1. Step 1

   Go to the Craigslist Web site. Select your location from the section on the right.

2. Step 2

   Click on “Services.”

3. Step 3

   Click on “Post” in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

4. Step 4

   Select the appropriate category for your business. Does it fit into more than one category? Make sure to post in all that apply.

5. Step 5

   Describe your business succinctly in the “Posting Title” field. Use the “Posting Description” field to elaborate on your business.

6. Step 6

   Decide how people should reply to your post. You can have them reply directly to your email address or choose the anonymous reply option. If you do not want to be contacted by email, include another convenient way for people to get in touch with you in your description.

7. Step 7

   Repeat the same process for Craigslist sites in other communities where you wish to do business.

Related posts

• How to Use Craigslist to Promote Your Articles (0)
• Affiliate Marketing through Craigslist (0)
• Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Promoting your Business Through Craigslist (0)
• Effectively Advertising On Craigslist (0)

1. Step 1

   

   Craigslist City Selection Area

   If a Craigslist account has not been created then now is the time to do so.
   Visit Craigslist website homepage and locate the “login” word link on the page, Click on “login”.
   Below the login fields locate the “Don’t have an account? Click here to sign up.” By doing so your re-directed to an account sign up page.

2. Step 2

   

   Craigslist Discussion Area

   Once a Craigslist (CL) account has been created, locate the city that will be targeted and click on that city link. If a city is not chosen before a post then CL will default one for you.
   Note: At the time that this article was created Craigslist was designed to only post in specific cities only. SF bay area is normally the default city.

3. Step 3

   

   Inside Craigslist Discussion Area

   Below the “discussion forums” area there are many topics available. Choose the topic related to your article. The most effective way to promote an article here is to post articles to a topic that already has comments only if it is related to the article.

4. Step 4

   

   Craigslist User Thread Postings

   Another way of promoting articles in the discussion forums of CL is to “compose new thread” to a discussion related to the article. This way may not be as effective as posting to a discussion that already has comments but it could be a lot easier if there is not many discussions on the topic create.
   Not only can you use CL to promote articles but the discussion topics and forums are a great way to get good ideas of writing articles. There are many areas of topics that people are searching for advice.

Related posts

• How to Promote Your Business on Craigslist (0)
• Effectively Advertising On Craigslist (0)
• Craigslist posting new rules — housing, craigslist changes October 2009 (0)
• Answering Advertisements on Craigslist (0)
• Affordable Advertising on Craigslist (0)

With the exception of job postings and housing postings in specific markets, advertising is free on Craigslist. Users are asked to agree to the terms of service of the community and are expected to follow specific guidelines when posting advertisements but there are no financial obligations to those placing advertisements on Craigslist. This means those who post advertisements do not have to be concerned with whether or not the advertisement they place will meet their expectations in terms of sales generated.

Reaching Potential Customers on Craigslist

Another reason why posting advertisements for products or services on Craigslist is so worthwhile is the likelihood of reaching a large audience of potential customers. A review of the Craigslist fact sheet reveals pertinent information regarding the amount of traffic the website receives. According to this information Craigslist receives approximately four billion page views each month with ten million people using Craigslist each month. From these statistics it is clear that advertisements placed on Craiglist are likely to receive at least some attention from potential clients.

With so many visitors using Craigslist each month the advertising possibilities are limitless, however, there are no guarantee any of these visitors will be interested in your products or services. Like any marketing campaign, your advertisements on Craigslist must be intriguing, informative and in a location where you will reach your target audience.

Finding Your Target Audience on Craigslist

We’ve already discussed the number of visitors using Craigslist each month but the key to taking advantage of these numbers is to target your advertising in a way aimed at reaching your target audience as opposed to a wide audience of individuals who have no specific interest in your products or services. It is much more worthwhile to reach a small audience of those with a keen interest in your products or services than to reach a much larger audience of those who are not interested. Those who have an interest in your products or services are your target audience.

The key to reaching your target audience on Craigslist is placing your advertisement in the most appropriate locations. Craigslist has a specific section for businesses to advertise their services. This section is broken down into a number of categories. Those who are in the business of computer repair would be wise to place their advertisement in the computer section as opposed to the automotive section because individuals looking for computer help will naturally migrate to the computer section. It may sometimes be appropriate to place an advertisement in more than one section. This is acceptable as long as it does not cross the line to spamming the section.

If there is not a specific section for the products or services offered by your business there are a couple of options. Business owners can place an advertisement in the section for small business advertisements where it might be found by those doing a search in this section. Alternately the business owner can contact Craigslist to suggest the addition of a new category. They might be willing to oblige if they believe this category warrants an addition.

The Difference between Advertising and Spamming

Advertising on Craigslist is one thing but spamming is quite another. Placing an advertisement in an appropriate section of Craigslist is acceptable; however, placing the same advertisement in nearly every section of Craigslist websites for a number of different geographical regions is considered spam. Spam is ineffective for a number of reasons.

First of all potential customers who see a particular advertisement in a number of different locations are likely to recognize the spamming techniques and be less inclined to patronize this business. Also, if Craigslist detects the practice of spamming they may delete all of the postings and could potentially ban advertisements from the individual in the future.

Related posts

• Affordable Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Affiliate Marketing through Craigslist (0)
• Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Unique Advantages of Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Understanding the Power of Craigslist Advertising (0)

The housing section of Craigslist is loaded with scammers and many of them are making thousands of dollars a day scamming people who are unaware that they’re being scammed. Although Craigslist makes great effort to post warnings on just about every page on the site including emails from potential scammers, people are still getting taken advantage.

For instance, right here where I live on the news recently there was a story about three families who were scammed out of almost $10,000 on one rental property. What the scammers do is find a listing on Craigslist that is a genuine listing w/ photo and they copy it, then they place a new ad with a lower price a price that seems too good to be true. This causes people to act fast and they take the scammers bait. In this case that’s exactly what the scammer did. He was so good that he convinced these three families that he was out of the country on business. He asked that they wire the money to him and all three families did.

And then come move-in day, three families show up with their moving trucks and belongings. Some of these families had traveled halfway across the country to relocate to this residence. What they were in for next shocked them. The house was already rented by the owner and the new tenant who was living there went to answer the door just to hear, what are you doing living in my house? By the end of the day three families were out over $10000, they had no place to stay, they had movers and moving trucks that had all of their belongings. Talk about pain!

I didn’t hear exactly how the remainder of the story went because the TV news only has so much time to tell a story, but I can only imagine the grief these families went through after that.

This is one of the many reasons why Craigslist has revamped their entire system. They did it for security reasons but at the same time locked out millions of people worldwide who actually make a living on there. I don’t think Craigslist realizes how many legitimate people were making a living on Craigslist, but all I can say is there’s a lot of people stressing out about this according to my blog traffic. I am experiencing heavy international traffic to my website so this is definitely a worldwide issue.

There are other places where you can make money online including housing, and one of them is to consider writing articles about the rentals or sales of housing in your area or the values of living in the area where you are renting or selling. In those articles you use specific keywords that you would actually use if you were searching on Google for the housing that you’re actually trying to rent or sell.

Using specific keywords to target Google search is called SEO, also known as search engine optimization.
One of the beauties about writing articles and then placing them on free article websites is that you are able to place a link from you, the author, to your website or blog. If you are a good writer and are writing on a genuine topic that informs the reader you build trust in them . If they like what they read they will click that link and visit your blog or website. Then they can see if you are a valuable source of information and have more to offer them..

Before they even arrive at your website you have already shown them your credibility so making a sale or scheduling an appointment is easy. Housing video’s are very popular and if you can drag someone from your article to your website or blog so they view your videos then you have a great chance of making a sale, rental or lease.

And don’t forget this, articles live online forever so if you did a good job, it will keep sending you customers over and over again. If one article that you wrote in under 45 minutes rented or sold one or two properties a year would you consider 45 minutes a good investment for the return that an article can give you? Imagine what 500 articles online could do for business! Remember that in housing people are always moving in and out of areas and 90% don’t use Craigslist for information. They want credible information from a local source. Tell a nice story about the history of a neighborhood and its strong points, schools, historic places and make a believer out of them. Include your photo in the article and they will think you’re their best friend and they can’t wait to meet you. An article is a salesperson that works 24/7 and costs you absolutely nothing.

Don’t have time to write an article? I have article writers who will write full time on any subject and will do all the research. All I do is post the article to the internet and insert my business link into it. How much do I pay per article? $4 each, YES $4 EACH! I outsource to a guy in the Philippines. He is a member of Wealthy Affiliate where I also belong. Wealthy Affiliate is the only place on the internet with an International community of internet marketers who freely share the ways they make money. The job bank there can help anyone out from building a website, writing articles, logo work, and much more. Many Wealthy Affiliate members actually produce their own member tutorials for members to learn from.

I don’t know about you but when someone that earns $375,000.00 a year as an article marketer produces free videos for Wealthy Affiliate members to watch and learn from, you bet your sweet Fort Knox that I will watch each one of those video’s a dozen times or more over and over again.

Related posts

• Craigslist Posting New Rules for Housing, Craigslist Housing Changes October 2009 (0)
• How to Use Craigslist to Promote Your Articles (0)
• How to Promote Your Business on Craigslist (0)
• Effectively Advertising On Craigslist (0)
• Craigslist ad posting tips. Follow this simple advice and you will have no worries (0)

Answering Personals Advertisements

The personals section of Craigslist can be a great place for individuals to meet platonic friends or potential romantic partners. However, it can also be a location for predators to prey on unsuspecting victims who do not realize the threat of danger which may exist with meeting online partners in person.

One of the simplest ways to avoid potentially harmful situations is to never agreeing to meet someone in a desolate location. Initial meetings should take place in busy, public locations to minimize the potential for danger. Predators are much less likely to attempt to harm you in a public location. Additionally, it is wise to not travel to a secluded location with someone you don’t know until you are positive they do not intend to do you any harm.

Precautions should also be taken to avoid giving out personal information such as your address to those you meet online. The Internet affords a certain degree of anonymousness and some unscrupulous individuals can take advantage of this to mask their true identity.

Answering Housing Advertisements

The housing advertisements on Craigslist offer opportunities for those who are seeking housing situations such as rental of a housing location, roommate opportunities, sublets or house swaps. Care should be taken in all of these opportunities to ensure the person you are working with does not have any ill intentions towards you. This can be done by carefully screening all potential roommates or others who might be using your house or apartment.

When selecting a potential roommate it is important to verify the individual is trustworthy and able to pay the rent. It is also important to seek out an individual with living habits similar to your own to avoid the potential for conflict.

Answering Job Advertisements

Craigslist is an excellent location for finding exciting new career opportunities. There are many different job advertisements in a variety of different categories. These job opportunities include full time, part time, telecommute and contract positions. The downside to answering job advertisements on Craigslist is the advertisements are often placed anonymously. Those who place the advertisements are given the opportunity to either use their own email address for candidates to respond or to have candidates respond through an email address generated by Craigslist. Therefore, candidates do not always know who has placed the advertisements. For this reason care should be taken when responding to these advertisements to avoid supplying specific contact information. Candidates are instead urged to supply only an email address when responding to advertisements.

Related posts

• Craigslist from Ant Farms to Zookeepers (0)
• Around the World with Craigslist (0)
• Affordable Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• The Craigslist Community (0)

The vast majority of those posting advertisements on any of the Craigslist over 300 websites are not paying a fee to do so. This definitely makes posting advertisements on Craigslist to be worthwhile from a financial standpoint. While the advertisements are free care should be taken to post these advertisements judiciously because although there is financial loss, poor posting can result in a loss of time and resources if it leads to poor profit potential.

Why Craigslist is Free

Although the founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, was approached in 1997 about the possibility of running banner advertisements on Craigslist to generate a profit, he made the decision to keep Craigslist as a noncommercial website. Even after Craigslist was converted to a for profit organization commercialization did not infiltrate the website. The points listed in the Craigslist mission statement demonstrate why Craigslist has remained noncommercial:

* Giving each other a break, getting the word out about everyday, real-world stuff
* Restoring the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, non-commercial environment
* Keeping things simple, common-sense, down-to-earth, honest, very real
* Providing an alternative to impersonal, big-media sites
* Being inclusive, giving a voice to the disenfranchised, democratizing…
* Being a collection of communities with similar spirit, not a single monolithic entity

Advertising on Craigslist vs. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another type of marketing which many business owners find to be both worthwhile and affordable. For many the appeal of affiliate marketing is the affiliates are not compensated for their efforts unless the business owner sees some type of gain from the advertising. This gain may be in the form of website traffic in the case of pay per click marketing, in the form of sales in pay per sale marketing or in the form of potential leads when a website visitor performs a specific action such as registering with a website or signing up for an offer.

While affiliate marketing is very appealing there are others who prefer advertising on Craigslist. The advantages Craigslist offers to advertisers is, of course, that the advertisers never pay for their business advertisements and the community receives a great deal of website traffic already so driving traffic to the website is not a concern.

Why Free Is Not Always Better

However, there are some specific instances where free advertising is not the best type of advertising available. Consider a product or service for which Craigslist does not have an appropriate category. In this case advertising on Craigslist may not be worthwhile because although the advertisement is free, it is also not likely to receive a great deal of attention from members of the target audience. In this case, advertising on Craigslist may be a waste of resources.

Another example of an instance when Craigslist may not be a great advertising option is when the market is already saturated with competitors’ advertisements. In this case it can be difficult to sway customer loyalty so it might be more worthwhile to pay for advertising in a less crowded market.

Related posts

• Affiliate Marketing through Craigslist (0)
• Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Utilzing Craigslist for Affiliate Marketing (0)
• Effectively Advertising On Craigslist (0)
• Can Craigslist Improve Your Business? (0)

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially a marketing campaign in which the business owner only pays the affiliate based on performance. Unlike conventional marketing campaigns where the business owner pays for the advertising regardless of the results produced by the advertisements, in affiliate marketing the business owner only pays when a specific result is achieved. Affiliate marketing usually takes place in the following three forms:

* Pay Per Click
* Pay Per Sale
* Pay Per Lead

In a pay per click affiliate marketing campaign the affiliate places a coded link on their website and each time a visitor to their website clicks through the link to the sponsor’s website, the affiliate receives a sum of money. The amount of money they receive is based on an agreement between the sponsor and the affiliate. This amount can be cents, dollars or even a fraction of a cent. In a pay per sale campaign the affiliate is not compensated when the visitor clicks through to the sponsor’s website unless they also make a purchase when they click through this link. Again the amount of money the affiliate receives will depend on a pre-determined agreement and may be a specific amount or a percentage of the sale. In a pay per lead program the affiliate receives monetary compensation when a visitor clicks through the affiliate link and performs a specific action such as registering at the sponsor’s website or requesting additional information.

Using Craigslist to Find Potential Affiliates

Business owners who are interested in finding affiliates to promote their website may use Craigslist for the purpose of finding these affiliates. It may seem logical to post affiliate opportunities in the jobs section of Craigslist but it is important to note this is against Craigslist’s job posting policies. Review of the policy for posting jobs on Craigslist will verify these requirements. Therefore those who are interested in finding affiliates will have to take advantage of other areas of Craigslist to find affiliates.

Visiting discussion forums related to your business may be one way to find potential affiliates. However, when using the discussion forums, care should be taken to avoiding spamming the discussion forums with links to sign up for your affiliate program. Such spamming techniques are likely to not be taken seriously by potential affiliates and may incur more severe penalties by Craigslist moderators. The best way to find potential affiliates is to make logical contributions to discussions and get to know other participants offline or to include a link to more information on your affiliate marketing program whenever you post.

Using Craigslist to Find Opportunities for Affiliates

Those who generate a profit from acting as an affiliate for others can find new affiliate opportunities through Craigslist. Although posting these opportunities on the job boards are prohibited it is possible for advertisements of this nature to appear either because the original poster was not aware of the restrictions or because they deliberately ignored the restrictions. These types of advertisements are likely to be removed when discovered but they may exist for a short time without being noticed.

Those who act as affiliates can also find potential leads by placing advertisements in the services section or the resumes section. They may also find potential leads by networking with those in the discussion forums.

Related posts

• Affordable Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Utilzing Craigslist for Affiliate Marketing (0)
• How to Promote Your Business on Craigslist (0)
• Effectively Advertising On Craigslist (0)

Reaching Potential Customers on Craigslist

Another reason why posting advertisements for products or services on Craigslist is so worthwhile is the likelihood of reaching a large audience of potential customers. A review of the Craigslist fact sheet reveals pertinent information regarding the amount of traffic the website receives. According to this information Craigslist receives approximately four billion page views each month with ten million people using Craigslist each month. From these statistics it is clear that advertisements placed on Craiglist are likely to receive at least some attention from potential clients.

With so many visitors using Craigslist each month the advertising possibilities are limitless, however, there are no guarantee any of these visitors will be interested in your products or services. Like any marketing campaign, your advertisements on Craigslist must be intriguing, informative and in a location where you will reach your target audience.

Finding Your Target Audience on Craigslist

We’ve already discussed the number of visitors using Craigslist each month but the key to taking advantage of these numbers is to target your advertising in a way aimed at reaching your target audience as opposed to a wide audience of individuals who have no specific interest in your products or services. It is much more worthwhile to reach a small audience of those with a keen interest in your products or services than to reach a much larger audience of those who are not interested. Those who have an interest in your products or services are your target audience.

The key to reaching your target audience on Craigslist is placing your advertisement in the most appropriate locations. Craigslist has a specific section for businesses to advertise their services. This section is broken down into a number of categories. Those who are in the business of computer repair would be wise to place their advertisement in the computer section as opposed to the automotive section because individuals looking for computer help will naturally migrate to the computer section. It may sometimes be appropriate to place an advertisement in more than one section. This is acceptable as long as it does not cross the line to spamming the section.

If there is not a specific section for the products or services offered by your business there are a couple of options. Business owners can place an advertisement in the section for small business advertisements where it might be found by those doing a search in this section. Alternately the business owner can contact Craigslist to suggest the addition of a new category. They might be willing to oblige if they believe this category warrants an addition.

The Difference between Advertising and Spamming

Advertising on Craigslist is one thing but spamming is quite another. Placing an advertisement in an appropriate section of Craigslist is acceptable; however, placing the same advertisement in nearly every section of Craigslist websites for a number of different geographical regions is considered spam. Spam is ineffective for a number of reasons. First of all potential customers who see a particular advertisement in a number of different locations are likely to recognize the spamming techniques and be less inclined to patronize this business. Also, if Craigslist detects the practice of spamming they may delete all of the postings and could potentially ban advertisements from the individual in the future

Related posts

• Affordable Advertising on Craigslist (0)
• Affiliate Marketing through Craigslist (0)
• How to Promote Your Business on Craigslist (0)
• Effectively Advertising On Craigslist (0)
• Can Craigslist Improve Your Business? (0)