New startups with small advertising budgets can find great success attracting new clients by posting their products and services on craigslist. In addition to being free, advertising on craigslist allows you to reach a very large audience — an estimated 60,000,000 visitors each month in the US alone. Read on for tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of your craigslist ad.
First Things First, Target Your Audience
With so many visitors scanning through free ad sites every day, it’s important to follow these guidelines for more effective marketing:
- Target the people specifically interested in your services. Narrowing down your ad will attract those who are ready and willing to buy what you have to offer.
- Write a catchy, keyword-optimized title — if you don’t hook your prospect right away with a headline that stands out, they’ll move on to the next ad.
- Take care to post your ad in the correct category for your product or service. Not only will you lose potential customers if you don’t, you run the risk of appearing spammy, and may find your ad is deleted.
Maximize Exposure Of Your Product or Service
These tips will help you attract more traffic to your ad by using keywords.
- Write two or three ads with different keywords, and rotate through them on a consistent basis. Updating or revising your ads every few days will keep them near the top of the list.
- Write ads that are focused on one key service. If, for example, you run a writing business, you could create one ad specifically focused on copywriting, another on editing services, and a third more general ad for business writing.
- In each ad, include a list of every service you offer. This way, people may find your ad for any number of keywords, even when your ad is targeted to one particular service
How To List On Craigslist: Final Tips
These final suggestions will help your ad stand out among the many other business listings on craigslist.
- Post when the site tends to receive the most traffic — between 4 and 9 pm
- Add an image to increase interest in your ad
- List your phone number at the top and bottom of each ad to make it easy for people to contact you
I hope these tips help your startup find new clients immediately. If you have had good — or bad — experiences using craigslist to market your business, we’d love to hear about it. Please leave us a comment below!