An Online Entrepreneur’s Experience Using Craigslist to Increase Website Traffic

It is easy to get overwhelmed with all of the rapidly changing marketing strategies and online advertising schemes that seem to bounce around the Internet news sites these days and are also found in every $40 Internet business book at Borders. The typical online entrepreneur, such as an e-book author, small business owner, independent artist, or website creator/operator, finds themselves struggling with implementing many of these seemingly foolproof techniques. I know, because I found myself in that same position several years ago after launching my website about my personal passion, open source website design. You see, I am a computer engineer and an independent author, not a marketing expert, and I had to develop a way to get web traffic to my sites. I want to share the insights I have found that started moving my projects into positive sales territory.

Let’s start by taking a look at some of the reasons why the “systems” you read about in those expensive books do not work well for many of us. First, many of these guides or strategies are written by people who do not have direct experience with a REAL online business. Things are different in the actual Internet trenches, as you can probably already attest to. I am sick of reading claims that sound too good to be true, because it wastes my time and money. I am not knocking people who write good books, but no matter how well written a strategy is the only thing that counts online is (traffic & sales) per (cost & time of doing it). Second, most online marketing strategies are geared for the “big guys”, websites and online businesses with the deep pockets and specialized personnel needed to implement effective, large scale marketing and sales campaigns.

The reality is that most of us starting online products and websites have real strengths and passions that we follow, and that is what drives us forward. We also are often trying to bootstrap an operation on very limited funds, alone or with a small team, with a laser-like focus on getting the online product, e-book, website, or other “tangible” finished. If you are like me, you may have “finished” your website only to find that you are getting just a dribble of people finding it - this is very demoralizing. That kind of web traffic is not going to generate enough product sales or Google Adsense advertising revenue to even breakeven on your hosting service costs, let alone bring in the riches all the books seem to describe.

How is the small business team or independent webmaster/entrepreneur to get customers to the typical specialized website? I found that what I needed was a way to convert my sweat equity (writing about what I am passionate about) into a marketing strategy that reached real people interested in the lessons and materials I was providing on my websites. I found that the best vehicle was craigslist.org, which for years has been one of the fastest growing websites on the Internet, and which provides almost the ideal environment for viral marketing. I say almost because there are some “limitations” (these turn out to be critically important strengths) which have to be understood before you wade into this vast sea of potential website visitors/customers.

Craigslist.org is not a single, unified national or international website. It is intrinsically a local resource only. It is designed to do one thing and that is to provide each craigslist market city or town or region with a local classified ad system. In fact, if you spend any time reading about craigslist.org or about its creator Craig Newmark, you will see that it actually limits you to posting “local” ads only. You can’t go to tampa.craigsist.org for instance and find a way to post your information to all 289+ cities across the US or world with one click. I will advise you right now NOT to waste your time and money on the automated posting software that is available out there. It blatantly violates the craigslist.org terms-of-use, and will ultimately get your posts banned. People like you and I that use craigslist.org sites to buy things or find out information are in general extremely savvy about ignoring anything that looks spam-like, and they will quickly flag spam-like postings for deletion, ultimately wasting your time and effort. So the first thing you have to do is to understand these 289 “local” markets - where are they located, how many people use them, how do you reach the most people with the demographic “profile” you want to reach out to, with the least effort?

I happen to have over 15 years of experience using Geographic Information System (GIS) to analyze things like population changes, so I used that knowledge geolocate each website and to mine for data I could link to each of them. It turned out to be a tough project, but I ended up with a unique series of maps, reports, and data files profiling each of the 289 US craigslist.org market areas. I began using these materials to focus my own posting efforts to reach the most potential customers for my open source website, and it worked. Slow but sure is how I would characterize my campaign, always being respectful of other craigslist users and the system that runs it. I learned how to use the built-in craigslist.org account to manage my posts, and honed some simple techniques to make professional, but not over-the-top posts. I started sharing my materials with my friends, and then decided to offer this all as its own e-book. You can learn more about these on my website http://www.aMillionPlaces.com .

There is one important indirect benefit for using craigslist.org as a primary marketing tool - increasing traffic from Google searches. Now a lot of material is out there on Search Engine Optimization or SEO, and you should follow every recommendation you reasonably can to make your product pages and websites look enticing to all the search engines; however, that in itself can be an overwhelming project for the average webmaster. I do not know if my craigslist.org posts, which are essentially links back to my website, directly boost my page rankings, but I do see those posts appear as first page search page results in many cases. It is amazing how fast Google and the other engines pick up on new posts. I have experienced that using craigslist.org in this way has been more effective for me than paying for Google’s Adwords system. Using Google Analytics, I can see the traffic coming from my various posts. I can’t guarantee that you or anyone else will have the same experiences as I have, but the fact that my original websites are still generating visitors and revenue means that I am still out there, like you, fighting for my piece of the Internet’s exciting and enticing web traffic. My final advice is to never give up, but be very flexible and keep trying new techniques and ideas. Some of the best things in life are still free, including posting on craigslist.org. Good luck with your project.

Jamie Robe is the author of the e-book “Craigslist for Entrepreneurs”, available from his website http://www.aMillionPlaces.com. You can also visit his website http://www.InSmallSteps.com to find about his real passion as a computer engineer, website development using free, open source software.