How to Use Craigslist and other Alternative Classifieds to Make Money Online

There’s been a lot of talk about Craigslist marketing for small businesses and affiliate marketers and I’ve tried using Craigslist and its alternatives for a short period of time.

Personally, I think they are an excellent avenue for freelancers who plan to make money online through their specific skill sets. These online classified boards can also provide small businesses with a channel to sell their services through the internet.

It’s basically free targeted advertising because of the ability to categorize services and products according to specific categories.

As an affiliate marketer, these classifieds can also provide a source of revenue but the likelihood of listing links to your sell page or website is very minimal as they are often deleted very quickly, at least for Craigslist. There are however, several other ways to use these classified services to earn some side income.

Using Craigslist-style Classified Boards to Make Money Online

• Offer freelance services. Do you write, design or photograph? Are you good at data entry or languages? The job sections of these boards usually allow you to pitch your services.




• Get paid to blog. I’ve tried offering ghost blogging and content creation services for specific niches and topics and actually did receive responses from business owners and webmasters who needed part-time bloggers or article writing.




• Promote your Online Business. Movers, computer repair and delivery services traditionally do well on classified boards. But that’s not to say that online businesses won’t do as well either. You can use the boards to promote your web design, copy writing, translation or online marketing business.




• Acquire interested leads. This concerns affiliate marketers. Links and obvious entries created to sell a product are deleted rapidly so an alternative is to write a general but targeted entry (without links) which collects responses from clients you can convert later.

  Time-consuming but this is a pretty powerful tactic that has worked for me. Just remember to be ethical and respect the privacy of those who sent you an email.

Dosh Dosh’s List of Online Classified Boards

There are probably a lot more than what I’ve listed below but these were the ones that I’ve tried. All of them work similarly to Craigslist so if you are familiar with CL, these boards should be relatively easy to use.

Note that most of them are strongly geared towards North America and the U.S in particular and none of them comes close to Craigslist in terms of ad and response volume. If you’re pressed for time, I suggest focusing on Craigslist, GoogleBase and Backpage.

Craigslist

Google Base

Adoos

Dorm Item

Postaroo

Backpage

Gumtree

Edgeio

ListSomething