

• Generates brand awareness
• Generates brand loyalty
• Increases company traffic
• Helps in increasing conversions and revenue
• Plays a role in defining brand image
• Helps in attracting new customers
• Gives your businesses a competitive edge
• Helps reinforce your brand’s idea for a product
• Keeps consumers up to date about the company
• Helps in business sustenance
• Increases the average lifecycle of a customer
• Increases repetitive business practices

Role Of The Free Advertising Websites In 2021

Besides the simple monetary benefits that you get, free advertising serves more help than you might think. Thanks to the role of the internet, online advertising has reached new highs, with $356 Billion being spent in 2020 alone. Additionally, the increased rate of digital adoption (75% of all companies) due to COVID-19 has also played its part significantly. The benefits you get are:

Helps In Targeting The Right Audience

Advertising and marketing are all about targeting the right audience. Majority of the ordinary people browse through free advertising websites to purchase the requisite things. So, if you segment the advertisement properly, you can easily target the right audience.

Captivating Images

Free advertisements leverage the usage of captivating visuals for themselves to get the job done. Whether they are interactive graphics or infographics, images are one of the key driving factors in the success rates of a free advertisement campaign.

Easy To Create

Free advertisement websites and platforms are catered towards a broader and more general audience. This means that though they require a certain level of creativity to be appealing, they are easy to create. Moreover, if the creatives are already planned, setting up the advert does not take much time.

Offers An Edge Over The Competition

While your competitors might also be using these tools, you can still get an edge if you use the tool correctly. Since free advertisements are easy to create, the real competition lies in making the ad more convincing, informative, and creative to appeal to the end-users.

Easy To Track

Almost all free advertising websites offer analytics tools that help you track the essential metrics that can determine the success rate for your magazine.

This not only gives you insight into what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. In addition, this makes them easy to track and understand the success rate of the campaign.

Increased Engagement

Since free advertisement websites draw more traffic in general than paid websites, the chances of engagement also increase. The placement of ads needs to be optimized, and you will automatically get more users than you would from a paid campaign placed improperly.

Best Free Advertising Websites For Business Owners

Now that you are well acquainted with the benefits that free advertising websites can bring for you, it’s time to find out which are the best ones to use today to maximize your leads and conversions.

Facebook Messenger

Facebook is the most extensive social media network, and with over 1.31 billion monthly average users, the platform boasts of being one of the best platforms for marketing and advertising.

While many businesses are using it to promote their brand, build a community, and market their products, only about 1% are making an effort to make a personal connection with their audience.

As you use Facebook Messenger in your marketing efforts, you maximize your chances of directly appealing to the user and getting a credible lead.

Google My Business

When you search for any business on Google, the result you see is from Google My businesses. Compared to conventional marketing websites, a typical company gets 59 calls every month due to Google My Business listing than any other.

Furthermore, 56% of all Google My Business page visits result in a website visit, an excellent way of marketing and advertising.

Facebook Marketplace And Facebook Shops

A third of the monthly average users (around 1 billion) of Facebook users use the Facebook marketplace and Facebook shops. Post its launch in 2020, Facebook shops and marketplace has been increasingly becoming more refined where it supports adverts, listings, and products from a particular business.

In addition, many Facebook shops are also present physically, which means that the consumers can experience the products in person.

eBay

eBay has been around for a very long time and is currently present in 100 countries. With over 1.7 billion listings, eBay has already helped various businesses make more than $27.1 Billion in Q1 2021 itself.

eBay also runs its internal SEO services on all its listings, allowing better visibility of all ads. Hence, the chances of getting leads, conversions, or sales automatically increase.

Craigslist

Whether you are targeting B2C or B2B users, Craigslist is one of the best places to advertise it. Launched 26 years ago, Craigslist offers anything from the services of professionals to job listings to purchasing merchandise.

Since it is one of the most visited websites in North America, you will automatically draw in more traffic if you cater to that region.

The only problem is separating genuine advertisements from spam and criminal ones, which have resulted in people losing their hard-earned money.

Locanto

If you want to target your audience in a particular location, demographic, or region, then Locanto is the best tool for this. Locanto is already present in over 60 countries and offers various categories to list your advertisements for people.

Craigslist usually offers an active time of 30 days for all ads, while Locanto offers an active advertisement time of 60 days which is an added benefit. While it is free, it also provides a background analytics tool and the feature to share the advertisement on social media, which comes in handy.

Oodle

If you want social media intervention in your marketing efforts, Oodle is the tool to choose. Based on the original model of the Facebook Marketplace, it blends seamlessly with almost all major social media platforms.

For example, you can link it up to Facebook Business Page and use its partnership with Advertigo, which increases the odds of the advertisement being noticed.

OLX

With just over 300 million total users, and 50 million monthly active users, OLX is already an established name in user-generated advertising games. Whether you are an individual or a registered business, or just a marketer, you can list your advertisement on the platform.

The platform gives you a timeline of 30 days and lets you control all the internal communication, the number of views, and basic settings reasonably and efficiently.

ClassifiedAds

A blast from the past, ClassifiedAds is a purely classified advertisement listing website that you can use for D2C, B2B, and B2C purposes. The best part of its age is that the moderators have done a great job of filtering the kind of live listings on the website, and hence only high-quality ads are available on the website.

Spams, suspicious, and erroneous advert listings are mostly removed or kept out of reach of the user, which increases the credibility of the live ads on the website.

Adpost

With over 30 million hits a year, and over 1,000 replies daily, Adpost is a free advertisement platform that does not disappoint. You get a few basic features with the free plan, like a 30 day ad lifetime with a 90 day renewal period and 100 images with one video to be uploaded per ad.

If you want more, you can upgrade to the paid plan that doubles the renewal time to 180 days and includes the page views counter.

Gumtree

If the UK is your target audience, then Gumtree is the website to choose. With over 14 million monthly users and over 10.1 million replies per month, Gumtree has built its credibility over time with patience.

Today, it is one of the go-to sources for most business owners and marketers for advertising for free on a digital platform. Moreover, based on the location, Gumtree is highly effective in garnering new users for a business.

Sales Spider

Sales Spider has already earned its rapport as a growing name due to its relations with biggies like Walmart, Macy’s, and Amazon. With over 4 million users and daily growth in the thousands, Sales Spider offers sales prospect leads, curated lists, and sales leads to small and medium businesses for free.

It is mainly considered social media for companies looking to advertise and hence comes in handy when you are scouting new leads for your products.

PennySaver

PennySaver is a US-based service that is catered chiefly towards businesses that want to keep it local. The platform calls itself the “largest direct mail shopping publication in the U.S..” It has a user base of 11 million users and is multiplying.

After you sign up, you can place an ad on PennySaver for free, and it will get exposure and traction from PennySaver’s subsidiary and affiliate websites automatically.

Geebo

With cyber crimes and mistrust on an all-time high, Geebo is going the extra mile to ensure that all the ads on the platform are safe, protected, and secure for all users.

They keep updating their website definitions to keep track of the latest criminal trends and make it a priority to remove all criminal, shady, and illegitimate advertisements from their website.

As a result, since its inception 17 years ago, the platform has remained scot-free from illegal activity, and you also get exposure to Geebo’s own social media channels that have more than 60,000 followers combined. High quality and low-cost bargain indeed.

Hoobly

Pretty much like Geebo, Hoobly also goes the extra mile to prevent any illegal activity on the platform. The platform offers categories specific to art, clothing, jewelry, real estate, and vehicles. However, it is mainly used as a marketplace for pets, animals, and adoptions of animals.

You have to log in from a business account only for authentication purposes and then post the ad visible for 30 days to post an advertisement.

Conclusion- Are Free Advertising Websites Worth it?

While it may seem like just another tactic that countless other business owners and marketers might use, free advertising websites pack a much bigger punch than they get credit for. So, free advertising is worth it if you are a budding entrepreneur, established business owner, or multinational conglomerate.