Reaching Potential Customers on Craigslist
Another reason why posting advertisements for products or services on Craigslist is so worthwhile is the likelihood of reaching a large audience of potential customers. A review of the Craigslist fact sheet reveals pertinent information regarding the amount of traffic the website receives. According to this information Craigslist receives approximately four billion page views each month with ten million people using Craigslist each month. From these statistics it is clear that advertisements placed on Craiglist are likely to receive at least some attention from potential clients.

With so many visitors using Craigslist each month the advertising possibilities are limitless, however, there are no guarantee any of these visitors will be interested in your products or services. Like any marketing campaign, your advertisements on Craigslist must be intriguing, informative and in a location where you will reach your target audience.

Finding Your Target Audience on Craigslist
We’ve already discussed the number of visitors using Craigslist each month but the key to taking advantage of these numbers is to target your advertising in a way aimed at reaching your target audience as opposed to a wide audience of individuals who have no specific interest in your products or services. It is much more worthwhile to reach a small audience of those with a keen interest in your products or services than to reach a much larger audience of those who are not interested. Those who have an interest in your products or services are your target audience.

The key to reaching your target audience on Craigslist is placing your advertisement in the most appropriate locations. Craigslist has a specific section for businesses to advertise their services. This section is broken down into a number of categories. Those who are in the business of computer repair would be wise to place their advertisement in the computer section as opposed to the automotive section because individuals looking for computer help will naturally migrate to the computer section. It may sometimes be appropriate to place an advertisement in more than one section. This is acceptable as long as it does not cross the line to spamming the section.

If there is not a specific section for the products or services offered by your business there are a couple of options. Business owners can place an advertisement in the section for small business advertisements where it might be found by those doing a search in this section. Alternately the business owner can contact Craigslist to suggest the addition of a new category. They might be willing to oblige if they believe this category warrants an addition.

The Difference between Advertising and Spamming
Advertising on Craigslist is one thing but spamming is quite another. Placing an advertisement in an appropriate section of Craigslist is acceptable; however, placing the same advertisement in nearly every section of Craigslist websites for a number of different geographical regions is considered spam. Spam is ineffective for a number of reasons. First of all potential customers who see a particular advertisement in a number of different locations are likely to recognize the spamming techniques and be less inclined to patronize this business. Also, if Craigslist detects the practice of spamming they may delete all of the postings and could potentially ban advertisements from the individual in the future.

Blogging is one of the most popular things to do in the internet. It can serve as an emotional outlet for some people by writing about their feelings, it can serve as a website that can let people tell their original short fiction or non fiction stories, and it can also serve as a website for advertising. Indeed, blogging brings fame. In fact, there has been quite a few people who blogged and became famous because of it.

As a business owner, you will definitely want to use blogging as your tool for marketing. In fact, you will see that a lot of businesses today are now using blogs as an advertising tool that can definitely help in raking in the profits and attracting more people to buy from their business.

Whatever products you are selling, you will be able to find innovative ways to write about it in blogs. Whether you are a car salesman, an insurance salesman, or an affiliate marketer, you will be able to bring out the best of your products through blogs.

Basically, the key in marketing in blog websites is to pre sell the product you are trying to sell. You need to let people buy it before they actually buy the product. By doing so, you will be able to achieve success and make your business famous.

So, how can you pre sell your products through blogs?

Simple…

All you need to do is make a great blog about the product that is informative, easy to read, and entertaining. Also, the technique used by most successful marketers in writing blogs is that they never aggressively sell the product telling the customer that they should buy this and that.

A successful blog should get your potential customers to think like they need to buy the product because they want it and not because you told them to.

So, how can you do this?

As mentioned before, never aggressively sell the product in the blogs. Instead, try telling a story about the product as if you are the customer. First, tell them a little bit something about the product, then tell them what it did for you and what benefits you got, and lastly, you have to tell them that you are definitely and genuinely crazy about the product that you always buy it.

If you believe in your product, then this should not be a problem for you.

When writing blogs, you have to convince and make your readers believe just as you would believe in the product you are selling. Don’t just describe the product but tell them what it is like using the product.

This is how you make readers believe.

You have to be one of them. You should never be a seller but you should be a regular person just like them who loves to use the product and is recommending it for everyone to use.

This is how a blog for your business should be like. And, the best part about this is that you don’t really need to work hard in marketing your product. After writing the blogs and someone came across your blog website and read your blog, and if they like what they read, they will not only purchase the product you are selling but will advertise for you for free. Always remember that recommendations by fellow customers are the best type of advertising that you can get. It’s better than TV ads as well as advertising in billboards.

Just remember to update your blogs once every week. This way, people will be able to have something more to read and really gather a lot of loyal readers and customers.

As you can see, blogging brings fame. This is guaranteed to work and as a business owner, you can be sure that blogging will definitely make your business much more famous as well as yourself.

For example, if there is a high traffic keyword, and/or a very expense keyword, why not optimize one of your webpages for that term? That way, you’ll end up saving a lot of money from Paid Search because of your SEO.

Rather than going after the “head terms” first, you might want to give this a try on your Long Tail Keywords. Once your chosen webpage has been optimized for that expensive keyword, sit back, relax (not too long), and watch all that “free” traffic from that once-upon-a-time expensive keyword.

Using PPC data for SEO

Originally from Shimon Sandler by Shimon Sandler

SEOMoz Page Strength Tool : Replacing Google PageRank?

SEOMoz has put together a new tool which Rand & Co. feel can “replace the often inaccurate and infrequently updated Google PageRank score in the toolbar.” SEOMoz has consolidated various metrics used to judge site value, visibility and SEO strength into one easy to use tool which hopefully will have a Firefox extension in the near future.

In an effort to make a better site and search engine importance measurement tool, SEOMoz Page Strength is pulling in linking info from Yahoo, pages indexed in Google, domain age, links from .edu and government sites, Alexa Traffic Rank (which does not seem to be working), Google PageRank, DMOZ and Wikipedia listings, and domain visibility.

I’ve found the rankings of my own sites to be accurate, especially those which have not achieved Google PageRank to date because of their newness and recommend giving SEOMoz Page Strength a spin.

More from SEOMoz:

“SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool is intended to serve as an alternative to Google’s PageRank score in the toolbar, offering insight into how valuable, important and popular a site or page is as compared to others on the web. If a particular page is on a very popular domain, it may be considered more important than if it’s on a domain that doesn’t receive much attention and, likewise, the homepage (or root URL) of a domain will often be considerably more popular/important than an internal page buried deep in the site’s architecture. In many cases, data may not be entirely accurate, as the search engines and other sources that provide information fluctuate.

Data about a URL in the tool is cached for 72 hours (3 days), so requesting the same information about a website in that period will not retrieve updated information. This tool is not designed to provide professional reporting or be used as an authoritative source of research about a site or page. When SEO/M professionals analyze a site, they are likely to use dozens or hundreds of additional pieces of data.”

SEOMoz Page Strength Tool : Replacing Google PageRank?

Originally from Search Engine Journal by Loren Baker, Editor

Yahoo Search Index and Google PageRank Updates

The past 24 hours have been quite busy as far as search engine updates are concerned, with Google updating PageRank and Yahoo making some changes to its search engine index.

Yesterday evening webmasters began picking up some changes in Google PageRank with the little green bar on their Google Toolbars (for those who don’t use all of those nifty datacenter PageRank checking tools on the market).

Looks like, according to some of the threads, PageRank is up for some and down for others.

Back to Yahoo, Rajat Mukherjee has made the first weather report of the summer on the Yahoo Search Blog with the news that Yahoo rolled out an index update last night and is looking for feedback:

As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

Remember, we recently beefed up our online help and resources, and the best way to provide us with feedback is via the online form.

 

So, how did the changes at Google & Yahoo effect your site?

Yahoo Search Index & Google PageRank Updates

Originally from Search Engine Journal by Loren Baker, Editor

I was checking out some of these links and noticed that some pretty interesting referrers. There are quite a few prominent SEOs using the RSS Button tool including: Mike Grehan, Rand Fishkin, Jim Boykin, Dan Thies, Kim Krause and several others. I think that’s pretty cool actually.

Thomas will be implementing an upgrade to the tool in the near future that allows you to display subscription options as a drop down rather than displaying all the buttons. This is good news for some blogs as it will make more space for ads or other features like tag clouds, blog roll links, categories and archives.

If you can’t wait, then visit the RSS Feed Button tool page now and create your own subscription buttons with RSS feed embedded automatically. It takes just a few seconds and is very easy to apply to your blog.

Speaking of Thomas and his blog marketing talents, he has launched a new blog called, Blogger Design which you can find at, yes you guessed it, bloggerdesign.com. There he will post blog optimization tips, tools, design tips and usability thoughts related to the world of blogging

RSS Buttons for Your Blog

Originally from Online Marketing Blog by Lee Odden

Rocketboom’s Advertising Rates

Originally from MIT Advertising Lab: future of advertising and advertising technology by Ilya Vedrashko