Well they are partly right…
I can only go from my own experience, but they do not seem to work if you are just promoting a money making scheme. I have never used them in any other niche, so I cannot testify to their effectiveness for other niches (although I guess Craigslist would be effective in any niche).
Let's look at some titles from a classified site today:
Easily Make $25,000 per month
Make Thousands Monthly
Did YOU make $3 Grand Last Week?
Idiots are making $997 everyday
Those are all live ads on one of the sites right now as I write this, and they are all talking about making huge sums of money – how can you compete with that? You either go one step up and put in more hype, stick your ad alongside and hope for the best, or make sure you post more ads than anyone else to increase your exposure, or you get smart, and you turn the tables on them.
You see, if you wanted a way to make money you would be assaulted with 1000 different opportunities before you ever made your way to one of these sites. Who would ever go to one of these sites and look for a serious business opportunity? Who would actually take the time to respond to these ads when they get there?
You need to target a different market, target the people like yourselves who are going to place ads, and sell them a product that helps them to get traffic, as traffic and sales are what people are posting for in the first place! They have exposed their wound by posting and you are going to heal it. Post an ad like 'Still struggling to get traffic?' or 'Not making any sales in your opportunity?' and then hit them for a product that you are an affiliate for.
That will generate some money so you can pay for advertising that works (more on that tomorrow).
If you want to try these out for yourself (and there are some high traffic sites out there for sure) then set up a duplicate of your main page, and link to that instead. Post 30 ads per day (one each to 30 sites) for one week, and then look at your traffic at the end of the week, then you will know for sure whether those sites work.
Now there are two sites that are an exception to the rule, they are usfreeads.com (not just for US people) and Craigslist.com. Those are two very influential and high traffic sites that get results. Both are free (but have paid options) and get results. Again you have competition, so for USfreeads then make sure you post daily. Craigslist is split up by the American states, try to post to a different one of those every day and you should see some good results.
Both those sites are also favoured by the search engines so if you can incorporate some of those keywords from your article research… you may get some good rankings for your ad which will lead to a flood of traffic!
One thing you have to watch out for, is people emailing you about your ad, they email you and say something like (this is taken from an actual email I received with the exact same wording from about 10 different people):
'Hi, I am requesting more info on your home business and how it works. What investment is required? Look forward to hearing more'
If you get one of these (or any variation) then they are more than likely wasting your time. You send a response back and they say 'Thanks, oh by the way have you seen [BIG red letters about some scam]' and I know I felt stupid the first time I was taken in. But you can't ignore these in case a) that person likes your offer and takes you up on it, b) it is a genuine person asking that just sounds like spam. So what I have now is a generic email explaining about my offer, which I can copy and paste into a reply, I don't waste more than 2 seconds and there is a slim chance someone could buy something.