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Craigslist Advertising For Your Online Business

Craigslist advertising is a good way to generate around 20 to 30 leads per day for your online business. One fact to consider is that not many internet marketers advertise on Craigslist, so there isn’t much competition. Craigslist also has an Alexa rank of 38, which is a higher rank than AOL, ESPN.com or CNN.com. Craigslist gets lots of traffic and with a little effort you can harvest some pretty good leads for free.

Craigslist Advertising:

I’ve done a little bit of advertising on Craigslist and it does work, but you have to be creative and you have to make it a part of you daily routine. It’s a pretty labor intensive strategy, but it’s free and the competition is low.

Here’s a list of the top reasons to consider using it.

• Craigslist Advertising is FREE.
• It’s the biggest online classified service that gets tons of traffic.
• It’s underutilized in the internet/network marketing community.
• You can generate around 20 to 30 leads a day.

How To Get Started

1. Setting up an account is easy and takes just a minute. You do need a phone number to set one up though.
2. Select a city in which you want to advertise. Obviously the larger the city, the more leads you can generate per ad. Size does matter as the bigger the city the more traffic.
3. Select a category . If you’re placing an ad for a Biz Opp in larger cities, there is a $25 per ad charge, but there are a few ways to get around that.  Select smaller cities to advertising in and place your ad in other sections besides the Biz Opp category.

How To Get Your Ad Noticed

Craigslist allows both text based and image based ads. They also support html, so you can make your ad stand out. The best approach would be to use a clickable image that takes people to a capture page.

How Not To Get “Flagged”

Craigslist advertising can be relatively straight forward, but you have to be on your toes. The site is regularly monitored by staff and by concerned users who can turn you in. The bottom line is that you can’t spam and you can’t post the same ad over and over again. The Craigslist system will notice similar ads across various categories, so you need to change things up regularly. Here are some other tactics:

1. Limit your ads to 20 runs per account
2. Vary the cities you advertise in and don’t choose neighboring cities. Mix things up geographically.
3. Focus on placing one ad in one category, per city.
4. Use different domains when placing ads.
5. Link from external sites such as Imageshack, Photobucket or Picasa. That means place your image on those sites and then link back to Craigslist using those unique domain.

Craigslist Advertising Lead Quality

The benefit of Craigslist advertising is that people that visit the site are usually actively searching for something, but a lot of the traffic are “window shoppers” which means they aren’t necessarily buyers. Also Craigslist visitors are bargain hunters and so they aren’t always the best prospects. We’re all bargain shoppers these days, so don’t let that get in your way. The lead quality varies depending on the categories too.

Final Thoughts

Craigslist advertising is a good source to generate leads and the best part is that it’s free. It does take a daily commitment to create and place ads however. This is a strategy that you could potentially outsource on Elance or oDesk, but just like anything else you need to have done it yourself a few times so you know how to instruct others on how it’s done and what you expect in return.

P.S. If You Don’t Have a Step-By-Step Blueprint For Success then CHECK THIS OUT (Unless You Already Have Too Many Leads).

P.P.S. CONTACT ME here if you are ready to get started or have questions. I will get back to you within 24-hours. Promise.

Image courtesy of AlishaV on Flickr.com
Image courtesy of OxOx on Flickr.com

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Tagged as: Craigslist Advertising