Thanks for all the great information. I have found that free still has a cost of time and effort, but if your strapped for cash Yahoo local and Google are great!

zermenoj - i would take a look at http://thirtydaychallenge.com which is a free, and very detailed course on how to use free (and some paid) tools to build an online business. It is very good and I recommend it to anybody starting out. Best of luck, Darren Crawford http://DominateNashville.com Message Edited by ChristineL on 01-03-2010 10:59 PM

Free advertising is easy, but need lot of time, to find the best places to advertise your business..   As I said again a free and effective way to advertise online, is using forums.. There you can talk about your business, answer peoples' questions and let them know about every single update you are doing.

Honestly these days if you want to promote the best place is social websites such as digg

I don't know whether it works or not. But i heard many people use twitter and facebook as their business marketing. Why don't you try that? Its free. Hope it helps. 

Forums within your niche are great ways to drive traffic while at the same time helping your SEO efforts. Classified ads can help bring short term traffic to your site, but don't do much else. Most of these sites also have strict posting requirements. For example on Craigslist you can only post once per day. I'd suggest looking into press releases, creating videos and writing a few articles to help with both SEO and traffic to your site.

The Internet is the best avenue for free online business advertising, there are literally thousands of websites that carry free advertising.  It's easy to find these sites through search engines

MarkAse and Jack_p had very good suggestions about using videos. I have used some videos that have helped a lot but the best videos to grab attention and hence traffic are: How To videos and Outrageous videos (funny,outlandish, etc but not crude or offensive) Youtube now has more search volume than regular search on the internet. One downside on the outrageous video side is a lot of the traffic may be kids that are not buyers but if you can have them link to and talk about your site that will help with SEO for your site.

Someone may have already suggested this but register your Biz address with Google maps. Its one of the best things you can do for free advertising and giving your site good PR

I think you are spot on here. I have developed quite a bit of my business by being an expert in a forum. The human interaction creates a lot of trust. Plus it helps me get a lot of referalls. The only downside is that it does take time that some are not willing to invest. Bt with that being said... nothing is ever truly free.