Simply going to sell your flea market or craft market products is one way to advertise for free – it means you get to advertise for free at the same time that you sell. Even if you have to pay a bit for the stall space at a flea market or craft market, your advertising is still free – you’re not paying anything to advertise; you’re simply paying for the space to sell your flea market or craft market products from.

You can make use of the advertising opportunity presented to you when you sell at markets – speak to shoppers about your products, have little flyers or business cards (or both) in your market stall product display area, even if they’re simple flyers or business cards you’ve printed at home yourself, in plain black and white (but perhaps on nice colour card).

If your products are the the type of products that can get a label or sticker on them, include that label or sticker, with your contact details on it. If your products aren’t suited to getting a label or sticker, at least pop a business card into a packet with the product when somebody buys one of your products. Friends or family of the person who bought a product from you may ask them about their lovely new product later, and your contact details will be there for them to contact you – another sale!

You can of course also advertise your flea market products or craft market products in all the usual ways if you like, in usual inexpensive advertising ways like posting ads on the walls of the local grocer, or clinic, or community centre, or popping flyers into post boxes, or posting an ad on free online classifieds sites or on free advertising sites.

Some free classified sites or free advertising sites allow you to upload photos with your advert too, so take some good clear pictures of your products, to show anyone viewing those online ads of yours how nice your product looks.

Displaying a little poster (even simply printed at home in black and white, and not even necessarily having any photos showing on it) in the back window of your car can sometimes work well as an advert too – remember to include at least one contact detail, like a phone number or email address – both would be better.

For security on free online advertising sites, you can refrain from including a telephone number or address, and can just make use of the messaging system on these sites, so that you’ll get contacted via email, but, if you’ve done your free account settings properly, the potential buyer doesn’t see your email address – unless you reply to them from your email address.

Sometimes people viewing ads on free online advertising sites may want to see more photos than you were allowed to display in your advert. It may be a good idea to get a website, even a free Blogger website, where you can display more photos of your products. Your own website is more professional, though, and doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Not all websites cost a fortune.

So if you have your own website, or even a free Blogger blog, with more photos of your products displayed there (and more details you’ve written about your products), you can include a link to your site in some free ads, as long as the free online advertising place allows it – and some do.

Of course you can also just email more photos to anyone who contacts you from a free online advertising place where they saw just a few photos of your products.

If you’ve read this carefully, you should have noticed that trying to earn some extra income (or a lot of income) from your flea market or craft market products doesn’t have to take place only at a flea market or craft market. You can sell your products from home too (or even only from home) – as long as people know about your products because you’ve been advertising them.

If selling your products from home, you could deliver the products, or have people collect, or could even post your products to people in other towns.

Remember that not everybody likes to walk around flea markets or craft markets, or may live in a town that you don’t visit, but these people might still like your products – so target them too, using cheap or free advertising methods.

© Copyright Teresa Schultz 2014