How to Use Craigslist in 4 Simple Steps to Attract Targeted WebsiteTraffic

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How to Use Craigslist in 4 Simple Steps to Attract Targeted WebsiteTraffic

Yesterday I started by telling you about my skepticism of using Craigslist to attract targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing business by posing this question: Is posting ads on Craigslist a waste of time? Today I want to pick up from there and I am going to share my simple tactic that I sparingly use to indirectly attract traffic to key specific pages on my blogs and sites.

Of course this tactic can work for you too, but it might counteract if abused or used with the wrong approach. In order for you to understand how well to use this strategy, let us look briefly at two key areas on how Craigslist works.

• First we all know that Craigslist is a huge site, it’s so huge that it gets 0.2% share of all internet traffic, in other words for every 1000 people that surf the Internet, 200 will most likely end up on Craigslist.

• Secondly at the time of this writing, Craigslist has a PR of 8, just ask any website owners and you will be astonished to discover that almost all webmasters would love to have such a high page rank.

These two combination put Craigslist at par with other huge sites like Amazon and Ebay where visitors go with the main purpose of shopping to buy or sell something and network for opportunities. So having said that, now let us look at the interesting twist on how you can use Craigslist to attract targeted traffic to your affiliate business site.

As you very well know, Craigslist is broken down into hundreds of cities around U.S and other International locations around the world. Within those cities, visitors can either look for products and services offered in that specific location or someone with an offer can post their product or services. Most people who post on Craigslist do so with the sole purpose of capturing and redirecting that traffic to their local or online business.

But there is a problem. Posting on Craigslist is free. Because it’s free and the fact that there are millions of people who use Craigslist each and every day it’s has become very competitive and increasingly very hard to stand out by consistently being effective and successful at attracting and driving traffic to your own affiliate sites. Of course some have succeeded, but they can tell you the amount of effort they are putting into it.

• But there is another way - A slightly different approach.

You can use Craigslist to attract traffic from the search engines by making use of the long tail concept.
Here is how.

1. Start by understanding the long tail concept and how it works.
2. Search and identify those long tail keywords.
3. Write your blog post or page and don’t forget to use SEO to optimize your page for those keywords.
4. Log in to your Craigslist account and post to your ad to the relevant locality and section.

Remember your ad main purpose is to target the search engines and so you must optimize your ad for the search engines by making use of html tags that are allowed by Craigslist. For example you can make use of the bold, italics, headings tags.

When posting your ad, remember to include your long tail keyword on the title and anchor text that links to the page that you just created on number 3 above.

Of the key thinks to remember is that Craigslist uses the nofollow tag and therefore no link juice will be passed to your linked page. But here is what I have tested and observed, Google bots love Craigslist and in most cases whenever I use this strategy to target long tail keyword on a product or service that I’m promoting, it works.

First the long tail keywords ad on Craigslist is picked up by Google and start to appear on the search engines results, of course it gets picked and stays among the top results for a day or so up to a week before it’s kicked out.

The interesting part though is that the long tail page or blog post that was linked from the “Craigslist ad” also with no time get’s indexed and starts to rank pretty well too. Of course you can then get more links that pass that juice to bolster and pump it up further on the search results ranking.

My own testing proofs that this strategy only works well when used to target only the long tail keywords. So far it doesn’t seem to work when used to target more competitive or most searched for keywords. But as you very well now, it’s such long tail keywords that eventually start the snowball rolling and consequently result to better traffic levels.

You might also want to read more on how you can use Craigslist to attract more quality backlinks to your site.