Using Craigslist to Make Money
Craigslist is the world’s largest classified advertising medium, both online and offline. One of the most visited sites on the Internet, Craigslist can be a great way of making money, whether you’re just looking to sell a used computer or if you want to drive traffic to a marketing site of yours.
Craigslist currently serves well over five hundred cities in numerous countries around the world. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to have virtually the same ad running simultaneously in various cities without doing anything illegal or unethical. If you want to create an ad and submit it to a few different cities, all you need to do is to reword the ad’s title, perhaps change a few words in the ad itself, and space out your ad submissions by a few minutes. By running your ad in a few different cities, you’ll be reaching a much larger audience as opposed to just posting in your own city or region.
Your main focus when creating an ad is to have a compelling title because that will be the only deciding factor as to whether someone clicks on your ad or not. If you visit Craigslist and browse through the ads in the small business ads for example, you’ll see many people using all caps for their ads while others like using excessive amounts of symbols to draw the attention of the viewer. These tactics may be irritating to some, but the people running the ads may have already tested various types of ad titles and found the ones that worked best for them. Your title doesn’t need to be informative or reveal too much about your ad, it just needs to get more clicks.
If you’ve managed to attract some eyeballs using a catchy title, then you’re doing a good job so far. Next, you’ll need a compelling ad. A short and formatted paragraph usually works best because nobody wants to have to struggle to read a poorly formatted ad that runs on for over a page. Most advertisers on Craigslist are doing one of the following things: posting a hyperlinked image or banner as their ad, having a one-liner as an ad, or having a ridiculously long text-only ad. As a Craigslist advertiser, you should also try and approach your own ad as if you were a potential buyer or visitor and see if your ad would appeal to you. A well crafted ad would stand out from the rest. Try making your ad more concise and compelling, or try and add an image with a brief description.
When you post an ad, it will run for anywhere between 7 and 45 days before it expires, depending on the section and city you post in. However, depending on which city you post your ad in, your ad could be bumped off the front page of its category within a day or less. This is why you should try and post in as many cities as possible, provided that you want the product or service you’re selling to be available to long distance buyers. For optimal results, post in various different cities and repost your ad about once a week per city by deleting your original ad and going through the posting process again.