Promoting Home and Online Businesses w/ Craigslist

Craigslist is one of the best classified ad resources on the net. We have used it sell vehicles and to promote our home-businesses, as well as promoting the tools that we use to promote our home-business.

Craigslist is structured geographically so that if you live in Denver and want to sell your couch and loveseat - it may be a good idea to post that to the Denver area. However, if you are marketing a travel service, health product, etc. - you would obviously want to spread the ad outside your area and likely even nationwide.

Craigslist will not allow you to post the same article to more than one area w/in 48 hours, so i have come up w/ a method to reach out to the entire nation without violating Craigslists policies.

I have a couple of main businesses i am working, 3 social networks, and a growing number of traffic generating/marketing referral sites that i would like to promote. So i have created a spreadsheet that on one of the worksheets has 3 columns, name of the business/ product/ service, a headline, body of the ad i want to post.

In the next work sheet i entered a date column and put in the current date then copied it out for 3 months or so. Then i added other columns for each the different items i am promoting. Now you will want to make a list of cities (minimum of 15) my list is over 40.

In the column of the 1st item you are promoting type in the 1st city on your list, then go down 3 rows and type in the next (your first city will be in the row of today's date, then your next city will be in the row of the date 3 days from now) continue entering the cities 3 rows apart until your list is exhausted.

Now go back to the top and highlight all of the cities that you just entered, right-click copy, then move to the cell one-down and one to the right of your top city and paste it there. Continue the pasting until you have filled in all of your columns. If you stepped down properly pasting then you will have some empty cells at the top right of your sheet. You can fill them in as you like. (at the bottom of your list will be the opposite affect you can use those cells to fill in the blanks at the top)

There you have it. Now every day you can open your sheet and look to see what items are to be promoted that day. Then go to craigslist and put in your add. Its a lot quicker if you cut/paste from your first worksheet the headline and body. This should take less than 10 minutes a day once you get the hang of it.