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Why it's important to advertise your website on Craigslist.
I'm always amazed with the reactions I get when I suggest to a new client that they include advertising on Craigslist as part of their marketing effort. "I don't think that people on Craigslist are a good fit for my product" I've been told, or "It's just really not the kind of clientele I'm looking for". So rather than going through the tedious exercise of trying to convince them that immediate sales should not be their primary focus at the start, I figure it's easier to open their eyes to one of the most important things they should be doing by pointing them to this article. Please Note: This once was a monsterously long article because of it's critical nature, but I mercifully shortened it for you here so you wouldn't succumb to boredom. LOL
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. Robert Louis Stevenson
You might get a warm fuzzy feeling when you view your new website, but that's mainly a credit to your website builder. It's not going to get you anything in the way of business. It might very well be a great website, with intelligent Search Engine Optimization written into it, but it's not going to attract visitors if nobody knows it's there. It's no different than someone opening a new brick and mortar location in town. They might put a whole lot of thought and energy into filling it with extraordinary inventory and providing ambiance that offers a comfortable shopping experience, but without some sort of driving force that gets the word out, odds are no human being will walk through the front entrance of that facility unless they're the mailman or the owner opening and closing each day.
Without a big budget for a first class TV spot capable of catapulting your business into overnight recognition, there's just no comparable, inexpensive way for the average business online to get known and attract customers in a short period of time. Creating, printing, and mailing literature to people on a list you bought is not going to be cheap nor is it necessarily going to be successful. In fact, it has a built-in downside, including, but not limited to the fact that the people on that email list might have come from anywhere, and might not necessarily appreciate being on a list for what you have to hawk. But discussing that fully is for another article. What remains is for you to put Craigslist at the top of your to-do list, and discover how to utilize this wide web world of very important positives to accomplish the same things as that overnight thrust on TV, albeit over a much longer period of time.
You must change your attitude toward Craigslist.
Don't approach advertising on Craigslist making a long face like it was your last resort, it really has far greater value to you than most anything else. Think of it as the TV campaign you couldn't afford but with the same results that take a bit longer to achieve. And best of all, it's free to use. Geico's commercials didn't deliver customers to them overnight and they're still paying lots of money to keep the campaign alive. What it did initially was provide the recognition I mentioned and the continued thrust provided the returns in customer signups. And if you remain observant, you'll see that they do everything possible to become ubiquitous on TV “and beyond.” So you can take a deep breath and invest a couple of months into doing the same thing on the internet utilizing Craigslist and put the millions you would have spent on TV back into your pocket. LOL.
As far as the “and beyond” reference is concerned, consider Craigslist as your TV and the “and beyond” the things you should be doing in conjunction with Craigslist, such as Facebook, Twitter, other social media, Linkedin, email blasts, and more, all part of a coordinated effort to strengthen your visibility online. But Craigslist advertising should be your central and initial thrust; it goes anywhere you want it to go, reaches anyone you want it to reach, and has a lasting value even more enduring than any average TV spot. Think of Craigslist as your major step forward in a successful venture. But first, in order to approach this intelligently, you owe it to yourself to learn the very basics of the internet which I'll offer a crash course in right here.
This is the most important part.
I'm going to give you a ridiculously short version of my original article on this subject that spanned two full pages. If you know anything about how the internet works you know that "bots" from all search engines read the content on the web continuously, indexing everything, that is how you can expect an answer to any query so quickly. A Craigslist ad running for 30 days is read by all search enginges many, many times a day. You control what they read. So your dialogue is what they deliver in a search. In my case it was Your One Man Advertising Department. Do a search for Your One Man Advertising Department and see what comes up. You guessed it: Cheapadagency.com. I could have made it anything, but I chose that just for my test. So if you want to be known as Long Island's Number One Plumber, ( and a whole host of other information) need I say more about what you have to do? There's a whole lot more I saved you from in the explanation of this, but if you want me to explain it to you for a greater understanding, give me a call and I'll be happy to do just that. Or if you have a lot of time to read, go to my Cheeper.info site and it's all there under the heading of my "Due Diligence Concept". Enjoy the day. Barry.
CheapAdvertisingGuy