Well, you are not the only one, believe me. In fact, many businesses, large, medium and small have never considered classified ads as part of their marketing strategy either. No, never. Yet they should. Classified ads sites are a potential opportunity not to be missed.

It's a huge and ever-growing part of the Internet, with some major players in the field able to generate enormous amounts of daily traffic.

Take Gumtree, for example, one of the giants in the market. It started out as a small local classified ads and community site in London, some eight years ago. Now it boasts a million visitors every month. Amazing. Wouldn't you benefit from a little Gumtree traffic? Sure you would.

Loot is another big, big player in the classified ads market, combining a massive online presence with some major print publications, including the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, Metro and other titles, all part and parcel of the Associated Newspapers organization.

Loot is well known - a household name in fact - through the more than 20 years in the buying and selling game. Online and print combine to give it a reach in the order of 2 million every month. Around 500,000 of those visit the loot.com website itself. Just a small portion of such massive traffic would benefit any web business.

And there are quite a few other major players to look at. Friday-ad.co.uk is one. Another is classifiedads.com. Yet another is vivastreet.co.uk, which displays in the order of about half a million ads on its website at any one time. Staggering numbers.

But it doesn't stop there. For there are many other major sites which could have been listed and which provide significant traffic, too. But if there are major players then there are lesser players. Don't ignore these although just how much traffic each might provide is much harder to work out.

One of the positives is that the ad placing process is easy and free (as with all the major players, too). So it may be useful to sign up with a few of these minor sites at a time. Together, they should provide a fair bit of traffic. However, nothing is guaranteed. The only way is to try them and see just how good, or bad, they are.

One such "minor" player is freebieads.co.uk - my classified ads site, which has been on the go for about a year now! Hopefully, the site will become a major player in the not too distant future. Time will tell.

With around 5,000 visitors a month and some 500 ads, freebieads.co.uk may not be in the Gumtree, Loot or Vivastreet league. But even these major sites were small once-upon-a-time.

Right, let's lighten the mood slightly and finish off with a look at some of the more unusual ads posted from time to time. After all, a classified ad site surely reflects the world we live in. And sometimes it's a weird world indeed.

Loot provides a real insight here into the bizarre. For items sold have included a Mr Whippy ice cream van, Australian shark cartilage, manure, a pencil sharpener collection, an organic wormery and a life size dalek. Odd or what.

And classified ads attract all kinds of people - including British royalty, it would seem. Apparently, the Duchess of Kent sold her second-hand fridge through Loot in 2004.

So if it's good enough for British royalty then it must be good enough for us lesser mortals, too. So check out classified ads sites both great and small. They just might provide the boost your business has been waiting for.