“Free” is the new currency on the Internet.  Think about some of the quality services that you can get completely free of charge today:  Skype, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, iPhone applications and now “Advertising”.

This is still an area where UK businesses are naturally skeptical, and who can blame them?  Advertising has for a long time been something your pockets fear, you know you need to do it, and you know it’s going to hurt (hopefully only at first)!

There are no 100% guarantees in advertising that you will get X customers and £Y for an advertising budget of £Z whether you go with an established directory brand, or some of the smaller ones.

Indeed many of the larger well known UK business directories are forced to charge a certain amount for advertising, not just because they drive huge traffic to their sites, but also because they have a sales and back office workforce to support.

Advertising on the Internet is changing rapidly, and like Facebook, YouTube etc some of the best online directories are offering a predominately free service, which is on a par with the paid service the larger, older directories offer.   Although they will naturally receive less traffic than the bigger players, they are generally less competitive making it easier for your business to stand out.

Many of these free directory services have a lean and agile workforce meaning that they can offer a quality free service.  They can also quickly innovate and take new products to market, without treading the murky waters of office politics, complex logistics, processes and legacy IT systems.

There are a few worthwhile online directories that offer free advertising with many additional benefits, such as your own (behind the scenes) “landing page” that major search engines can crawl, and display a link back to your free advert.

For the sake of just a few minutes effort, it would be worthwhile listing your business on some of the quality free advertising directories.

To find the right online business directories for you, then take a look at our comparison table of Top 10 Internet Directories, and see what they offer for free.

Tags: free business advertising

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Free Business Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.