Placing advertising

REACHING CUSTOMERS

One of the great advantages to Craigslist is in reaching a high volume of potential customers.  It is estimated that ten million people make use of Craigslist per month.  This ten million figure translates into about four billion page views per month.  So I think it is clear that your ad will be seen with some frequency.

But just as with any type of advertising, sheer volume does not necessarily translate into sales.  The key to getting positive results is in making your ad attractive to those who may be interested in your product or service.  Also, you must make sure that the placement of your ad is such that you will hit your targeted potential customers.

HOW TO FIND THAT TARGETED AUDIENCE

You read above about the numbers, in terms of traffic, that Craigslist gets per month.  What you want to do is to take those numbers and target your customers.  Obviously, your potential customers will be a much lower number than the total that visits the site.  But that is what you are looking to do.  Target a much smaller number of people who are interested in what you are offering.  It does no good to go after people who are not interested in your product to begin with thus wasting time and energy on non-buyers.  Your smaller targeted customers will be much more worthwhile.

In order to get to your targeted audience, or customers, you will want to place your ad in a specific category on Craigslist.  That is how Craigslist is broken down.  Specific categories of business make it fairly easy to determine where your ad should go.  By doing this you are not advertising an auto repair shop in the computer repair section.  You can even place ads in more than one category.  You must take care in doing this, however, as to not make it look like your ad is spam.

What if there is not a category for your type of business?  Well, you can still use Craigslist.  You simply place your ad in the small business section.  You may even want to suggest to Craigslist to add a section for your type of business.  If they feel that there is sufficient need, they may consider doing just that.

CLARIFYING ADS AND SPAM

You are safe if you place an ad in a specific section or two.  But placing your ad sort of “across the board” in many sections may constitute spam.  If your ad is seen in too many unrelated areas, then customers will be less likely to buy from that business.  In addition if Craigslist suspects that your ads are spam, they may delete ALL of your ads.