Advertising is the key to any home business. I am always looking for the best FREE resources to use. I came upon a free advertising blog and have found it to be a tremendous tool. The blog is called 3stepAds. The blog owner recently sent out an email showing the September stats. His email informed the users that four out of the five most effective ads were mine. He asked me to write an article about how some of my ads resulted in the most hits.

First, I would like to tell you why I use 3stepAds for advertising. When I post an ad, I am not really trying to advertise to the other blog users. My main purpose for posting there is to get Google traffic. This blog is constantly crawled by the search enginge spiders. It has been set up with a great SEO area where you can put in keywords, tags and other vital information. When you put in the URL of what you are promoting, the search engine spiders will associate all of those keywords with your URL. It is extremely effective. 

Here are some of my tips for posting the most effective ads possible. Don’t post an "AD", make your post an article of at least 200 words. Articles contain original content which is more appreciated by search engines. Write a few articles about your service or product and then post them to the blog every few days. Highlight the key words within the article by marking them "bold".

Next, use your keywords within  your title and your post. Try and think of what Google searchers might type in to find a service such as yours. Phrases often  work better than just a single word keyword.

The blog also provides the opportunity to bookmark you posts. Make SURE you use the social bookmark button to bookmark your post in Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious. That is a huge factor in the success of your ads. In the SEO area, make sure whatever you put for the description there is the most eye catching phrase and the most relavant to your post. Google only captures the first 160 words of so of it so make is short and sweet and useful. For the keywords, I put all 40 or so of my keywords directly from my site. I just cut and paste them.

I have also found that actual products vs. an “opportunity” result in more hits. I myself am an affiliate marketer and always desire to promote my opportunity just as you do. However, I decided to focus on the products I sell rather than the opportunity, and have found that it does work better. Work from home, start your own business, make a gazillion dollars overnight………. well, you get the picture: It is overdone! The net is saturated with it and focusing on people’s personal needs is more likely to catch their attention and result in a hit.

I use 3stepAds for one main reason, to get into Google faster. Once I post an ad on there, I start seeing more Google traffic within days. The more often you post, the more you will stay in Google’s headlights. Any extra hits I get from the blog itself or from the bookmarked sites, is just extra gravy to me. That being said, 3stepAds is by far the best promotional tool I have used so far. You just can’t beat the exposure it gives to your websites.

If you are interested in another free way to promote your business, I highly suggest Squidoo . Consider it a little mini-site that can lead to hits to your main site. It is a great way to promote your main site and get more google traffic. I use 3stepAds to promote all of my Squidoo lenses. Possibly the two combine into one great SEO package? That could have something to do with the success of my ads.