Affiliate Programs And Tips

Advertising on Craigslist

Advertising on Craigslist is worthwhile for just about any business offering products or services. Whether these products are offered through ecommerce websites or physical stores, the business owners can see financial gains through advertising on Craigslist. Firstly unlike other advertising opportunities there is very little risk involved in posting on Craigslist. With the exception of job postings and housing postings in specific markets, advertising is free on Craigslist. Users are asked to agree to the terms of service of the community and are expected to follow specific guidelines when posting advertisements but there are no financial obligations to those placing advertisements on Craigslist. This means those who post advertisements do not have to be concerned with whether or not the advertisement they place will meet their expectations in terms of sales generated.

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.

SFI Marketing A Business Not To Ignore

Those that are pursuing marketing online as an affiliate business there is one affiliate opportunity out there
that should not be taken lightly.

Building a team in this particular opportunity has been difficult at the best of times because getting active
members takes a lot of time, effort, and the ability to pay attention to your business.

Your provided with every tool imaginable to help you manage your online business, whether its to sell products yourself, or sell other peoples products by promoting them everywhere.

Today I would like to introduce you to SFI Marketing. I have been a member with them for quite some time.

Given the problems that I encountered, I've worked out a solution which can and will help you build your active team. Be sure to visit this site dedicated to helping new and existing affiliates accelerate their business and team building.

You may have seen the old site, which was an experiment to see what would happen.
My Old SFI Team Trainer Site

Now I've decided it needed to be refined, and made easier to navigate.
SFI Team Trainer

If your considering affiliate marketing, Do check out this special site, Do some reading, And then, make the jump. Don't jump in if you are a program jumper. This is a long term business opportunity. You must be focused.

If your an existing SFI Affiliate, and you have already visited my old site, you may want to check out the new one. Let me know what you think, is there anything I need to do different. Please post your comments about the sfi team trainer site here please. I'm not ready to accept comments on the other site yet.

Ethics and Morals, Do you Use Both?

While your building your online business there are a couple of things you should pay attention too. Ethics, and Morals.

Both will play a paramount role in your business build.
Whether its in the restaurant, A Brick and Mortar business, something you have to create, or another kind of business which is a narrow service provider.

Either business you will have to deal with ethics, or morals.

Ethics: Here are a few things that can bring up that monster.

Do you provide an incentive which can be viewed as illegal. This brings up the subject of whether its ethical or not. Do you feel comfortable with the sales message. Does it give the reader an appeal to the product and an honest message that this is right for them.

Morals: It does come down to whether your depicting the right message, and truth about the product or service.

Are you displaying a true picture.
Are your reviews from customers embellished.

You Lie, You Lose over the long run.

We could run off and talk about Toyota.
Whats happened to them;.

Dodge, Chrysler, and we can go on and on.

But really instead of a corp attitude. increasing numbers by a volume of reputation, shouldn't we all be taking the path of Righteousness, true honesty

You of all people who have to make that big decision, do I or don`t I should take a close look at the affects on other people and groups, cities, countries, planets, universes, galaxies, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The picture is so much bigger than life itself.
The picture that you see, is one that others made for you. Do you think that picture is big enough, or strong enough to carry your generation to the next best level of generosity to improve that which we can never see

Free Tools For Online Marketers Who Are Ready!

Now that you are ready, if you truly are ready, to market online, I have a few free tools, of which I will never make a dime referring you too.

Most if not all of these tools require you to have a personal website that you can add these scripts too.

I've hunted high and low for the past few years, as I am on a tight budget much as many of you probably are as well.

My Dime means My Dime. If I have to spend a dime, it better be the best dime I ever spent to get my online business running. One of the hardest parts of starting an online business is to make that almighty jump to creating your own personal website.
If you have read any of the articles posted on this blog, you should be able to weigh the pros and cons of a paid site vs a free site. I'm referring to wordpress.org, or blogger.com

You may if you choose go with either one of those to gain experience, or just take your beer money, or give up a couple packs of smokes per month, and pay for your own domain name, get some hosting, and make your site personally yours.

Branding is what its all about by the way. Without branding, all the slaving you do, driving traffic to your site, will be so much work that you will give up way before your golden nugget falls.

Free traffic is available all over the internet, all you have to do is dig it up. Make it yours, by that I mean is to register the unique traffic source as your own domain name. The traffic will be free, for as long as people are searching for that particular source of information.

That is your first free nugget of information.
Once and only if you have your research..(Keyworded domain registered) and you have some content, hopefully something original, and in your own words, or combined with other works, you will need some other tools to make it all work to bring even more visitors automatically.

I'm not talking about programs that steal other peoples writings and posting them to your blog.
I'm not talking about reciprocal links.
I'm not talking about automated comment makers.

What I'm talking about is real life traffic.

A lot of it can be done with free traffic tools. The real, Godforsaken, Free, Life changing social tools.

Lets go back about a year. If you go to the waybackmachine.com site, you can view what my site has been up to, and how it looked way baCK. Way when I had no knowledge, but had the money and the brain power to sift thru a lot of the crap thats out there.

It really does come down to this. Find a keyword that has little or no competition. Find out if other people are using that keyword to make money. Find out if you can register a domain name with that keyword in it.

Find out if there are either affiliate programs, or affiliate products you can sell with that keyword/domain site.

Create an attraction article, Create a site that has information to keep them coming back.

Here are a few free tools you can use to do your research:
Get a Gmail account. Its a free account and you can use it for combining all the tools you need for tracking.
Once you have a gmail account, click on the view settings link when your logged in.

Check out the list of tools you have at your disposal.
Webmaster tools.
Analytics
Adwords
Adsense
and the list goes on.

None of these cost money, except for adsense. If you plan on advertising on a large network with keywords, you will have to pay. But if you do your keyword research (use adwords keyword tool to check out the trends and such) you can save yourself a lot of money.

Plugins for wordpress: only good if you have your own domain
I recommend Akismet, which is loaded by default when installing wordpress on your domain.
I also recommend, google privacy policy if your going to run adsense on your site.
Another is Hop press for clickbank advertising.
And yet another which can combine adsense, clickbank, is datafeedr. you can enter the html code or javascript into a plain text option box, and insert it into any part of your site.

Heatmap which is a part of this site is a theme, which has a multitude of configuration options from adding ad codes, whether from google , clickbank, or any other affiliate program to just about any part of your site, from header to footer to sidebars. Left or Right.

You may have to learn a bit about php to customize your theme though in heatmap. I prefer the blue layout myself. My favorite color.

What else could there be that can be free. Hmm.. Oh, I've been experimenting with Amazon as well with all these tools.

This site is my testing ground, and you may have gotten here by some leftover link I left behind, that led you to a page that no longer exists. I will not appologize , but welcome you anyway to learn a bit from my mistakes. It will save you a ton of money.

Are you ready? I have been for quite some time.