First, let’s see what’s good about Craigslist. To me Craigslist has 4 major benefits: it’s free; it’s a well known website; it is a trusted site; and most importantly, it is one of the most visited websites in the US.

Many internet marketers use Craigslist to make a quick buck. If you’ve been on Craigslist before, you’ve probably seen all these ads such as “Make $12,000 in 3 days”, or “Earn 2K residual for life”. These are ads made up to advertise affiliate programs. From an affiliate marketer standpoint, these ads have very little value because they will most likely be removed in a matter of minutes.

The real deal is to create ads that will stick (which means not be removed) to generate traffic to your site, not from Craigslist visitors, but from Google visitors.

Let me explain to you something you probably know… Google loves Craigslist and it crawls the site many many times a day. When you post an ad on Craigslist, Google will find it in a matter of minutes, index it, and give it much more importance than it actually deserves, putting it on the first page of Google for a given keyword. If one of your keywords shows up on the first page of the SERP, you’re gold! You will get good qualified traffic from this.

Let’s cut the crap. Here is what I recommend to do in order to get your Craigslist ad on the first page of Google:

1. Your ad title should be your main keyword/keyphrase
2. Choose your ad title wisely. If your website sells warts removal cures, don’t just name your ad “warts removal”. There is too much competition for this keyword, so be more specific: “Natural Warts Removal” would be good.
3. Write a very short post description. Just a few words are enough. You’re not trying to sell the people right here; you’re trying to get them to come to your site! A good description for our warts removal site would be: “Our natural warts removal cure will help you get rid of warts naturally without drugs or cream”.
4. Make sure to include your main keyphrase in the description.
5. Include your URL and make it clickable. Not good: www.SebastienPage.com – Good: www.SebastienPage.com
6. That’s it!

Now here is what you shouldn’t do:

1. Do not repeat the same process over and over again with the same keywords. I don’t even recommend doing this over and over again with various titles as the Craigslist community will get back at you by flagging your posts. Just do it a couple times a week, switching ad titles and ad descriptions. Note that ads show up quickly on Google, but they don’t stay for more than 2-3 days.
2. Do not use broad titles!!! As I mentioned above, do not use competitive keyphrases but go after the long tail.

I use this trick on the 3 of my money making sites and I get great traffic for free. Since you’re targeting the long tail, you’re most likely not gonna get thousands of visits. But as we say in French, “10 grams of fine patisseries are better than 10 pounds of potatoes”.

Here is a screenie of my fake ad posted on Craigslist for “Natural Warts Removal” ranking #1 for this search! Note that I posted this ad on Craigslist on 1/16/09. This screenshot was taken on 1/17/09. So by the time you see this, the results will most likely have changed.

Click on the image for a larger view.

Below is a snipet of an interview that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave in January 1999 to Karsten Lemm, a correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern. The full interview can be found here.

Do you generate any revenue at the moment?

Sergey: You caught us at an interesting time. Right now, we’re thinking about generating some revenue. We have a number of ways to doing that. One thing is we can put up some advertising. The key there is to put up advertising that will be really useful to our users and not slow down our site. That way we won’t push people away from our site, but we’ll still take in some revenue. Another way would be co-branding. Provide the back-end search engine to other sites.

How do you see Google develop? At some point, do you see yourselves on par with AltaVista, Excite, all these other established search engines?

Sergey: I would say no. We want to be on par with Yahoo, or Amazon, AOL. AltaVista, Excite and [the others] are by no means viewed as the winners. There’s no question, we want to be number one in market share in terms of search. And I think we can do that in not so long. Past that, it’s really hard to predict. There’s really no reason to set our sights low. If you do things right you can make a big jump over everybody else.

Boy, these guys were right on! As much as I hate Google, I have to admit the business model is impeccable!

• www.AforAndroid.com is a blog that aggregates news about Google’s (not so) new OS’ Andoid. I am a firm believer that Android will kick the iPhone’s ass some day soon. I still love my iPhone but I will switch to Android in a heartbeat. This blog has no purpose but sitting around. One day it might be worse millions, who knows… Just kidding.
• www.FforFranchise.com is the same as A for Android. It just aggregates franchise-related news from various places. Why a franchise site? Because that’s the industry I’ve been working in for the last 4 years…
• www.FranchiseBrief.com is also a site about franchising. It lists over 500 franchise opportunities, making it one of the largest franchise directories out there. I haven’t touched this website in months and it went from a PR 4 to a PR 0 :(
• www.iForiPhone.com is, once again, a news aggregator for iPhone. Nothing really creative about it. It’s just sitting there and I have nothing to do with it to maintain it as it is auto populated with content.
• www.iPhoneDownloadBlog.com is my main iPhone blog. It actually is the blog on which I spend the most time. This blog is about hacks and cracks for the iPhone. If you’re an iPhone owner and you still rely on Apple for your applications, well, sorry, but you’re missing out. Jailbreaking your iPhone is the best thing that can happen to it and it will set you free from Apple’s evil claws.
• www.iPodMediaSelection.com was my second domain name and it made me a lot of money last year. I don’t do anything on that site anymore. It’s just sitting here, generating an affiliate sale every once in a while.
• www.Podpaganda.com redirects to iPodMediaSelection.com. I am not sure why I bought this domain name in the first place but I remember finding the name pretty cool. I don’t know if you noticed how I am playing with words: podpaganda = propaganda. Yes? No?
• www.SebastianPage.com is my name misspelled and it redirects to SebastienPage.com.
• www.SebastienPage.com is the blog you are currently reading. Mostly nothing really interesting to most people. Some people might like it though as I get decent amounts of traffic.
• www.YogaZee.com is a yoga blog that Tina works on. The goal is to make it a large yoga class directory, with news and articles that are related to yoga.

Some of these domain names are pretty ugly… To my defense though, I think the domain name doesn’t matter much. As long as it doesn’t contain hyphens or numbers or as long as it’s not more than 15 letters, it is good. After all, I am not trying to create an online empire here…

My latest thing is domain names starting with a letter + the full word, such as “F for Franchise”. Such URLs are short, easy to remember, and they are available!