First a little history about Craigslist, where it come from and how big it is.

Craigslist Definition:
“Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.”

History
“Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996. After incorporation as a private for-profit company in 1999, Craigslist expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, four each in 2001 and 2002, and 14 in 2003. As of November 2009, Craigslist has established itself in approximately 700 cities in 70 countries.

As of 2009, Craigslist operates with a staff of 28 people. Its sole source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities – $75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area; $25 per ad for New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon – and paid broker apartment listings in New York City ($10 per ad).

The site serves over twenty billion page views per month, putting it in 37th place overall among web sites worldwide and 11th place overall among web sites in the United States (per Alexa.com on January 8, 2010), to over 49.4 million unique monthly visitors in the United States alone (per Compete.com on January 8, 2010). With over eighty million new classified advertisements each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium. The site receives over one million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world. The classified advertisements range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements, to personal ads and adult services (previously erotic services).”
Information provided by Wikipedia

Craigslist is becoming number one for many small companies.
When it comes to online marketing for many businesses, especially small local businesses, Craigslist is slowly becoming the method of choice first. Why?

Craigslist is FREE.
It’s free 99.9% of the time to list your items or services for sale. Ebay, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all others either charge a fee for each listing or there is a cost per click charge associated with a complex algorythm that only those in the industry have a concept of and how it works.

Craigslist is easy.
Simply find your city, create an account and post your listings. You can load up to 4 images, or you have the ability to show images from anywhere else on the net with links to your company’s website or sales pages.

Craigslist doesn’t work for everyone.
Unfortunately, not all business products and services can be sold easily on Craigslist. B2B is difficult to pull off. Businesses selling products have an easier time than those selling services. While you might think it’s best suited for people and companies selling used items, and it is great at that, there are many companies whose entire marketing strategy is to list as many of their new products each and every day. There are even affiliate marketers that make a bit of money by creating listings and placing affiliate links on Craigslist.

BUT … Selling nationwide is extremely time consuming.
Craigslist was not designed or built to support the marketing of your products to the entire country with a single listing, as with most other online marketing methods. There isn’t even a nationwide search capability to shop for items listed in other cities. You must set up a different account for each city with a new username and password to pull this off. This also means you must create a different listing for each product you attempt to showcase. I would suggest you also vary the info on the listings a bit and not make them exact duplicates of one another. And, if you are a business, then list yourself as a business. If you don’t, your listings will always be getting flagged by the community and you will increase the work load tremendously.

So, will it work for your business?
On a local level, every business should try to advertise their top selling products – say their top 10. Even service oriented companies should make an attempt.

Tips:

• Listings last for 30 days before they are deleted from the searchable index.
• Make sure you use the appropriate keywords in your title and listings.
• You need to list in the “For Sale” categories. The search box that everyone uses on the left searches this category specifically. I am not saying you shouldn’t create another listing for your service and place it in the Business Services category, but you will not get searched if that is the only place you search.
• Provide links back to your website and use your phone number in many places.
• Write good Sales Copy.
• Creating an snapshot image of your website that is clickable is also a great idea.
• Do not cancel your listings just to relist them to go back to the top of the lis, unless you create a very different listing to replace it with. There are automated algos that run each day that remove those tricks.
• Try to spread out your listings throughout the month – not all in one day or one week.

Conclusion

Pros:

• FREE.
• Slowly replacing eBay as the number one online place to buy and sell items on a local basis.
• Traffic and awareness is growing rapidly.

Cons: (Time is Money)

• The time involved to open an account and load, monitor and renew listings for each product, in each city you choose.
• The time involved to manually manage more than one account is great, especially if you choose to list more than 10 items or services.

Is it worth the investment of time and resources for your business to try Craigslist? Perhaps, at least on a local level. But going nationwide will bust the bank in terms of time involved, unless the items you sell do extremely well on Craigslist and are highly profitable.

Good luck and good selling!

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of designing and creating content that will result in increased amounts of quality traffic to a website via “organic” or un-paid search engine results.

Webmasters and internet content providers started doing SEO in the mid-90s. However, what actually constitutes SEO work has changed as the field evolved over the years, sometimes rather drastically.

The Early Years

According to Danny Sullivan, a respected search engine industry analyst, the actual term “search engine optimization” started being used around 1997. But even before that, in the early days of Yahoo!, people were already starting to mess around with SEO concepts, testing out different keywords and different keyword densities and placement.

In the early days of search engines, webmasters needed only to submit their page addresses or URLs to the various search engines, who would then send spiders to crawl through and index the sites. As soon as people started to realize the value of having their websites show up on the first page of SERPS, they began looking for ways of manipulating the search engines indexing algorithms.

Back then, search algorithms relied on on-site information to determine page rankings. In other words, they relied on information that was provided by the webmaster, things like keyword density, meta tags and index files. All people needed to do was put in the right keywords in the sufficient density and they would start seeing front-page SE rankings in no-time. Web content providers also started manipulating HTML source attributes to get clients higher rankings. This started to result in the SERPS becoming unreliable, often filled with spam pages whose keyword tags did not accurately represent the pages’ actual content.

The first algorithm crackers appeared around ‘97. By decoding a search engine’s ranking algorithm, which at the time was nowhere near impossible, unscrupulous webmasters could get sites into the top 10 results at will. 1997 was the year that several SEO providers decoded all 35 parameters of Excite’s algorithm.

A Shift, And the Arrival of Google

Relying so much on on-site factors like keyword density, which could be directly manipulated by webmasters, to determine their rankings had gotten search engines in trouble. To make search results useful to internet users, search engines had to find another method of ranking pages that actually reflected a page’s value and search relevance.

More complex algorithms started being developed that took into account off-site factors. Things like link pop and directory age become important ranking determinants, and cracking SE algorithms becomes a more difficult and sophisticated task.

At this point, Alta Vista was ahead of the pack and the rest of internet users were evenly split between Lycos, Yahoo!, MSN and InfoSeek. Despite the improved algorithms, black hat SEOs were still finding ways to manipulate them, and page jacking and site theft was rampant.

Google, a company founded in September 4, 1998 by Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google’s algorithm, PageRank, determines site rankings by measuring the quantity and quality of their inbound links. Google’s superior, relevant search results immediately attracted a loyal following, and competing search engines started to realize the importance of keeping up with Google’s new page ranking methodology.

As the new millennium comes around, Google is solidifying its spot as the de-facto engine, while engines like Infoseek are becoming part of SEO and Internet history. By 2001, users are abandoning search engines like Lycos, Excite, AltaVista and Hotbot.

The Google Age

By 2004, the three major search engines that are left, Google, MSN and Yahoo!, start incorporating undisclosed page ranking factors into their algorithms. The era of keyword-spamming SEO is long over. Webmasters and content providers have to rely on more creative ways to promote content and generate inbound links in order to achieve long term increases in SE rankings.

In 2005, Google starts personalizing search results, taking into account a user’s search history to come up with customized results pages when that user is logged in. In 2007, Google starts a campaign against paid links affecting PageRank. In 2009, the company announces it is attempting to stop the effects of PageRank sculpting that come as a result of nofollow links.

Today, SEO is, for the most part, a conversation with Google Search. Google has over 70% of today’s search engine users and is thus the place you have to be in in order to start driving organic traffic your way. SEO campaigns are much more laborious and complex now than they were a decade ago, but this is largely a good thing. Users get better relevant results and webmasters and content providers have to provide actual value in order to rank high on search results.

Original Article: Newsletter – no online copy

This is not very digital, but even a stopped clock is correct two times a day. My first ClickZ column, “Marketing is NOT Sales” was written exactly nine years ago today I wrote this column. Soon after the dot-com crash, I wrote:

“For all that’s being written about various marketing strategies, success in e-business, as in any business, isn’t about marketing or about design; it’s about sales…

Ultimately, it’s about the conversion rate: the percentage of visitors your site can turn into buyers. Lots of dot-coms have turned into dot-bombs because even though they spent tons of money on ’sexy’ designs and tons more driving traffic to their sites, they overlooked the tiny fact that they needed to sell to visitors once they arrived at the site. The sad thing is, many of those visitors would have bought happily and could have left delighted.”

Pioneers get arrows in their backs but settlers get the land; venture capitalists seem to enjoy explaining that to entrepreneurs. I’ve been predicting that conversion rate optimization would become mainstream forever and was convinced the moment was upon us in May 2005 when “Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results” became the first self-published book, without wide bookstore distribution to become a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BusinessWeek, and New York Times best seller. I was wrong. Despite many successes with clients, more New York Times best sellers, lots of publishing, and speaking about improving conversion rates, I underestimated the value of tool adoption.

Even if people had the desire nine years ago, it was very hard work without good tools. When you can now get enterprise level tools like Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer for free, the barrier to entry into conversion rate optimization has dropped. And it isn’t just these core analytics and testing tools that exist today. There are countless free and low cost tools to improve your Web site that didn’t exist even a couple of years ago, fueling the desire and the ability to increase conversion rates.

So, Is 2010 Finally the Year of Conversion Rate Optimization?

I’m not going to say it. I’ll let others speak for fear of jinxing conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz recently predicted that 2010 is the year of landing page optimization. Rand writes, “think this is still the most under-utilized and highest ROI activities in the marketing department, but more awareness is on its way. CRO isn’t just about testing; it’s about building a process for improving conversion over time. Online businesses can generate so much revenue from this, yet few invest. I think 2010 is the year, simply because it’s an inflection point for companies to assess their spend and where they derive value.”

Rand, from his SEO (define) perspective, thinks of it as only landing page optimization, but there are more than landing pages involved in optimizing conversion rates.

Raquel Hirsch of WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization agrees with Rand. Raquel makes the following observations that I concur with:

“Rand Fishkin then goes on to present a table describing three tiers of marketing channels and their scores for Average ROI, Average Effort and Average Cost. Conversion Optimization appears in the #1 placement for Tier 1….

…We at WiderFunnel work with clients using different tools and, as a technology-agnostic firm, are free and unbiased to recommend the right testing tool to the right client at the right stage of their company’s adoption of conversion optimization as a strategy…

At the end of the day, conversion optimization success is never about the testing tool: there are already many excellent tools available…

…When we first started WiderFunnel, we would spend a lot of time explaining what testing is all about, trying to cause an ‘Aha! Moment’ where prospects would suddenly (well, after a one hour presentation) ‘discover’ that it was dramatically cheaper and far less risky to run conversion optimization tests than to keep throwing marketing dollars at Search campaigns…

Things have changed.

We now get a steady stream of well-educated prospective clients who contact us knowing what conversion optimization is all about and asking how we work with clients…

Most importantly, we now get a very high percentage of prospective clients who have already dabbled at testing themselves (both with free and with paid testing tools) and have realized that conversion optimization isn’t just ‘one more thing’ their in-house staff can do: they know they need experts to deliver a sustainable and scalable testing strategy for them if they are to optimize the complete site and stay ahead of the competition…

…After two and half years of running tests for clients, we have learned that conversion optimization success is NEVER about the testing tool they choose and ALWAYS about two factors:

1. The right test hypotheses (or ‘knowing what to test’)

2. The right (and scalable) process (as in ‘Can you execute properly in the areas of web analytics; conversion optimization strategy; test design; variable content placement; wireframing; graphic design; copy and modifications; layouts and mock-ups; technical installation; HTML; real-time results analysis…?’).

…So many marketers still look for the silver bullet: that shiny new idea that pleases their eye and their ego and which can be done with relatively little work.

However, current economic conditions, where the CFO continues to cut the marketing budget and demands marketing actually increase its productivity and deliver even higher ROI, is changing all this.

And it is changing on a daily basis: we are seeing not only greater investment in conversion optimization but a greater realization on the part of marketers that this is a business-model changer for their companies, here to stay.”

Rand and Raquel are smart people. I’m happy to consider them my friends.

Is there any other evidence that I can see? Market Motive recently added a certification course in conversion rate and landing page optimization; I am the instructor. There is more demand than I thought. Even the day after our first kickoff call on Monday, several new students registered.

Students’ interest is not superficial. They want to dive deeper into all the diverse disciplines required to be a good conversion analyst. With all this interest in conversion rate optimization, I’m going to have to revise my recommended reading list to include, “The Portable Conversion Analyst” for all the would-be conversion rate analysts. If you’d like to help everyone out, what books would you add to that list?

Original Article: http://www.clickz.com/3636122