Aug 09 / 2013
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Promote Your Lake Havasu City Website – How to Boost Profits with Craigslist, Part I

Howdy readers!

Craigslist. We here at NSquared are almost positive you have heard of this website. But, did you know that this website can be an extremely beneficial tool for marketing your business and boosting profits? Check out, Marketing on Craiglist, below:

“Marketing Your Business on Craigslist

Learn how to showcase your products and services on this popular online marketplace.

From e-commerce websites to furniture wholesalers, small businesses both online and off are realizing the marketing power of Craigslist.org. Founded in 1996 by Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org gets an estimated 10 million unique visitors per day. With an online classified ads format organized by either region or city, Craigslist connects buyers and sellers in more than 300 communities; for the most part, posting on the site is free.

If you’ve never heard of Craigslist or never considered using the site to market your business, the following tips will help you determine whether it might be a good fit for you and offer another outlet for marketing your products and services.

What Sells Best on Craigslist

From services like tutoring, car repair and real estate to products such as wholesale furniture, consignment goods and retail e-commerce, Craigslist is the ultimate destination for online marketers. If you manufacture goods, provide services directly or sell products regionally, Craigslist is a marketing tool you should consider. You can also easily promote an eBay store, a franchise operation or a referral partner. And it’s a bourgeoning business opportunity for affiliates and webmasters looking for new ways to find customers.

Identifying Your Market

Like any other advertising medium, Craigslist requires some strategy, though paramount to its usefulness is simplicity. To start, you need to determine which city or cities you’re going to post an ad. If you’re a service provider, you can identify available cities on Craigslist that encompass your service region. Keep in mind that some regions overlap. For instance, if you’re a mobile groomer working in Orange County, California, but service from Los Angeles to San Diego, Craigslist reaches your service area across four cities. So you’d want to develop your messaging and a posting schedule in each of these regions to increase your exposure. If you sell a product or offer a service nationwide, the opportunity to reach new customers is even greater.

Posting on Craigslist, either nationally or locally, requires an understanding of the rules. Craigslist has in place–a set of rules that prohibits advertisers from over-posting or spamming users. You can follow these rules and still get excellent exposure. To start, develop unique ads for each city you post in, focus on specific products and rotate them on a promotional schedule. Never post the exact same ad within 48 hours, and be careful to delete your old ad. Craigslist users are quick to spot businesses that misuse the system and can be quite unforgiving. The Craigslist flagging system puts the power of spam control into the hands of the users.

Building Ads

Building an ad on Craigslist can be as simple as typing in some text, or you can incorporate html and images. Typically, what works best is the direct approach. For instance, if you’re a real estate agent using Craigslist to promote properties for sale, build a text ad that incorporates images of the properties for sale–you don’t need to know html to do this. Simply define what property specifications best sell the property and keep the sales pitch to a minimum. Be sure to include important search words, such as “three bedroom” or “condominium,” as well as regional identifiers including a ZIP code, city or community name. You do this so that people who search for specific items find you in the search results.

Craigslist’s search function isn’t based on a search algorithm; instead, search results are displayed first by date, then by keyword. This makes the text content of your ad extremely important. Ads with images only increase ad effectiveness. And adding images to your ad isn’t difficult. If you’re not web savvy, use the “upload image” function available during the posting process. (If you want to feature a large image or more than one, you’ll need to upload your images to your own web server and reference them inside your ad using basic html.) Images, however, are not required. Often the best performing ads on Craigslist are simple text ads that get straight to the point.”

…to be continued…

Contact us if you need inbound marketing, IT consulting, or an awesome website. Stay tuned for Part II on Monday. Until next time, stay groovy!

May 31 / 2013
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Articles, Social Media

Make Money Using Social Media, Part II

Howdy folks! Welcome to Make Money Using Social Media, Part II! This week we are featuring an article by Rosalia Cefalu, 22% of Salespeople Don’t Want to Make Money.

Our last post explained why social media value is on the upswing. Today we are going to talk about why you should adopt a social media strategy (like that cool kid to the left adopted a strategy for getting his candy). Check it out!

Why Should Sales Adopt a Social Media Strategy?

Because your future customers are on social media!

Remember back when businesses would advertise in the Yellow Pages? Someone might look up “Law Firm,” call for a quote for their services, and the firm would answer when people called. In the digital age, it’s not so different. People “call” us in a lot of different ways — on the phone, via our website, on email, even in search engines. And when they do, we do our best to “call” them back, whether through nurturing materials, an email, or an actual phone call.

Now answer me this. If you got a “call” through social media … would you return it?

If your answer is anything other than of course, you might be in the 22%. For some time now, social media has been the voicemail box we just haven’t been checking. With growing adoption of social media, there are more and more messages being sent over social that you should be doing your darndest to pick up on. And if you’re not checking the messages, someone else will.72.6% of salespeople using social media actually outperformed their colleagues not on social media. Don’t let the salesperson outperforming you be from your competitor.

(Tip: The value of social media in the sales process extends beyond just being present where leads are communicating. It has to do with the soft skills many sales professionals have already honed in-person and on the phone. Any sales professional knows it’s extremely important to develop a sense of comfort and trust early on in a relationship. Social media can be the perfect medium for engaging in those conversations that will help you better understand your lead’s pain points, interests, and personality. In a world where we text before we call, the domain of sales conversations is expanding from the headset into the Twitter stream.)”

Stay tuned tomorrow to learn what you could be doing to increase your business! Contact us if you’d like to start a social media strategy today…don’t be the 22%!

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Posts Tagged / Sales