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

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.

How to Use Craigslist to get Quality Backlinks

How to Use Craigslist to get Quality Backlinks Using a Press Release

I have read crazy post of how to use Craigslist that suggest very weird tactics and methodologies that some of us don’t consider being orthodox. Today on the video below you can learn a better effective way that you can use to gain quality quality backlinks to your site by using Craigslist to write a press release.

The more quality backlinks you are able to get pointing to your site, then the more likely hood that your pages will rank higher with the search engines which will then directly results to more targeted traffic to your site.

Now from the video, when you are looking into ways to hire someone to write a quality press release for you there are a few Key things to remember:

• Don’t abuse the system.

• Be persistent

• Word you links carefully.

Is posting ads on Craigslist a waste of time?

Is posting ads on Craigslist a waste of time?

As you may already know Craigslist is a huge free advertising site that attracts over 30 million unique visitors per month, it is also well respected and has a very high page rank. That none of us can dispute.

But as an affiliate marketer, we all have this chronic disease of always looking for ways to attract more traffic to our sites and blogs. I don’t know about you, but I can sure tell you that one of the worst scenarios that can cause endless night sleeps or lead to heart attack to most affiliate marketers is a case scenario where suddenly all your traffic sources stops to send that much needed and sought for traffic.

Most site owners dare not think of a day when all their pages are suddenly de-indexed on all leading search engines. But it can happen. It has happened before. Who knows when you will be the next victim?

Aware of the repercussions, when the above scenario becomes a nightmare, not long ago, I set out to find new ways of attracting traffic so as avoid overlying on one source of traffic. Among the methods I set to try out was Craigslist.

• After a month of religiously posting ads on Craigslist and analyzing that traffic, I had to sit down and ask myself is it really worthy posting ads on Craigslist or is it just a waste of time?

Before I give you my feedback on my next post, here is what others are saying regarding this topic on posting ads on Craigslist. After reading this interview and getting some of my questions answered, I headed to the guys from DoshDosh who had this post about how to use Craigslist and other alternative classifieds to make money online.

Having read the two posts, I still had more questions than answers and therefore my quest to find for sure if it was really worth posting ads on craigslist led me to this guide on how to use Craigslist and another post on how best to use Craigslist.

Please excuse me but I’m not the kind of guy who gets satisfied so easily until I have heard what others are saying on forums about posting ads on craigslist. Finally after going round and round reading great information coupled with very sorry posts, I finally found this funny experiment on Craigslist that was about “how I found some cash, did you lose it”

By this time I was getting tired so for now that was my little journey that I undertook while trying to find out if it was worth posting ads on craigslist. On my next post I will tell you what approach I decided to use as far as posting ads on Craigslist is concerned from an affiliate marketers point of view. Till my next day be safe.