While working with one of my students this week on the FREE Weekly Training Webinar, I received an email with a discouraging attitude about using craigslist. You see, I gave everyone the assignment of creating and digital flyer and posting it on craigslist. The assignment wasn’t meant to generate an immediate lead, while that is what we all want from our craigslist ads, the assignment however was to get them doing something to start the marking process.
Here is her email to me:
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Hi Mike, I posted this ad on Craigslist, I put a code where it made the picture fill up the whole page. I got a big fat 0 number of responses. I went with a gloomy appeal. Please let me know if it sucks, as a newbie, I need all the help I can receive. |
Here is my response to her:
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First of all, don't get discouraged with bad results from craigslist. I only got two hits to my website this week from craigslist and I have 3 ad's on craigslist this week. Craigslist can generate a good lead or two every now and then, but it is not going to work all the time. The only reason it is even worth doing is that it is free. The second reason is that it provides a link to your website that Google will pickup if you advertise on craigslist frequently.
The important thing is that you attempted it. Now keep doing it, change your ad up and create several ads to post on craigslist. |
This is one reason why I posted an article a few weeks ago called “Real Estate Investors Need To Start With Back Page: An Online Classified Site Primer”
Marketing is an ongoing process with no right or wrong way of doing things, it is a test to see what works and what doesn’t and learning were to tweak your marketing to generate leads and also learn when to stop tweaking your marketing when something starts working. That is why we are doing the marking training every 6 weeks on the training webinar. I am sharing what I am doing and other students are sharing what they are doing. Together we can all learn what is and what isn’t working in today’s market, and when things change, which they do very frequently in this market, we will all be the first ones to know.
Another benefit of posting ads on craigslist is that it creates an external link to your website. Google and other search engines crawl craigslist looking for links to websites. When the search engine robots find new website links, they store those links in a database. Once they find enough external links to your website, then the search engines will finally crawl your website to index your website in the search engines. This is what we want, and then eventually we will start getting hits to our websites from Google and the other search engines.
So don’t let Craigslist give you a Gloomy Appeal. Instead, understand what Craigslist use is for real estate investors and use it that way, as a means to generate links to your website. And a well rounded approach is to do the same thing using BackPage, FaceBook, Blogs and other social media outlets.
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What has your experience been with Craigslist or any other Online Marketing for your Real Estate Business? |
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