Craigslist – It’s All In The Words!

Craigslist Classifieds Power

There are two things that are important about this image.  First, there’s an enormous opportunity for the Internet marketer with Craigslist.  Second, it’s all about the WORDS.  No, though they’re important as far as selling, the real importance is in their “relevance.”  You see, unlike the newspaper classifieds, with Craigslist it’s all in the search, both yours and your prospects’.

Imagine if all of the items for sale on Craigslist’s 700 sites were to be in a newspaper classified section.  It’s difficult to imagine just how big that paper would be, but it would take trucks to haul it.  So, take your time invested in trying to locate an item for sale in a big city newspaper’s classified section and think about how it would multiply for Craigslist; if it weren’t for search.

Let’s take a look at searching in Craigslist from both a seller and a buyer perspective.  As a marketer, you’ll be on both sides, even if you don’t intend to buy anything.  You’ll be doing research to see how buyers are finding what they want, and testing ad content to see what attracts buyers.  So, whether a buyer or a seller, you can use Craigslist in many ways to further your agenda.  All you have to do is to use the right WORDS.

A Craigslist search is like having thousands of people all sorting at the same time through that pile of newspaper classifieds and presenting their sorted results to you in seconds.  And, it brings refined and focused results to the searcher who knows what they’re doing.  Let’s take a look at an example from the “video gaming” category in the Las Vegas Craigslist.

Craigslist Search

We notice first the use of actual game names and titles, obviously a good strategy, as people will arrive searching for specific games.  However, if you’re selling online gaming, even apps or software, you would want to use keywords and phrases that highlight these.  The Google Keyword Tool is a great place to find what people are searching on in Google, which should work well here too.  Google reports an extensive list, but a couple of examples show Low competition and high search volume:

• fun online games…246,000 monthly searches
• fun free online games…60,500 monthly searches

If you’re marketing online gaming or you’re an affiliate marketer for online gaming sites, you can test market on Craigslist to see what images and text work to get the greatest response.  Turning it around, if you’re wanting to buy something, use different search phrases, some you may not think are that great, as there are a whole lot of non-marketers out there writing their own ads without a clue as to the marketing value of certain words or phrases.

Using Craigslist in your marketing can be effective, or it can be a free test environment.  Work with the words of your ad to leverage the power of Craigslist.