Free Ads on Google Adwords, Facebook and Elsewhere
Google Adwords, Facebook and Yahoo search ads are all key money-makers for ads that work on a pay-per-click basis. Still, they can burn through your money very quickly, especially if you are sill enough to use Adwords without fully understanding all of how it works. (Perry Marshall is a great go-to guy for Adwords info.)
Yet, there is a free option for all of the above, and often for other ad networks as well. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others regularly offer $50 (or even $100) worth of free advertising to both new and existing account holders. People who have more time than money have been know to sign up for multiple accounts at these places to take advantage of the offers for new users.
The free ads usually come as part of a package, quite often for signing up for a web hosting account. While this is not free, many hosting companies offer hosting at $4 or $5 monthly, and you can leave after one month. Either way, you may actually need hosting, so be on the look-out for these free advertising offers whenever you sign up. If you decide to cancel the hosting, you’ve still paid only a few dollars for over $100 worth of advertising in many cases.
Hosting offers are not the only places to find these free offers, though. They are all over, and can sometimes be had for simply completing a survey or providing an email address.
Places to find them include Ebay, forums, and an endless collection of blogs.
$75 from Google Adwords Now
At the moment, Google is offering $75 in free Adwords ads if you sign up with them via this link. It’s basically a free trial offer for new accounts. While I can’t guarantee it will be there forever, it will likely be around in some form or another for a long time yet.
To find similar deals for other networks, try some creative searching on Google. Search for terms such as “Facebook ad coupons” or “Yahoo ad coupons” or “free Facebook ads.” Also try searching for “vouchers” instead of “coupons.” Since they usually have expiration dates, when you search, go to Google left sidebar and click on “More Search Tools.” Then select results from the past 2 months only. That will weed out all the old offers. A similar search on Ebay won’t be exactly free, but I see $50 (and $75) Google Adwords coupons going on Ebay for $5 to $10 right now.
As a side-note, I should warn you that Google is often hostile to small advertisers, and will ban your account for perceived infractions of their very complex and vague sets of terms. Current accounts are banned even for ads that ran and were deleted years ago, but which their computer recently decided were not up to snuff. For this and other reasons, I don’t recommend any business strategy that depends heavily on Google. Yet, if you can get some free online advertising from them, what’s to lose?
