HOW TO USE CLASSIFIEDS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC

Free classified sites can be a huge source of traffic if done correctly. Here we will cover the methods that I have used to get rather large sums of traffic to my sites.The top traffic sites in the classified realm in my opinion are (web stats may say otherwise but these are the ones that perform consistently for me).

• Craigslist
• Kijiji
• USA Free Ads

I have tested the others and for my marketing purposes they didn't do too well at all. I do have a friend who promotes dating offers on the "Back Page" classified site and does nicely with that. But for most marketing offers I found that the three I listed above are the ones to focus on.

• How to write a good ad

There are 3 main points to any ad copy and those are headline, body and close or call to action.

With your headline you really want to grab their attention. But you also want to do it in such a way as to only attract the people you really want to respond.

Even if you are giving away a free offer in your list building I have found that it's not a very good idea to put the word free in your headline. The reason being that you attract a ton of freebie seekers who then bloat the size of your list and your auto responder service fees but don't make you any money at all.

Instead attempt to have your headline carry an implied benefit like "The Secrets of List Building Have Been Hidden from You, Until Now That Is...” Or you could even work with titles like "The best New List Building Secret of the Decade". The point is that you see how they imply a benefit?

You should really put about as much effort and thought into your headline as you do the whole rest of your ad.

• Why Because if the headline doesn't grab them and make them read the body of your ad you won't have to worry if your body and call to action are any good, no one will ever read it.

In the body be sure to tell them what's in it for them. Everyone wants to know "what do I get out of this?" so tell them. You can do this with paragraph copy or bullet points which I tend to use quite a bit or non-bulleted single sentences with lots of white space. Much of that will be determined by the classified company you’re placing your ad with.

Make the first sentence of your body copy your hook. What this means is this should be your second best sentence in all your ad copy.

Here's an easy way to do this. When you are brainstorming your headline you should write down all the headline ideas that come to you. You may end up with 10 or more but you just pick your top one as your headline and then your second best you simply modify as the 1st sentence in your ad for your hook.

The reason this works so well is that after someone reads your headline they get hooked by that also important first sentence and continue on to read the entire ad.

For your close/call to action be sure to tell them what to do next and give them a reason to do it. Don't presume that people will know what to do at the end of your ad; you need to make it very clear.

This along with your headline is one of the areas where you can have a winner or a dud for an ad. Be sure to always keep in mind benefits. What does your prospect get out of this? In your call to action you must give them a solid reason why they need to take action or they won't.

• Placing the Ads

The 1st thing you really want to focus on when placing your ads is of course relevancy of the category. Because of the categories they give you to choose from this are not always going to be 100% laser targeted by any means but you really want to put a lot of effort into it.

The reason why is simple, you personally would not likely look for money making offers in the garage sale section, real estate rentals in the pet section or espresso machines in the for sale by owner category and neither do your customers/prospects.

• Be as relevant as you can be.

As an example: if you are marketing Mobile Websites you would likely put that in the services section under computers. This is the most likely category that someone interested in what you have would browse.

• Test different styles of copy in your niche.

If you're selling Mobile Websites as the example again then test your length of copy and see if really short bullet point copy gets better response than longer copy. I have seen both pull really well and it all came down to testing.

In general I found that short copy got me the overall greatest amount of responses while longer copy weeded out more of the tire kickers and gave me better quality response.

• Test, Test, Test

My saying is this: Test, Test, Test and when you're sick of testing test again. We always want to believe that our first ad is going to be a big winner and bring home the bacon but in reality it's usually some revision down the line that is the bread winner.

Whatever ad you have that is pulling well becomes your control. You then simply test other ads until you are able to verifiably beat your control. Then and only then do you replace your control with your new improved ad.

Your new and improved ad is now your new control and you begin the testing against it with more new ads right away.

Show me the guy who is satisfied with his ad and has stopped testing and I'll show you a guy who's losing money.

• An Easy Way To Earn Big With This Method Is...

Find hot selling products that everyone wants at below wholesale and sell them on eBay, Craigslist, Kijiji and tons of other auction houses and classified sites. When you're buying the hottest selling products at the right price you couldn't even imagine how profitable it really is. Put it this way, it could be a full time income PLUS some.

The hard part has always been where you find the hottest products at below wholesale.

Because what you really need is not just an old outdated wholesalers list but the secret source of where you go to uncover any wholesaler for any product anytime you want with just the click of your mouse.