Yes Online Classified Advertisements can be an effective method to generate real and substantial traffic to your website!
You may have read that online classified ads were dead or just a place where spammers live, but I am here to tell you they are alive and kicking. You just need to use the right classified websites (no surprises there).
Still don’t believe me? Well what if I told you that eBay, the premier and largest auction site in the world has launched Classified Ads as part of their service? Getting interested yet?
They offer full multimedia options (video and audio) as well as regular text/html and are happy for you to link out to your website and show an email address (all of this stuff is not available with regular eBay auctions, well at least not if you want to avoid potentially getting your auctions closed down).
I’m sure you will agree that eBay would not launch a new service unless they felt they could make money out of it (and lots of money!).
And here’s the kicker, search engines absolutely love eBay and you can be confident that your link will be found by the search engines very, very quickly (and you site indexed/re-indexed in next to no time).
Thinking laterally you could use this to launch a website and get your website indexed in a day or so by the search engines. Contrast that with how long indexing can take with using other methods (weeks and months in some cases).
Now because it’s relatively new, only certain categories with eBay currently allow Classified Ad’s but you can be sure this will grow over time.
The great thing about them is that you pay a fixed price for the classified ad to have it listed for around a month (or you can define a shorter period). Potential customers fill out a form on your classified page and the details are forwarded on to you.
Alternatively a customer could navigate direct to your sales page from a link.
Obviously eBay is not the only classified Ads site, pretty much the largest site for classifieds is craigslist.org (incidentally eBay owns a 25% stake in this company).
Craig Newmark (the owner) started the site in San Francisco (indeed when you surf over to craigslist.org you start off in this area).
However it has grown to include all states in America, as well as many countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, the UK and many more.
Once you hit the website you can easily select the area you want to focus on.
When looking into classified ad script; we suggest you do some important research first.
Millions of people use craigslist.org EVERY day so this is a huge opportunity for you, and the really cool thing is many posts are free! There is a charge for job postings in some areas, but a lot of the site is free.
Again thinking laterally if you find out a classified ad in a particular location is not free on Craigslist, then try another location, you should eventually find a free one.
Now don’t think you are going to be able to do one classified ad on Craigslist and post it in every location or serve it up for everyone to see, it doesn’t work like that. And if you start posting the same thing over and over to multiple areas of Craigslist the ad will get pulled.
So you need to be smart about this. Remember I have harped on and on about relevant great content?
No differences to be found here, make sure your post is giving useful content and relevant information, and that it’s posted in the correct location/section of craigslist.org.
If you’re selling computer equipment don’t post it in Beauty Services (even if you think your computer is a beauty like mine is).
Now duplicate content is frowned upon and will likely get your Ad’s deleted, but that’s not to say you can only post once.
By all means post to multiple areas, but make sure your content is different or mix it up a bit. Although you can probably get away with just changing the subject and re-posting, it’s far better to actually change the main text as well, so that if a potential customer reads both your classified ads they wont see them as the same classified ad and report you (in which case both classified ads will likely be deleted).
Most of Craiglist classified ads stay online and available for up to 45 days, so you get great value in leaving them up. And just like eBay, the search engines love Craigslist too, and you will find your website is indexed extremely QUICKLY after you post.
Craigslist has some important posting rules you should be aware of, so be sure to read all of the help section so you know exactly what the rules are.
Make sure the link you are displaying actually works, if your showing an email address, make sure it’s live, and that you are checking it regularly.
The good thing about Craigslist is that unlike most other classified Ad websites, they place NO LIMIT on the space you can use for your ad, so get creative, get your text rich and compelling and get people pumped up to click your link and find out more about you.
Now we have talked about eBay Ads and Craiglist, as I reckon they are two of the most important places you want to be listed, but there are literally thousands of other classified sites you should consider.
There is even software out there that you can buy that will automatically post your ad to hundreds of classified ads (although I personally don’t use software like this).
If you have any experience in a particular product please drop me a line, and I’ll incorporate your findings in a future version of this e-Book to benefit all readers.
Don’t ignore classified ads, they can dramatically increase web site traffic.
