Advertise Your Products,Events and Sites for Free on SLUnivese

Looking for ways to get more exposure for your products, events, real estate and SL-related sites on a high traffic site, but not ready to try paid advertising? SLUniverse.com offers multiple effective ways to advertise your products and sites for free:

1) SLUniverse Forums (forums.sluniverse.com):
The SLU forums are the most active third party SL forums, and there are dedicated forums commercial announcements, SL site updates, real estate, and a specialized Events forum that automatically adjusts event times to the viewer's time zone and can send email reminders. Upcoming events are also shown on the forum home page.

2) SLShopper (www.slshopper.com)
For advertising you products, SLShopper goes way beyond normal forum classifieds - it combines the best of online and inworld shopping, with the ease of use of the forums. The site is fully integrated with the SLU forums, but is a dedicated shopping site. All you need to be listed is a product image and a link to your inworld location. Posting an ad is as easy as creating a forum post. You can add multiple images per product, keywords, full descriptions, and more.

Visitors can browse by category visually and can make wish lists of products they want to check out in world, and then pull up the list with direct links to visit your store. They can leave feedback and easily view your other product listings. They can even add an RSS feed of your products to keep track of when you add new stuff. The latest product listings are also shown on the home page of the SLU forums.

3) Second Life Link Directory (www.searchsl.com)
This is a directory of SL-related sites - blogs, development companies,resources, podcasts, and more. Also fully integrated with the forums, you can submit your own listings and maintain them. The listings have thumbnail previews of the sites, and visitors can rate them, provide feedback, and make lists of favorite sites, as well as sort the listings in various ways.

All of these options are free - they only require being a registered SLU forum member to use. Let the high traffic of dedicated SL audience visiting SLU help bring you more traffic to your stores, events, and sites.

When you are ready for even more exposure, paid advertising options to fit different needs and budgets are available at www.sluads.com .

Huzzah for SLU!

SL Shopper has become an integral part of my marketing efforts, which I have to admit is probably the part of my business I like the least. I'm glad I gave it a try though, because I'm getting more eyeballs on my offerings in SL Shopper than in other areas where my products are quickly lost in the crowd.

This is a great resource for small business content creators and startups in SL.

I will second what Beebo said. Both as a merchant and a shopper, I really appreciate SL Shopper. It's about as painless as putting ads up/surfing for that special item can be, and while you cannot purchase directly from the site (as in OnRez and SLEx), it's easy enough to follow the SLURLs to the store in question.

For those who prefer to shop inworld, it's a tremendous aid. For those who want exposure for their products, it's more useful than many venues you have to pay for.

Thank you, Cristiano, for hosting this.

Thank you, Beebo and Virrginia, I am glad you both enjoy SLShopper. I plan to focus on adding more features to it after I finish upgrading Snapzilla, so any input you have, please let me know.

registering at SLU doesnt work

Could you be more specific about what is happening? It does require that you confirm your email address. If you are using a free email account, sometimes you can run into problems with spam filters. if you continue to have trouble, send me an IM in SL and I will confirm your account manually - just let me know which email you registered under privately.

SLU...Puuleeezzz!! Don't waste your time...if you want to GET PAID, put your products on SLExchange. If you want to PAY put your stuff on SLU.

I don't understand why you think advertising on your third world forum will make anyone any money besides yourself. As much as you want people to think you have a high traffic site, the reality is its just a bunch of you and your buddies alts.

One can also do some marketing in the SLUniverse forums through the time honored approach of creating an advertisement to put in their forum signature, then just post is the discussion forums when you have a question to ask or find something to say. No sales pitch needed in the body of the post at all.

This is true - however, in the SLU forums, the signature only appears once per page, instead of showing on every response from a user, to help cut down on visual clutter.