Make Money on Craigslist How to Use the World’s Best Classifieds
Oct/09N/A
Do you know how to make money on Craigslist? Craigslist is the world’s largest and best classified site. And the best part is that almost all of the classified ads on Craigslist are free.
Craigslist started out as a simple email list that Craig Newmark sent to friends in the San Francisco bay area. At first it was a list of the weekend’s parties and events. As his personal list of recipients grew, people began asking him to list a roommate vacancy or a job opening.
Eventually, he decided to put the list online and let anyone post to it. At first, the site was only for San Francisco area users. But in 2000, they set up separate listings for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland (OR), San Diego, Seattle, Washington DC, and Sacramento.
The site currently has more than 550 cities in 50 countries around the world.
Craigslist gets 12 billion page views a month and is the world’s 8th most popular English language website.
Knowing this, do you think you could make money on Craigslist?
Well, you need to keep in mind that Craigslist has an internal culture that isn’t overly friendly to internet marketing sales. In fact, the official url is www.Craigslist.org with the .org reflecting the company’s “relatively noncommercial nature.” There is a sense that it’s okay to list your couch for sale but not an ebook.
Still, internet marketers have found ways to make money on Craigslist.
There are several sections to Craigslist including community, housing, jobs, for sale, and services. Craigslist asks that you post internet marketing opportunities in the appropriate services section. For instance, a debt consolidation offer should go in the Financial Services section.
Not all marketers agree with the Craigslist guidelines and they post to other sections at their own risk. For instance, you can create ads for ebooks and place them in the books for sale section or give away subscriptions to your free newsletter in the free section.
Many people promote affiliate marketing and other internet business opportunities in the jobs section. This can be risky as these ads often get flagged. If you get flagged too many times you can lose your rights to post to Craigslist.
The most visited cities are posted under “US Cities” on the right hand side of the screen. San Francisco is, by far, the most visited page on the site. If you want to get your web site indexed quickly, make a post to the San Francisco page.
You can make money on Craigslist if you use the world’s largest and best classified site wisely.
Should You Pay an Affiliate to Promote Your Product
Oct/09N/A
Many product owners wonder whether they should pay an affiliate to promote their product. While I think the answer is generally yes, there are exceptions to when you want to pay an affiliate.
You can only get so many people to come to your website on your own. Your pay per click resources are limited and you can only write so many articles and create so many back links before your time is exhausted. If you have an army of affiliates promoting your product, you simply will be able to make more sales. If your affiliates aren’t poaching off of the sales you would make yourself, paying affiliates to market your product is a no brainer.
If you were selling chocolate chip cookies, each additional dozen cookies would cost you money to produce. But digital products are different. It costs you almost the same amount of money to produce one product as it does to produce a million. Therefore, why wouldn’t you want to pick up low hanging fruit by paying affiliates to promote your product?
Additionally, once you get a customer, you can sell to him or her for life. If you have structured your product line correctly, you can pay an affiliate 75 percent of the original purchase price, but continue to market to that customer for the rest of his life without paying the affiliate any additional money.
Affiliate marketers are very good at their area of specialization or they wash out quickly. Some are experts at pay per click and know how to deliver traffic to your site that converts. Others put in the time to write articles that pre-sell customers on your product before they ever land on your page. Video marketing, forum marketing, and classified ads are other specialities of affiliate marketers.
So, are there times when it doesn’t make sense to pay affiliate marketers? Yes, there are.
If you are only going to sell 100 of an item and you have 1,000 responsive people on your personal email list, you will probably not want to pay affiliates. When you can sell out the subscription yourself, there is no need to split the proceeds.
Another time when you may want to consider not using affiliates is when you want to control how the product is marketed. When you open the product up to affiliate marketers, you lose control of the advertising process. Marketers could spam safe lists or classified sites and give your product a bad name.
Most product owners, however, find that the benefits outweigh the down sides of paying affiliates.
Clickbank is the most popular way to set up an affiliate program for digital products. PayDotCom tried to give Clickbank a run for its money, but hasn’t taken off as well as the promoters hoped. You can also set up a script to run an affiliate program. The $7 script and Rapid Action Profits are two scripts which let you pay affiliates.
