Craigslist – 7 Tips for Successful Advertising

Classified advertising has become one of the most popular, effective, and economical methods of online advertising the past few years. There are a number of classified advertising sites on the Internet, but none as popular or as powerful as Craigslist.org. This incredible site has millions of visitors each month and they are accessible nationally and internationally. This makes them a fertile website for promoting your products and your website.

At first glance, Craigslist may not seem as sophisticated or visually appealing as some other sites. They are not as sophisticated as eBay for example, but they have an incredible following of online users. Their visual appeal has not been a deterrent to buyers or sellers in any form or fashion. As a matter of fact, they continue to increase the number of people visiting their site every day and the number of cities they reach has now exceeded 500 in over 50 countries.

Posting your classified ad on Craigslist is a great way to drive traffic to your site. Including your URL and other information about your products and website will have people clicking to learn more. When you classified contains valuable information that helps people solve a problem or concern, they’re more likely to visit your website. They’ll be intrigued by what they read and they’ll be hungry for more.

But before you start pounding away at the keyboard to create your classified ad, consider some of the following important rules for utilizing the Craigslist website:

Always adhere to the privacy and conduct rules included on the website – violation of any of these policies can get you banned from the site. It’s also a good way to lose potential customers who will be turned off by your unethical and unprofessional practices.

Craigslist is serious about spamming – and they do NOT allow it in any form. If Craigslist finds that you are spamming, you will not be allowed to use their website for any future postings or classified advertising. Users are not allowed to send unsolicited email advertisements to Craigslist email addresses for any reason. They take their mission of providing high quality, professional content and classified ads seriously and they expect you to do the same thing.

Craigslist allows you to post one category and in one city about every 48 hours. If you submit similar postings in another city, you will get a message for ‘duplicate content’. Keeping this in mind, you’ll have to manage where you post and when you move postings from one location to another. Posting the same ad to more than one Craigslist location is considered spamming and you could be banned from using the site if you continue.

When including your URL in the text of your ad, you must include the http:// in front of it so it becomes an active link – otherwise it is inactive. Using HTML sparingly is allowed and they do not change your HTML.

Advertising your business or services on Craigslist must be done on the “Services Offered” category.

Some categories offer you the option to include a graphic or picture in your posting. Check to see if pictures are allowed and if so, this can increase the ability of your ad to grab attention of our target audience.

Remember that Craigslist has a search feature where people will type in keywords so make sure that you use relevant keywords to attract the people you want to attract. The search feature allows people to search by region and sub-region.

Following these 7 tips will help you create ads that are effective and that will drive traffic to your site. Craigslist is a good opportunity to promote your business and products through classified advertising. Give it a try and see for yourself.