Best Paid Traffic: Lead Generation

Lead Generation – Online Classifieds

Overview

Online classifieds sites are a free or relatively cheap and effective way to get leads for your business.

Classifieds are localised online communities focussing with community moderated forums where you can find anything from jobs, housing, goods, services, local activities or advice.

One of the biggest sites is Craigslist and that will be the focus of this article.

To review which Craigslist posting are free, visit this link:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees

Posting Ads

Ads on Craigslist can be text, text with an image, or just an image. In this example I’ll show how to use images for ads.

Create Ad

Firstly you need to create an image to use within your ad posting. This has several advantages over posting an ad with text including:

1) Your ad stands out as something unique (most people only do text)

2) You can include text on your ad image that would not normally be allowed by the site.

Images

You’ll need to find some suitable images. You can use Google or Bing and search for images using the keywords ‘entrepreneur’, ‘home business’, ‘freedom’, ‘luxury’ or similar terms.

Note that legally you should only use images which are available under the Creative Commons license, or which you have purchased.

Some popular websites to find images are:

http://photobucket.com/

http://www.sxu.hu

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

http://istockphoto.com/

Create Graphic

To create the image for the ad, I suggest this easy method.

1) open up a new document in your favourite word processing program (ie OpenOffice, Word, Google Docs)

2) Paste your image into the document

3) Add some text below the image, I suggest using the headline from your optin page.

Now the basic ad copy is created, we need to make it an image.

The fastest way to create the image is to use a free tool called Jing, available from Techsmithhttp://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

With Jing installed you can select and drag the area of your document containing the text and save the image. The border can then be added within Jing.

Here is an example I’ve used for MOBE previously:

Upload Image To The Internet

The ad image now needs to be uploaded to the internet so the Craigslist ad can display it.

1) Create an account on photobucket.com/

2) upload image

3) copy the Direct link (you’ll need this next)

Create The HTML For The Post

The next step is to create the HTML for the image, including the link, for posting in the ad.

1) Open this page in your web browser:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp

2) On the page, click the ‘Try it yourself’ button.

3) replace the text ‘smiley.gif’ with the link to the image you copied above.

4) remove the alt, height and width text

5) this should leave you with some text like

<img src=”http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h403/dav1d6/entrepreneur-500px.jpg”>

6) click the Submit Code button and you should see your image displayed on the right.

7) Copy the whole line containing ‘img’, including the angle brackets. Save this for using next.

Creating Your Account

You will need a Craigslist account to place ads. You can create your account athttps://accounts.craigslist.org/signup

Placing An Ad

After logging in, choose your city. Craigslist is comprised of localised communities, and there are many, many Craigslist sites.

I would suggest choosing a city close to you, or at least in the same country.

Step through the creating a post procedure, choosing a Job of type Sales or Business/Mgmt.

Posting Title

Enter some text similar to what you put on the image, and on your optin page. To make your Title stand out from others, add some special characters which you can find the HTML codes for on this page:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_symbols.asp

A favourite of mine is diamond, which is the code &diam;

Posting Description

Now you need to create an link for your optin page from you image.

In the text below…

<a href=”url”>Image</a>

1) replace url with your optin page link

2) replace Image with the img text from your Photobucket site.

The result will be something like

<a href=”https://global.leadpages.net/my-top-tier-business-coach-site/”><img src=”http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h403/dav1d6/entrepreneur-500px.jpg”></a>

This text is then pasted into the Posting Description on Craigslist.

Click Continue, and on the next page click Done With Images (no need to upload any images).

Review that the posting looks ok (you should see your image) and click publish.

Summary

The ad will now be reviewed and will be live shortly. This process can be repeated about 5 times per day. Any more than that and they will be declined.

This above process could also be performed by a virtual assistant.