Craigslist
"To Achieve Victory We Must Mass Our Forces At The Hub of All Power & Movement. The Enemy's 'Center of Gravity" - Von Clausewitz Craigslist
People have been using this technique for years - cause it WORKS! Early I asked If a Craigslist poster has a shitty experience with Craigslist, is it wrong for me to send them emails letting them know about another platform where they can get exactly what they are looking for knowing fully well that some will be willing to pay for it? It's what Airbnb's been doing and has been killing it. Airbnb has been traffic leaking craigslist to get their $1 billion valuation:
- Airbnb Farmed Craigslist To Grow Its Listings, Says Competitor - Business Insider
- New Billionaire AirBnB Still Spamming Craigslist, Not Returning the Favor | Betabeat
- https://medium.com/design-startups/ce0b06ee29ee Random Twist: The key with this technique is capturing user's information versus direct sales. Direct selling straight from Craigslist without a soft sale is not a good idea. It's actually not a good idea with any marketing, conversions will be shitty.
From the craigslist add prospects should be send to a lead capture page, then you follow up with them in your email funnels to promote your product(s)/service(s). It's key to know the demo and lifestyle of your customer as well. Tagging them at the beginning is critical - say you place a classified Ad in Portland, Oregon's pet section. When traffic comes in from that - tag it Portland, Oregon, Pets - and any other identifying markers.
Idea, you can offer to give away a free doggy couch, blackhat style, that your "dog" no longer needs. In that scenario, having them email you at a specialized email that goes directly into your database would make sense. Setup an email that is specifically for that section portlandoregondot@gmail.com <- don't make it that obvious, use a spreadsheet if you have to. Get a programmer to write a pop3/imap email script that extracts the email address from anyone that emails that email into your database.
Later on - a week or two giving them enough time to forget about the doggy couch, send them a survey for "Pet Lovers". This survey will start capturing more information, First Name, Last Name, and other interests as a pet owner. State the survey is by "Pet USA" or whatever, in an interest to bring a new Pet Store to the local area. Ask as many questions about them as you do about their own pets. If they have birds, cats, dogs - what species, etc - some questions you may want to add tags as well - "cats", "dogs" in your tag fields. Make it sound like it's from a concerned Pet Store, which wants to cater to their needs. All this information goes back into your database growing the 2nd stage level of your list. Keep sending them different surveys if they respond to them - if not jump them straight to your CPA offers to see what they like engaging with. Each email owner is different, so just because they don't respond to surveys for their info doesn't mean they won't fill out their info if they are about to receive a coupon for their pets. The key is trying different tactics. Sign up for your competitor's newsletters and see what tactics they use and try mimicking their success.
1st level is capturing email, 2nd level is capturing more information. Follow up in a week or two with some story about how in the meantime before you build your new store you've created this awesome website with Pet discounts, coupons, and home delivery. And then you can hit them with CPA offers afterwards, and rotating advertisement for your website, and Pet Lover heart warming stories, etc. Make it seem like they are part of your community. You'll be leading them from here to there and back again by the nose and they won't know or even care how they got there, as long as you are using the data you collected to create a connection with them.
Once the gears in your brain start churning, you'll start seeing the possibilities for your own niche. You can pretend to give free giveaways or just tell them straight up to sign up for your newsletter to get daily discounts on offers in the classified AD. The most unconventional methods usually work - Also if there are options for Paid Advertisements, try that as well. The key is to exploit the technique for traffic leaks to your main site and remember each technique should pay for itself directly or indirectly. This is really for email signup versus anything else, more of an indirect method.
Also, don't spam the shit out of craigslist - never a good idea to get ghosted. Make sure to track everything, and only do one city at a time. You can post 2 and you might be pushing it with 3 posts in the same city a day, but I don't recommend posting ads in different cities on the same days, flags will ensue. Start off slowly with different baits, and monitor the ones that get results, and good capture rates, then scale those ones going city by city - I'm overly cautious so I jump cities every 3-4 days.
If you really want to get more blackhat/exploit style, once you know your capture rate for each Ad/bait style, you can then hire a craigslist spammer to take it up a notch and spam the shit out of these cities.
Craigslist is not the only Classified Ad site. Here are a list of others which you should research - I like exploiting newer ones first since they usually have less spam filters in place: Free Kijiji Canada Classifieds | Free Ads | Petites Annonces Gratuites Gumtree | Free classified ads from the #1 classifieds site in the UK eBay Classifieds (Kijiji) - Post & Search Free Local Classified Ads. http://www.backpage.com/ Marketplace in Dallas Used Cars, Pets, Jobs, & Real Estate | Classified ads on recycler.com Free Classified Ads . Classifieds . Real Estate, Jobs, Vehicles, Dating... Free Classifieds - Hoobly Classifieds Classifieds - Free Classified Ads Online Free Classifieds - USFreeads DomesticSale - Free Classifieds Yahoo Classifieds For Free Atlanta Contractor, Landscaper, Painter, Roofing, Restaurants Post Free Classified Ads Find and Shop for the best products, prices and online deals on Fashion Apparel, Cars, Home Improvement, Collectibles, Pet Supplies and Merchandise. Free Ads 1 - 12: Local City State Homes Vehicles Electronics Here is also a list of 100 Classified Ads by some Blogspot blogger: TOP 100 BEST FREE CLASSIFIED AD POSTING SITES
You have to remember all these websites have traffic on them - huge amounts of traffic, their owners are working hard everyday to grow their business, so if you can explore and exploit different ways and if you can even automate several of these websites, you can create a system of classified traffic leaks for the long term.
Craigslist - Quicky
Offer to sell an old Ipad for low price. When they contact you tell them "sorry its' taken, but I got my new one at (CPA Offer for Ipad Giveaway), you might get lucky like me".