Craiglist, the Best Traffic Generator out There

The estimates tell that Craiglist beats almost all other private traffic generation advertisements, except, perhaps only for Google Adwords, Yahoo Publisher Network, and Microsoft AdCenter. It’s due to the mega-classifieds ads company’s 40 million monthly visits from English speaking countries. 30 million of them are from the US. All of them total to a pageview count of awe-inspiring 10 billion. So, there is enormous potential to get high traffic from Craiglist, if you do the advertisement here strategically.

Target the Growth and Population

When you advertise on Craiglist, targeting the most appropriate geographical area for your business is ultimately important. For instance, if you have an insurance consultancy firm in New York, definitely you don’t want to advertise on Craiglist’s China site.

If your aim is product sales on Clickbank and other affiliate networks, Craiglist is a goldmine to you. Target the US cities according to their population and business growth.

Here is the list of US cities according to the population:

1. New York (20 million)
2. Los Angeles (12 million)
3. Chicago (9 million)
4. Dallas (6 million)
5. Philadelphia (5.8 million)
6. Houston, TX (5.6 million)
7. Miami (5.4 million)
8. Washington (5.3 million)
9. Atlanta (5.2 million)
10. Boston (4.4 million)
11. Detroit (4.4 million)
12. San Francisco (4.2 million)
13. Phoenix (4.1 million)

These estimates give you a fairly good idea of which of the cities you should target primarily with your advertisement. New York city advertisement gives you the maximum exposure.

Most Business-oriented Cities

Here is a list given by Inc.com, they ranked the cities with the greatest business growth. Though not proved, these cities may be instrumental in capturing some good leads for webpreneurs.

1. Atlanta, Georgia
2. San Bernardino, California
3. Las Vegas
4. San Antonio, Austin, Texas
5. West Palm Beach, Florida
6. South New Jersey
7. Hollywood-Pompano Beach, Florida
8. Jacksonville, Florida
9. Newark, New Jersey
10. Maryland
11. Orlando, Florida
12. Phoenix, Florida
13. Washington MSA, District of Columbia
14. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida
15. San Diego, California
16. Nassau Suffolk, New York
17. Richmond-Petersburg, Virginia
18. New Orleans, Louisiana
19. Austin, Texas
20. Northern Virginia
21. Miami, Florida

This list conclusively gives cities and areas according to the business growth in them.

Targeting Advertisement Features

When you place ads through Craiglist, you should be careful about how it looks to the people. Also, you should place the ad on the most matching category of ads.

In Craiglist, you can place image ads on specific categories. Also, the image ads can perform better than normal text ads. Persuasive writing is also important.

Make the Ad Text to a Minimum

A huge ad copy always performs worse than a smaller one. So, try to make it short and powerful. Targeting the needs of the customer is a skill earned through consistent publishing.

Conclusion

You can innovate a lot through Craiglist. Learning how to reap traffic and money through this huge site is an art.

Copyright © Laurel Shah 2008