Standing Out

Craigslist is not dead.

It is one of those mega-sites that I figured would come in, sweep us off our feet, and then die. Why? Because the number of daily posts on Craigslist in some cities is so high that using it to find something (like a used car, or a dresser, or a babysitter) can be a nightmare!

Even so, it’s still a very useful site - even for business owners.

3 Ways to Use Craigslist

1. Location. Figure out WHERE you want to post, and depending on your business type, you may want to consider posting in a large city somewhere else. For example, your target audience may be located in California but you live in New York. No biggie. If your business is mainly online, just post in a larger city in California (or even a smaller, if you have a niche market).
2. Use images. USE IMAGES. Use images. I can’t say this enough. Listen, craigslist is really just a forum that doesn’t allow commenting. So, it can get VERY bland after awhile. Differentiate yourself from the thousands of others who won’t use any images. The best way to do it is to upload your link to a URL, and then put an <img> tag pointing to the location. If you need a place to store images, ask me. I am willing to host them on my site (first come, first serve). Remember, you use HTML in a craigslist posting, not CSS. Find a good tutorial for inserting an image tag here.
3. Use advertising language. Remember, these are ads. Ads use words like New, Now, Join, Call, Email, etc. You want to explain what you’re offering using flavorful language and a call to action.

Find a good tutorial for writing Craigslist ads here. There are some things I don’t agree with - (like not inserting images from an external source when you can upload them, because when you upload them you cannot play with the image placement in the post) but all-in-all it’s a good place to start.

Cheers! Happy posting.

Yikes. So I realized today that I do not like my business website at all. Thing is - I didn’t even need to actually visit it to figure this out. I was simply doing a transcription project for one of my clients and the special speaker was talking about getting clarity in your business, and my mind immediately shot to my website.

Am I being clear? NO! I’m definitely not. From my website, you’d think that I am casting my net as far out into the sea as possible, hoping to catch everything from the smallest shrimp to the humpback whale. Ridiculous! The thing is that it’s not even what I’m after. I have a particular type of client in mind with particular needs. Why am I so afraid to communicate that?

Anyway. You may have a similar problem. Or, a different problem, but with the same solution - re-vamping. Re-vamping, as I define it, means to re-create your material in such a way that new energy and life is brought to it. In my case, my website should be re-done immediately - like, by Monday - so that my marketing efforts are not in vain.

I don’t want my marketing efforts for my website to be like the good seed that fell on infertile land. Wasted. A total waste. That’s not what I want. That shouldn’t be what you want either.

(more…)

It started out as a “sick” Sunday. I know that tonsillitis is coming on (I’ve had it many times before) so I stayed home from church to rest. That’s how it started out. My baby son and I stayed in bed until a ridiculous hour of the morning which I will not confess out loud, and then decided to have a go at the day.

We did the usual - eat, play, sing, chill out, etc. Then I caught some time to myself as he took a snooze. That’s when Marketing Mania Day began its onset.

It started out when I decided to build out my new Linkshare program (Join B2B LinkShare Now!) which I actually found when browsing a competitor’s website (you can find really interesting things while browsing competitor’s websites…). I was creating links to add to my page and found a really great one for Vertical Response. Well, I decided that not only did I want to promote them on my website and earn money, I wanted to use them, too.

VR offers some really cool tools for direct marketing and e-mail marketing. I had already decided that I wanted to send out a launch e-mail to my “circle of influence”. VR’s tools just made it way easier. Instead of having to send a huge, mass e-mail from my webmail account that wouldn’t look so nice anyway since I can’t create cool-looking HTML e-mails with it, I was able to use VR’s e-mail marketing tool to make this amazing launch e-mail to send to my friends and family. I am so pleased with it! (If you want to find out more about it, click here.)

But anyway, the real point of this blog is to discuss circles of influence. I really had no idea that I had contact information for as many people as I do. At the end of the day, I had over 150 bonafide e-mail addresses of real family and friends to contact regarding my new business. That number will either seem small or large to you depending on how much you use and believe in circle of influence. If you had asked me how large my circle was prior to today, I would have guesstimated somewhere around 20 or 25. Obviously it is much larger than I thought. Why? Because I never looked! I never really looked into it until today.

How did I look into it? Well, this isn’t a how-to article but maybe one day I’ll write one. All I did was go to my contacts list in gmail and export it! I was shocked to see just how many “contacts” I actually had. After cleaning it up a bit and removing people I don’t consider part of my circle of influence, I ended up with somewhere in the 150s and that was darn good enough for a great launch.

Thus, I created a tres chic Pass-It-On campaign letter in which I simply asked those in my circle to pass on the news of my new business to someone in their circle who could use it. In effect, I was asking my friends and family to do me a favor by doing a favor for a small business owner that they knew, because I truly believe that my services can help small business owners. It was an earnest request that I know will have excellent results.

So I used my circle of influence today and I’m so proud of that. These are the types of activities that separate the small business wheat from the small business chaff. Seriously. I got a boost of self-confidence today from something so small - sending an email!

There you have it, folks. Everyday you can do something to take a step in the direction of increasing your small business’s value. Even on Sick Sunday!