Find a hot niche, do some SEO on the page, write articles on the niche and add to the page. Get traffic. Won't happen immediately. Takes time and patience. Read lots of forums/articles/blogs on SEO best practices.
bl4ckmaN^ : It's interesting you mentioned free classifieds...could you tell us which ones you found to be the best? Or is there any service that will submit my ad to multiple free classified sites?
infopage www.USFreeads.com is very popular for classifieds. I haven't tried to submit classifieds to multiple sites at once, but this is the website I know that offers this service http://www.5starads.com/submit100ads.html
Perhaps you and your friend can join forums and try to question/answer eachother with affiliate links like the one above me. Right PeopleHelper? google 'promote clickbank free' and use the search here before asking basics, you'll see ther are thousands of posts just like yours from last weeks new comers... NC.
Thanx for the link bl4ckmaN^...sort of reminds me of Howard Moreland's old MyFreeAd site which I later found out was whack...but this service has another option for those classy ads to be submitted manually so it should prove to be worthy.
Read this article. It is extremely helpful. http://www.bummarketingmethod.com/Article_Marketing.html Hope this helps.