e_Marketing

After reading the excellent materials from Jeremy Lawrence describing how you can generate traffic from craigslist.org I've been looking for an opportunity to do some testing.

I'm sure a lot of you know more about CL than I do, but the truth is I had never even looked at CL until about a month ago. I'm not a big fan of buying stuff from classified ads. But apparently millions of people are since there's an active craigslist site in virtually every significant ciy across North America - and a bunch in the rest of the world too.

My first "test", if you can call it that, was to try to get rid of an old claw foot bath tub we had taken out of commission in my dad's house near Fort Erie, Ontario. I placed an ad in the Toronto edition of the site: "Free Claw Foot Bath Tub". We just wanted someone to haul it away and have been told there are all kinds of people who cherish these old things. Toronto is roughly two hours from Fort Erie, so I figured only people who were seriously interested would call.

My brother is the contact in tub city, and even before I told him about the ad he had received two phone calls - within about two hours. The calls have continued to come (who can resist the allure of a "free claw foot bath tub"), but so far no takers.

After that limited success story (its traffic we're after here, right) I decided to try promoting some of our display graphics products. I placed five ads in cities across Canada, each with a toll free number and a link to one of our product sites.

Now these are narrowly targeted products with a limited appeal to what I assume are the typical craigslist readers: consumers looking for cheap stuff. But so far those ads have pulled in more hits than yahoo and msn. Of course Google is still the big traffic generator (relatively speaking) - but that is at least partially due to our Adwords campaign.

So clearly craigslist will generate hits. What the conversion rate for those hits will turn out to be is another question. But hey, the ads are free. So with a bit of work you can start generating traffic using craigslist.

Before jumping into CL I recommend you have a look at these two products:

Craigs List Videos - Where you should place your ads, how often, what you should say, and what you should not say. The CL folks don't like certain kinds of ads (affiliate links, for instance) and these short videos give you the inside scoop.

AdBomber - Once you are convinced you want to do ads in CL on a regular basis, have a look at this product. Adbomber automates (as much as possible) the process of placing multiple ads in Craigslist, Back Page, Google Base and Kijiji. The FAQ on the site also contains a lot of useful information about different strategies for placing ads.