No its not Craigslist but It is every bit as powerful in generating leads and sales for you at no charge.

It's called Backpage.com and it is very easy to use. First setup an account, decide what cities and states you want to advertise, write a compelling ad and then post it.

The real power behind backpage.com is that it will:

* allow your ad to be relisted every 7 days automatically

* allow you to place your ad (after you have tweaked it and found an ad that works) in local papers

* place your ad in multiple cities instantly

* place clickable links in the to take people to your website or sales page

All this for free or a very small fee.

Remember that the first thing you want to do is test your ad by changing the headline, using compelling language in the body of the ad, if your product can be sold nationwide then test the ad in various cities to see where you get the best results and then roll out the ad to additional cites.

Now once you have made a couple of sales with this free tool you need to up your sales using paid advertising strategies that can bring you thousands of customers per month and make yourself 6 figures per year or even per month.

You can also do this with Craigslist at the same time to increase your traffic and if you are placing links in the ads they will also count as trusted links to your website and make Google see you as a trusted website due to these links.

Other free ways to get traffic is with squidoo pages (squidoo.com) and hubpages (www.hubpages.com) where you can create a free webpage , write some information or an article that tie in with your product or service and include links to you salespage.

This same information from your squidoo or hub page can be reworked into a 500 word article and can be placed on goarticles.com for free and be seen by hundreds of people per month and in some cases per day.

The paid article sites like isnare.com will send your article out to more directories for a small fee per article.

These article directories are a place where people go for information to read or to place on their website in order to have as much related content as possible.

Since Google loves sites that have lots of related information and most people do not have the time or desire to create this information they love to use the article directories for free info to put on their sites.

The rule on these article sites is that the articles are free to use but must be used in their entirety INCLUDING a bio box you created that has your name , as well as link to your website, blog or salespage.

These articles spread very quickly across the web if it is a popular subject and the more articles you have out there the quicker your link spreads when people place your article on their site.

If you are not sure how to write an article just go to the directories and look at examples of what people have written in the same category that you are interested in and repurpose the content BUT never plagiarize it as the sites will check for duplicate content and will not post your article if it matches in too many areas, usually more than 30 % similar.

Just get ideas from the articles as well as bu surfing the net for info on your subject.

So try these free ways to market your product or service and then look for ways to increse or expand your marketing in order to make the bigger bucks.