Craigslist can prove to be an excellent avenue for business promotion. Whether an individual has a small business which they operate on a part time basis or a thriving business which has become a time consuming endeavor, Craigslist can help the business to increase in profits and popularity. The two main components to successfully promoting a business on Craigslist include reaching the target audience and running a marketing campaign which will appeal to this target audience. This article will discuss these two components in greater detail to help the reader realize how Craigslist can be used to grow a business.

Reaching Your Target Audience on Craigslist Promoting a business on Craigslist doesn’t have to be a difficult process. However, it is not necessarily automatically easier than promoting offline either. Promoting your business through Craigslist does have some similarities to the process of promoting your business offline. The main similarity is that the business promoter musts do their research to find out who is included in their target audience.

Even the most well thought out and innovative marketing campaign will falter if it is not reaching the intended audience. This is why it is so important for those who are trying to promote their business on Craigslist to be sure they categorize their advertisement correctly to ensure their intended audience will receive the intended message. The majority of posts on Craigslist are available free of charge with the exception of job listings in New York City, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area as well as brokered housing listings in New York City. Therefore small business owners can take advantage of the free posting on Craigslist to reach their target audience in a number of different locations.

Consider an example of a company offering moving services in Portland, Oregon. A small moving company that is relatively new might want to take advantage of the free advertising available on Craigslist. To have the best opportunity to reach the target audience the company should place a services offered posting under the labor and moving category for the counties in which the services are offered. Placing the post this way makes it far more likely to reach an audience of those who are planning a move in the desired county than it would if the same exact advertisement was placed as a job advertisement under the category of government jobs in a county in New Hampshire.

Besides being free for most postings, Craigslist offers additional benefits. The most significant benefit is a large audience. Craigslist receives over 4 billion page views per month. With such a large audience it makes it possible for those who post on Craigslist to reach a large audience. However, as previously mentioned, care should be taken when placing the post to categorize the advertisement correctly to ensure the advertisement is reaching the target audience.

Effectively Marketing on Craigslist Marketing effectively on Craigslist is not very different from marketing effectively in other forms of print media. One of the most important elements of an effective marketing campaign on Craigslist is professionally written copy that appeals directly to the target audience. Hiring a freelance writer skilled in writing sales copy is an excellent idea in this situation. The business owner might be quite knowledgeable about their business but they do not likely have the skills necessary to convey the purpose of the business while also effectively convincing those who read the posting to perform a specific action. The specific action may include visiting a website and making a purchase, requesting additional information about the products or services or performing some other desired action such as visiting a traditional store or place of business.

The other component to marketing effectively, as previously mentioned, is placing the advertisement in the correct section of Craigslist. Categorizing the advertisement correctly is important but it is also important to place the advertisement in the right physical location. Products and services which are only offered in a limited area such as a particular city or county should be advertised in these exact locations. However, those who offer products via a website might consider placing their advertisement in all of the location to which they are willing to ship their products.

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I was just reading through some other articles on EzineArticles about “attracting” the ideal customer.

I’m going to deal with two aspects of that.

Our job in marketing should be more about “finding and acquiring” customers instead of “attracting” customers. The difference is passive versus active. “Attracting” sort of implies that if we do all of the right things we’ll attract them to us while we set here. Marketing, done right, however, means that we identify who our ideal customer is then we “go get ‘em.” That’s an active step. And THEN if we say the right things to the right people they will literally JUMP into our shopping cart.
The second part of that is about THE IDEAL customer. And most small business owners either have no ideal who their ideal customer is, or they may have identified a much less than ideal customer.I guess we could define ideal, and the really ideal.

There is a lot of ways we could define an ideal customer, and not all of these are this AND this, they are more like this OR this..

Easy to get
The individual customer buys a LOT (they are the super customers. When some clients buy $10, these are the ones that buy $1,000, or even $10,000 each time they come along).
Or, as a group, they buy more. In other words, I had a client who was selling a $5,000 program and having trouble selling them. When asked what an Ideal client would look like she started talking about larger companies who would buy $10,000 to $15,000 of the same program from her. But when we looked at options she was hesitant to even look at we lowered her price to $250 and sold hundreds a month, in other words, $25,000 a month and for only 4 hours of her time, about $6,000/hour. The $5,000 program was taking 8-15 hours a month to produce, and many more hours than that to sell it, and she wasn’t selling them.
Or even a company that could refer LOTS of companies.So, there could be several different ways to define ideal. All of the way from easy to sell, to making the most money, to making the most money with the less time, or a customer or a prospect who’d refer tons of new customers while reducing your time doing it, the last being one of the best, but still, your definition may be different.

Now, let’s take that even further, as I said above “THE REALLY IDEAL.”

The Ideal Customer… The Golden Egg

Let’s call the ideal customer we defined above as “the golden egg.” But now we want to find “the golden goose.” The golden goose is the one that lays dozens of “golden eggs.”

So, once you define a golden egg, who they are, and where we’d find them, then we start looking for “the golden goose” that lays those particular golden eggs.

The Golden Goose… The Customer That Lays Dozens of the Golden Eggs

Creston, one of my clients, who owns a sign company, was talking with me about how to find his golden eggs. At first we were defining the golden eggs as companies in malls. They are frequently moving in and out and needing his signs. He had been doing a lot of really small yard signs such as realtor signs. They were $24 each and were taking up a lot of his time to sell individual signs.

So, as we talked about the potential Golden Geese each of those turned into a different form of Golden Goose.

The mall shops turned into him working with large scale property managers. Those that managed the malls. He made a deal with them. He’d cover the empty shops with signs and help them get that shop filled quicker. Then they’d recommend him to the new shop owners that came in. So, instead of selling a sign here and there to the shops, now he gets almost every shop as a customer both every time it goes empty and every time it has a new shop owner. And, on top of that, some of these shops are franchises, so he gets referrals to other shops around town that are in the same franchise. In fact, he offers a discount to the shop owner who gives him a referral that is sold to another shop owner.

He also built his marketing message to target mall managers instead of shop owners. Now he says that the average mall or property manager makes another $30,000 a year from partnering with him due to the fast turnaround and high occupancy rates. BINGO. Now he gets lots of Golden Goose mall managers. And, that’s at a time when malls are actually downsizing… they really need him. He’s their answer, and they are providing him a nice answer as well.

That was when his sales exploded.

We also looked at how to find the Golden Goose for the real estate signs. He did develop a program for real estate agencies that would recommend his signs to all of their real estate agents, another one for mortgage brokers, and another one for the city wide association of realtors. That certainly kicked his sales of $24 signs up several notches. But they just didn’t compare to the large thousand dollar signs in the malls. The difference was that the small real estate signs weren’t really golden eggs. So, he had developed a goose, but not a golden goose that was laying a lot of golden eggs. Yes, he was getting a lot of eggs, but just not golden ones from this program.

So, where are your golden eggs, and how could you find your big golden geese?

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Article Source: EzineArticles.com/

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Getting your small, local business found on the world wide web can be a challenge, and most small business owners jut don’t have the time to research what works, or the money to pay someone else to figure it out for them.

To get you started, here are five techniques you can use today to start seeing results tomorrow.

Blogging. Simply buy a domain name, secure a hosting service, and install WordPress. For less than $20 and an hour of your time, you can get a blog up and running.

Why blogging works: Google (and other search engines) loves fresh content. If you’re choice is between a static catalog type page and a blog, go with a blog every time. The more you update, the more Google will crawl your site, and the more Google crawls your site, the easier it will be for potential customers to find your site and your business.

Pay Per Click advertising. If you want to guarantee search engine placement, pay per click is the way to go. Those results that show at the very top of the search results page in Google? Those are paid for by businesses just like yours who don’t want to wait for their rankings to rise naturally. By bidding on certain keywords, they essentially are buying placement in the search results.

Why pay per click works: The average Internet user doesn’t distinguish between paid results and natural results. If the link matches her inquiry, she will follow it, regardless of how it got there.

Forum posting. Forum posting is about helping your potential customers with their problems. Simply join the conversation on relevant forums and provide thoughtful advice, and you’ll find clients following you back to your site to see what else you have to say about the subject.

Why forum posting works: People like to do business with people, not corporations. By offering advice on forums, you are reminding customers that there is a real person behind your small business.

Article marketing. Article marketing is the placement of useful, relevant articles in article directories across the web. It’s another way of getting your business in front of potential customers, again by offering advice they are looking for.

Why article marketing works: The purpose of article marketing is twofold. First, article directories likely rank higher in search results than your company’s site, making it easier to get your name in front of potential customers. Second, article marketing produces valuable back links to your company’s site, which improves your own search engine ranking.

Banner advertisements. Banner advertisements are those graphic ads you see all over the web. They can be nearly any size, but most typical are 125 x 125 pixels, 468 x 60 pixels, or 160 x 600 pixels. Typically, merchants pay advertising networks to place banner ads on websites, rather than dealing directly with site owners.

Why banner advertising works: People rarely click banner ads, and when they do, they generally don’t buy. So why bother? Brand recognition. If you own a florist shop on a street full of florists, how do you get people to stop in your shop instead of your neighbor’s? By getting your brand in front of them. They might not click on your ad on the Internet, but they will recognize your shop if they’ve seen it on line, and they will choose the shop they recognize over the one they don’t every time.

Author Resource:-> Getting noticed on line doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. At http://InAreaCode.com, we take care of all the details of Small Business Internet Advertising so you can get on with the business of running your business.

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