Craigslist can be a great place to promote your business. It doesn’t take too much time to place a simple, effective ad and the results can be phenomenal. This is a low key way of letting people know you that your business exists. The reason people fall in love with Craigslist is because it is the equivalent of newspaper classified ads in real time. There is no charge for the ad In most cities. The ad can be for the product or service you offer, or to post a job looking for new employees.
Recently a client and I started an experiment with a Craigslist employment ad. We wanted to measure the response of the ad placed in Craigslist compared to Career Builder or Jobs.com. We wanted to measure not only the amount of responses, but also the quality of candidates. I don’t have the total results in yet, but just about every other day my client calls to tell me how excited he is with the quality of candidates he is getting from Craigslist. He says he is already so happy with the results that he doesn’t feel a need to use paid job posting sites in the future.
Most of your ads for your business should go under the Services category. People that go to these categories are looking for a specific business. Though they may not be looking for your business at this time, it is a great opportunity to let them know that you are out there.
Here are some important things to keep in mind when you run your ad.
THE POSTING TITLE HEADING IS THE KEY. The heading may be all the advertizing you need. People do not need to click to the body of your ad for it to be effective. If you are a bigger business, a headline like 25% OFF ON ALL COMPUTERS THIS JULY 4th WEEKEND AT JOE'S ELECTRONICS is usually enough information for those interested to either click for more information, or stop in your store. You also need to use specific dates to make this type of ad effective. You may also run this ad under For Sale-Electronics, but it would need a different headline as Craigslist doesn’t let you run the same ad under different categories
Give people what they want. Most people who read your heading are not interested in your product or service at this time. Let them know what you are about and who you are in the heading. Spare them the time of having to click on the heading to find out more if they don’t need to. People don’t want to waste time clicking on the heading just to find out it is something they are not interested in, or worse, that it is just a scam.
Make the most of availabe space. If you want more words in your headline, don’t use all upper case letters. You can get another 20-30 extra letters in your heading if you use lower case.
Post every 5-10 days. Don’t post too often. Some people discover what Craigslist can do for them, and flood the category with ads one right after another. If viewers notice this, they will skip you altogether, or red flag you as a scammer.
Use a picture. People love pictures. Pictures bring validity to your offer. If you are just doing PR type of advertizing, put in a picture of your office or warehouse staff. Maybe put a picture of your product being used in a unique situation.
Put in your real email address. You have the option of using the private Craigslist email or your own email. Don’t use the private Craigslist email unless there is a specific reason to do so. It’s more personal and gives legitimacy to your business. If you want to drive traffic to you or your website, why would you use a blind box e-mail?
Make sure you put in specific city or location. If you are a bigger city, identify where you are in the city. Put a link to Google maps. The scammers put in things like west side, or downtown. If there are a lot of scam ads in there, you will need to be more specific.
Help Craigslist. If your category has a lot of scam ads, do your part and red flag them: this will help keep your category clean and more relevant.
If you don’t feel comfortable writing your own ads, you may want to consider hiring the two guys who wrote the Craigslist ad that is working so well for our experiment above, Peter Nevland and Jeff Sexton. These guys know how to write great ads and have demonstrated that they can get results.
Peter’s next writing course will be the Young Writers Workshop held at Wizard Academy, August 4-5 in Austin.
Jeff Sexton teaches an online ad writing course, How to Write Powerfully and Clearly. He tells me that he will be offering this course again in the fall.
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