Most businesses can benefit from free online promotion. We round up a handful of the best free resources for promoting your business on the web.

While there are hundreds of free services out there, these are our pick of 10 of the essential resources that will help drive traffic to your site.

While we’ve tried to include sites with worldwide reach, we recommend doing a local search for services in your locality as well as industry-specific listings sites and directories.

1. People’s Guide

One of the newest sites, but notable for being the cleanest and simplest way to add a free business listing. As these 100+ cities have just gone live, our advice is to get in early to pick up the most traffic.

Choose your city (there are over 100 worldwide, in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, China etc.), select your category from the pretty wide list: Restaurants & Cafés, Bars & Pubs, Entertainment, Shopping, Sports, Health & Beauty, Places to Stay.

2. Google Local

Any land-based business should be on Google Local.

Tightly integrating with Google Maps, Google Local is a great way to get your business to show up on Google searches.

Takes longer to add your business, partly depending on the confirmation method used (phone call is clever, postal is slower), after which you need to wait another couple of weeks typically, but worth doing today.

 

3. HotFrog

Another strong & multi-national business-listing site.

HotFrog is a nice simple business listing site (no reviews), active in several countries round the world, including the UK and Australia.

 

4. Windows Live

The Windows Live Local Listing Center is also free with reasonable reach.

Launched in October 2007, Microsoft’s Windows Live Local Listing Center service allows business owners to add their business information within Live search and Virtual Earth.

 

5. Yahoo! Local

Like the People’s Guide, Yahoo Local is a combined business listing and community review site, organised by location and category.

Pretty clean and well laid-out site that’s certainly worth adding your bricks & mortar business to, if your city is featured. Wide range of categories too.

Note that, if you get reviews via Yahoo! Local, businesses with higher ratings get higher listings.

 

6. Yellow Pages.com

Needs no introduction for most people. Strong brand recognition.

Yellow Pages is certainly big in the US and UK. The big US site does offer a free listing.

 

7. Best of the Web.com

Offers free advertising for the first 60 days only.

Basically premium search results ad placement, similar to AdWords, the free 60-day trial is worth taking advantage of.

 

8. Adland Pro

AdlandPro has apparently been offering free and paid advertising services to small businesses since 1996.

Allows you to place free ads in classifieds and community pages, and also in a “Free Traffic Exchange” system, which looks a little riskier.

 

9. Squidoo

A good number of lenses on the Squidoo network offer the opportunity to add a link to your site, free.

Squidoo gives you simple tools to build your own web pages, and get a share of ad revenue, so it’s also a route to a budget web site where you can promote your products or services. (Also have a useful page about free advertising.)

 

10. eBay

OK, maybe not free, but don’t overlook finding advertising bargains on eBay

Don’t forget that a lot of people auction promotions on eBay. It’s possible to pick up really cheap mailouts or ad runs, without investing too much time either.