Advertising on Facebook is pretty straightforward and simple. You have a choice of paying for ads based on Cost Per Impression (CPM) or Cost Per Click (CPC). You can choose to target ads to users based on keywords, interest, demographics, age, and more. This feature is especially important and useful for advertisers who want to target specific groups of people.

Besides traditional display ads, you can also choose to promote your Facebook account’s pages, groups and applications. This is especially useful for advertisers and marketers who want to promote their pages and groups to build up their social profiles and drive traffic to their businesses. For developers, this is a good way to promote newly launched applications. With tons of applications launching every day, it is a good way to let Facebook users know andl earn more about the applications that you have developed.

With over 200 million active users, Facebook is indeed a good place for advertisers to promote and advertise their businesses. However, many marketers and advertisers have varying degree of successes with Facebook ads. If you are looking to advertise on Facebook, make sure that you do your research first before committing yourself.

Although many people find banner ads to be a distraction, it is also precisely the reason why they are so effective. The visitors’ attentions are drawn to the banners as soon as the web pages are load up. While banner ads are effective in drawing attention, you also need to be careful and not over do it.

If you are looking to create some banners yourself or outsource it to graphic designers, here are a few tips to bear in mind when designing your banners.

First of all, if possible include a bit of animation in your banners. Animations will give a different feel to your banner ads as compare to non animated banners. However, do not overdo it as heavy animated banners tend to load up more slowly as compare to static banners.

Also include a catchy slogan and a call for action. In this way, people will tend to remember your business more easily. Adding a call for action will let people know what you are trying to get them to do. For example, if you offer a free trial for a certain product, you can put a call for action such as “Click here to get your free trail now” into your banner. This will let your web visitors know what they should do to get the free trial.

Last but not least, keep things simple. No point designing an animation intensive banner which loads slowly or a banner that has too many messages for web visitors to digest properly. At the end of the day, you just want your message to be delivered across.

1. Banner Ads
A typical banner ad is 468 x 60 pixels in size. A banner ad is normally placed in a very prominent area of a web site to attract visitors to click through them. Normally sold in per thousand impressions, it is regard as one of the earliest form of web advertising.

2. Social Network Ads
As the name implies, social network ads are advertisements that are targeted at users of social networking istes such as FaceBook, Friendster, MySpace. It is gaining in popularity and many marketers have very good results from social network ads.

3. Online Classified Ads
Similar to newspaper classified ads, online classified ads are the online version of their more conventional model. There are many sites that you can place your ads on. There is a mixture of free and paid classified ads sites that you can advertise on such as Craiglist, Kijiji, Gumtree and USFreeAds.

4. Contextual Ads
Contextual ads are targeted ads that are displayed according to the type of content a website is based on. In this way, visitors are exposed to ads that are highly relevant I nature to what they are reading. Contextual ads are also used by search engines to displayed ads on their search results based on keywords used by web surfers.One good example of a contextual advertising network is the Google Adsense program.

The four channels above will offer you ways to advertise your business for free or at very affordable rates. Given the nature of online advertising, it is best to employ a mixture of the above channels and test and track to find out which channel or channels offer you the most value in return for your effort, time and money.

Advertising on Craigslist is free with the exception of job postings and housing postings in specific markets. As advertising is mostly free, there are virtually no risks for merchants and businesses to advertise their products or services on Craigslist. However, you have to take note of their guidelines and follow these guidelines closely when posting advertisements. If not, you may end up being identify as spamming Craigslist and get your accounts suspended or deleted. Advertising on Craigslist is one thing but spamming is quite another. Placing an advertisement in an appropriate section of Craigslist is acceptable but placing the same advertisement in nearly every section of Craigslist websites for a number of different geographical regions is considered spam.

The key to profiting on Craigslist is to identify and target your audience market and where to place your advertisements. Place your advertisements in the most appropriate locations to garner maximum results. No point posting hundreds of advertisements only to see little or no results. Do your research well and you can definitely profit from Craigslist’s enormous customer base. The other thing to take note is your advertisements must stand out from the rest. To be effective in capturing people’s attention, your advertisements’ headlines and content need to be intriguing.

If you have not use Craigslist to market your products or services and drive traffic to your sites, isn’t it time for you to consider doing so.