How to Leverage Craigslist Traffic
By German Calvo
You may be asking now, if you don't know, what is Craigslist? Well, in the simplest term,
Craigslist is a massive classified ad site. And it is hugely popular because it is so simple
to use as well. It gets its name from its founder Craig Newmark and it began operating way
back in 1995 or 1996 in the San Francisco Bay Area. But now their traffic is enormous, serving
billions of pages per month and so, you are going to find out how to leverage the traffic that
Craigslist gets.
For a start, Craigslist is one of the 20 most visited websites in the Internet according
to Alexa.com, even though is mainly directed towards the US, Canada and the UK, it may soon
open to other countries. It is a place where you can buy something, sell almost anything even
cars and where you can meet people, find jobs etc. And it is completely free, except job listings
for employers. So Craigslist can help a lot of people most of the time, which is one very important
principle of its founder's first intention when he started Craigslist.
You can start by posting an ad, clicking on "post to classifieds", once you are in their
website Craigslist, choosing the category where you want to post it, and telling viewers what
the ad is about, where you want to be contacted, whether at Craigslist or to your own personal
email address. And this is done automatically from Craigslist if you ask them so you don't
have to give your personal email address to the public. You can also add an image at the bottom.
And when your ad is completed, and checking that is fine, write the caption you see and continue.
Go to your email address that you were using and click the verification link inside the
email. You will then be brought to a page to inspect your ad and approve it. Make sure the
links in your ads are correct and work properly, the spelling in you ad is right and then click
to publish your ad. And voila! Your ad is online in Craigslist.
You can sell physical products and in fact, selling things from around your house, things
like jewellery for example, are a good way to make a start with selling things on Craigslist.
If you wanted to sell things like bracelets, watches etc. you could set up an online mini store,
go to Craigslist and post a classified ad in the jewellery category. In the ad you would ask
visitors to go to your own jewellery website for more listings of jewellery.
The chances are good that when visitors arrive at your website, they can find what they
are looking after and make a purchase and thus becoming your customers to whom you can make
further offers later.
Your ads can be posted in different cities, countries etc. so you do not have to limit
yourself to just one city or country. Post the same ad in ten or twenty different cities and
in several countries to leverage the success of the one ad that works, or several ads that
are successful.
What you then need is tracking your ads to see where they perform the best or which ones
sell the most and use this knowledge to leverage your results and profits online. But this
is only one of the strategies you can use with Craigslist, because there are so many other
ways to make money with Craigslist.
Yes, you can sell affiliate programs and products very successfully with Craigslist as
well. So, for instance, in the previous ad for jewellery, you could place an affiliate link
to an online jewellery site, and when the customer clicks on the affiliate link and makes a
purchase, you get a commission for the sale of the product.
Remember that we you can also make ads about jobs, ideas, events etc. etc. so the possibilities
from Craigslist are really too great to go into detail within the scope of this article.
Finally, always use ethical ways about postings, or you may be flagged by Craigslist's
user flagging system which identifies illegal or inappropriate postings. On the whole, provided
you strictly conduct your presence in Craigslist with ethical business values, according to
Craigslist terms and conditions, you will have nothing but great experiences in marketing online
with Craigslist.
This is what I want you to do right now: go and click on
FREE Internet Marketing Library
to get more information about internet marketing topics of your interest, FREE e-books that
will propel your online business to new heights.
| 
About BTH
User Agreement
Privacy
Site Map
Contact
News Feeds
RSS Feed
Follow @Stephen Bucaro
Web Design for Marketing
