Using Craigslist for International Business Promotion

Craigslist is an excellent avenue for international business promotion. Whether you operate a small family business or manage a thriving conglomerate, Craigslist can make business promotion far easier, thereby increasing both your company's popularity and its profits. Remember though, the primary components involved in any successful business promotions campaign are advertising to your target audience and appealing to their senses.

Advertising to Your Target Audience

Using Craigslist for international business promotion has many similarities to offline promotion. Most importantly, you must still effectively reach your target audience if you intend to be successful. The key to doing this is correctly placing your product or service advertisement to ensure that your target audience receives the message.

First of all, I want to point out that most advertisements can be placed for free on Craigslist. The only exception is any job-related advertisement placed on a Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, or Washington DC page. This still leaves you with almost 500 cities, towns, and municipalities all across the globe that you can advertise on for free.

Second, as of May 2008, Craigslist has pages for over 500 cities. In fact, Craigslist is estimated at receiving over four billion views per month. Millions of people worldwide use Craigslist on a daily basis. Just imagine how many of them could be potential customers.

Third, correctly placing your product or service depends on its availability. If, for instance, you have one towing company in Chicago and another in Bloomington, you will want to place ads on those respective pages only. However, suppose you are selling a product through an e-Commerce store that anybody worldwide can access. Your best bet would be to place an ad in each and every city on Craigslist. Although tedious and time-consuming, it has the potential to drive herds of traffic your way.