Your Second Local Internet Marketing Tool: Craigslist.org
Craigs list is such a useful and under looked tool in the local internet marketing game. There are thousands of businesses advertising in your area, thousands of clients looking for your business and thousands of marketers looking for the next quick buck. What, we are LOCAL internet marketers need to do, is pinpoint a couple of things and craigslist is great for that.
1. Identify our main competition online. Other than a google search and the like, finding out if your competitors are listing on craigslist is a great tip to see if they have someone helping them with their online reputation.
2. Identify products and services that your client provides that might be currently overlooked, but heavily requested.
3. Create an online presence as a services and goods provider in the local internet world.
Now there are a couple of “tools” that you can purchase that allow you to break the Terms of Service (TOS) of craigslist, no I don’t know where you can get them, and I don’t reccommend you use them. Thats a slippery slope that is hard to come back from.
What WE do is the hard work of figuring out what searches we need to do, what our clients customers are looking for and what you client WANTS to be found for.
If this is your first Local Internet Marketing project, craigslist is the perfect place to hone your skills of getting people to act from your writing as well.
First you need to search craigslist, for me its this: miami.
http://miami.craigslist.org/search
Local Internet Marketing Tools Craigs List Search
after that search, it will bring you to a results page like this:
Local Internet Marketing Tools Craigs List Search Results
Now, you would have to search every single keyword, repeatably throughout the day every day.
When I fist starting doing this, I was ahead of the game because I made a html page with the hyper link of the search, so I could just make the keyword list and search results the one time and load the page, click on the link and see my results. Sounds like a great plan right? So why am I not telling you to do that now?
Well, craigs list has conveniently now given us access to a RSS feeds of any search result! If you don’t know what an rss feed is: Local Internet Marketing Tools: What is RSS??
Tucked away on the lower right hand corner of the screen you will see this:
Local Internet Marketing Tools Craigs List RSS
The beauty of this is that the rss feed is updated real time… When you get the rss feed it will look like this in your browser (i use firefox and so should you)
Local Internet Marketing Tools Craigs List Search RSS Results
Great, awesome, stupendous! Now you have an auto updating page for the first search term you want on craigslist!
You can probably already see the advantages of having the rss feed right? Well take it one step further, use a rss feed reader to subscribe to the feed, and each and every other search result rss feed you make for the other keyword you have for your client.
The possibilities are endless here, play around with it.
Next time, I will show you how to use a free blog to display all the results of your craigslist searches real time with no searching 
later!
-shawn
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