Virtually any business with a product or service to offer can benefit from advertising on Craigslist. Regardless of whether the business is a brick and mortar location or operates on an e-commerce model, Craigslist is a venue well worth advertising on. There is no cost involved in advertising on Craigslist, though here are terms of service which you must agree to in order to place an advertisement. However, advertisers don't have to be particularly concerned with their advertising ROI when using Craigslist, as the investment is literally nothing in financial terms.

Reaching Consumers on Craigslist

Advertising your products or services on Craigslist allows businesses to reach a vast audience of potential buyers. The Craigslist factsheet illustrates this in a glance - the site receives about 4 billion (yes, that's billion with a B) page views each month and counts around ten million different users per month. With so many people to reach, it stands to reason that advertisements on Craigslist are almost certain to receive some exposure to your target markets.

The number of Craigslist users provides businesses with a free advertising model which has a nearly unlimited potential. However, no audience, no matter how large guarantees that you'll receive any response to your advertisements. Getting consumers to take an interest in your products or services by advertising on Craigslist relies on making your advertising interesting, compelling and properly placed, exactly as with any other campaign.

Targeting Your Audience on Craigslist

If you want to take advantage of the popularity of Craigslist with consumers, you'll need to target your advertisements to those consumers who are the most likely buyers of your products or services. You can easily reach a more generalized audience, but your response rate will of course be far lower than if you'd aimed your advertisements towards your target market. It's always preferable to get your message to a smaller number of people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer than an enormous number of consumers who are not likely customers.

It all comes down to your advertising placement. Craigslist is organized by categories. There is a category for businesses to advertise, which is itself separated into a number of subsections. Obviously, you'll want to place your advertisement in the most appropriate section (for example, automotive if you happen to sell auto parts or supplies). Depending on what your business offers, you may want to post your advertisements in more than one section; this is fine as long as it's appropriate - placing your ads in the wrong section can lead to your ads being flagged by users and removed as spam.

If you don't see a section which fits the products or services you have to sell, you can choose from a few other options. You can place your advertisements in the small business advertisements section or you can write Craigslist to suggest a new category for advertisements. If they've had enough requests for this category, then they may be willing to set up a new category; don't expect an instant response to this, however.

Advertising vs. Spamming

Advertising on Craigslist is a perfectly acceptable and common practice. Spamming is just as common, but obviously, not acceptable. Placing the same ad in Craigslist sites all over the country in just about every category will be seen as spam and your ads removed accordingly. Other than being against the terms of service and irritating to users, spamming on Craigslist is simply ineffective. Consumers who come across the same advertisement posted in nearly every category across many different locations will identify these ads as spam and begin flagging these ads. If the site administrators at Craigslist become aware of these ads, they may remove all of your postings and even ban you from placing any future postings on the site.