Thanks for another good question – this one by keith on promoting his service oriented business on Craigslist – he didn’t share alot of info ( ie – what kind of business he is in ) but I thought this would make for a good contribution to the site as it seems to conform to the type of stuff alot of people are struggling with – how to get free traffic – and how to convert that traffic into paying customers.  If it were only that easy, right?  Well – maybe – with some good advanced planning and a little bit of follow through – it really can be that easy.  Lets take a look : 

Hello Ian

I subscribed to your newsletter and you said something about talking about making money on Craigslist? I have read a few of your messages and there hasn’t been anything on Craigslist mentioned yet. I was going to buy an e book on making money on Craigslist but wanted to see if you had anything about it coming soon. I heard you can’t put links in so what’s the point anyway? I’m in the service business and haven’t used the Internet to sell my services much yet, but I’d like to start soon. Any ideas on what will be in the e-book?

Thank you:

Keith

 

 

Hi Keith - 

I guess the question you need to ask yourself is – knowing what you know to be fundamentally true about Craigslist – what possibly could an * e- book * teach you about how to make money posting classified ads on a free service that you couldn’t glean through some basic experimentation? How many * insider secrets* are possible to fill an e book on using Craiglist effectively?

Very simply – if you have a product – or you have a service to promote – you can make money on Craigslist just using your ingenuity, creativity and the strength of your offer.

If you are a skilled tradesman, a dentist, a landscaper or any similar service oriented business – you can use CL to post your ad for service for free – to a potentially huge demographic of potentially interested parties ( some CL cities get dramatically larger pager views – obviously the bigger cities are going to have a larger populace to draw from – but I’ve found that some medium sized cities on the left coast performed far better than larger cities on the East coast where I live for larger affiliate offers I’ve worked with )

 

How successful you are will very simply be a function of how often you post, how aggressively you mix and match categories, and most importantly – how well you write your copy – ( and how you position your offer within the copy – ie – are you offering a free white paper on the 7 mistakes most homeowners make when installing hardwood flooring – the 4 deadly sins of teeth bleaching, etc )

 

My simple rule for Craigslist – and in any other marketing venture – is when in doubt, be very aggressive..:-)

So – if you are a service professional in Portland, Oregon you want to post your ad in multiple categories, re-write the ad copy so that you ad can be positioned in as many categories as possible – (ie – there is only a slender shred of copy difference between making a business offering in small business service – vs – repositioning that offer as a financial services proposition – or within the creative category, etc. )Be creative and think outside the box a little bit.

You’ll find most of your competition is not only in the box – they’ve got wall to wall carpet and are pretty comfortable in there..:-) Re-post the ads every two days – ( don’t top post – or post multiple times in same category, same day – as eventually you will be deleted and draw attention to your copy, email address/account – and depending on how aggressive and who you believe – potentially even your ip address )

Reposting your Ads is simple – after 48 hours – log back in to your Craigslist account – click on the ad you want to work with ( it’s green if live ) and click delete this ad. You will get a confirmation screen that the ad has been deleted – go back to your account – re-select the ad – and hit re-post..:-)

One category and Captcha verification later – your ad is live and at the top of the heap once again. Spend a lot of time on your copy – using direct response principles in your CL ads is equally as important as using them in your squeeze pages, your postcards, direct mail, etc.

My standard approach for doing Craigslist work for a client who is in a service business is to make a time sensitive offer – write a great headline – offer a free report or white paper of some sort related to the topic – and send the person to an opt in form ( off CL obviously ) where you are collecting a name, fulfilling the free report or promise – and then bringing that new person into your sales funnel for follow up relationship marketing. This works – as you would expect – very, very well.

If you have an Aweber or Auto responder account – rather than using your own email address in the ad – just plug in your Aweber list name. Then – in the ad copy – very simply state – if you are one of the first 29 people to email me/us before the clock strikes 12 on Labor Day Monday you will get a * free copy of whatever *.

This will dramatically increase your response rate – which – as you already know if you are using Aweber – these people will be automatically* opting – in * to your list by virtue of emailing the aweber address to receive their free gift. Of course they will be required to confirm their opt in as Aweber and other auto responders require confirmation on this type of subscription – but so what?

Put it in the copy – right up at the top – and bottom of ad – let them know that as soon as they email you they are going to get a confirmation email for their protection ( because as we all know – you hate Spam as much as they do..;-) and once that is done – they will have their free gift automagically. Very, very simple – very, very effective. Best way to build a list for free that I know of – and – if you are doing national or even international Craigslist campaigns for affiliate offers or even your own products, if you aren’t doing some variation of the above – you aren’t optimizing your efforts.

Of course you could skip the above – and just send any prospective customer/client directly to your site where you make the offer – which is also effective. I’m a big believer in collecting names and building a list as the primary driver for any business building protocol so I’m partial to that process. But for simplicity – as long as you are testing different headlines and offers on your landing page – nothing wrong with just sending them directly to the offer page if you are more comfortable with that.

For competitive industries with high PPC prices ( adwords/yahoo/msn etc ) Craiglist is an absolute gift – because, as it is as they say, it’s ummmmm…FREE? Rather than spending a whole boatload of cold hard coin trying your ad copy on a PPC campaign – stick it up on Craigslist and test it there.

 

 

Rotate your landing pages with different offers, different copy and keep what works best, chuck what doesn’t’. Simply put on Google Analytics ( Free ) and measure everything that you can control ( everything on your side of what happens once they click through or follow up in any way on your offer )
 

Another thing I love to do with service related professionals is send your Craigslist visitors to a page that is nothing but testimonials — > If you are a Clown and perform a kids Birthday parties – and a parent is searching CL for birthday party entertainment – what could possibly sell your services better than a landing page – on your site – with video of a few 7 year old kids chattering on about the great time they had at Bobbies B-day thank to Cleo the Clown..:-)

Or give incentives to the parents to have the kids write nice testimonials – in their own handwriting on your landing page – and test that as another alternative. Let them say it for you. No way you can tell me that wont’ work – because it very simply just does.

 

As far as links go – dont’ believe the hype. I’ve seen lots of people say that Craigslist won’t take links – and it’s just simply untrue. I run ads with live links every single day – and while I have had ads flagged – it wasn’t because of the links..;-) In some categories they are tougher than others – as well they should be – adult oriented content, dating, Erotic Services, etc – they are much more aggressive in filtering the ads.

Even there though – it is possible to sneak links in – either by not hard coding them in – ( ie – www.mysite. C-O-M , or just simply mysite.com ) using images hosted elsewhere with a URL embedded in the picture, etc – these are the sorts of things that an e book is going to try to teach you to do for 39 bucks – so save your money – or better yet – donate it to charity – but the above scenario doesn’t seem to be apropos to your needs anyway.

If I can help in any other way – please don’t hesitate to ask.

Best..:-)

 

Ian

 

– —- — Note —- —- -

Affiliate marketing on a larger scale is somewhat of a different kettle of fish on craigslist – same basic principles apply always – good copy – good offer – solid product or service, yet – it is much more fun to get much more creative and titter totter a little bit more on that proverbial edge of TOS – ie – how to use links on a far bigger scale – throwaway domains, redirects, rotating copy and cloaking your copy a bit more using images in place of text, changing up links for SEO, more email addresses, sometimes more IP’s, different affiliate offers for testing purposes and so forth.

 

If you are willing to learn, and experiment a little bit – Craigslist is easily one of the absolute best places to get started with direct response marketing online – and with a pretty light learning curve, you can be making serious money, very quickly – which I think is really exciting for lots of people just starting out.

 

I am going to add a second piece to this article on Making Money with Affiliate Programs on Craigslist, I’m hoping to have it finished within a day or two – I will be covering some more advanced strategies relative to the ones highlighted in the letter to kieth, as well as dealing with some of the squirrelier issues that people seem to have problems with – ie – picking the right affiliate programs, using auto posting software vs outsourcing the work or posting by hand, the ignominious world of adult dating offers and much, much more..:-) So if you are into this kind of thing – ( making lots of money and having a blast doing it..:-) be sure to check back in a few days for the update.

Happy, healthy and safe Labor Day for All!