Never heard of Craigslist?
Currently(11/16/07) ranks 49th in internet traffic. Don’t kid yourself, that is a HUGE potential source of free traffic and free advertising. . . you heard me correctly, FREE ADVERTISING.
Here is the website: Craigslist (Be sure to come back … I’ve got some suprizes for you)
Whether Craigslist is going to improve your business or not depends on how you are using it. As to whether it can help your business the answer is; of course, absolutely and positively YES. The catch is that you have to do it right if it is to prove profitable. It will not work for you if you abuse the system and it might work through chance if you are trying to working the system blindly and without any planning. The best approach is to identify your target market and then perform a thorough research on how to approach it. Only then should you start thinking about writing that sales letter that is going to do most of the heavy lifting for you. If you are not willing to take the time to do research and simply rely on spam volume then Craigslist is not going to do anything for you.
You can make serious profits by proper advertising on Craigslist. You can list your products and services for free on Craigslist. And since Craigslist has traffic of billions each month you do not have to worry about or spend time and money on building traffic for your own website. Craigslist can be one of the most powerful methods of advertising for those on a tight budget and even for those with no budget. The real effort lies in researching and evaluating your target market and behaving yourself. If you can do that then Craigslist can certainly benefit your business.
The biggest mistake people make when thinking of Craigslist is assuming that even a trickle of the billions of visitors per month will somehow make its way to their website. This is simply not true. You need to research and identify these people before you can actually get them to do something. You need to know your primary and secondary targets. You must know the right categories in which you are going to be advertising most heavily. Based on the target demographic you need to decide on the right sales copy. Keywords are another area where you need to really work hard to make sure that every single person reading your sales copy is at least remotely interested in what you have to say.
Depending on your business you may have to do this research offline as well. A good thing to do is to survey a sampling of your target market. Use well crafted questions to make sure that every response you get is useful. Do not ask for anything generic that your neighbor could tell you. It should be a strict market survey whose only purpose is to tell you how to most effectively plan your advertising campaign.
Do not ignore the competition when you are busy with all this. Craigslist is popular and every business out there is working hard to get the largest slice of the pie they can get a hold of. Since everything is on the internet you can monitor what your competitors are doing and also determine their level of success. This will give you additional information for your own plans.
Read the next article on: Efficient Customer Marketing
