Another Craigslist Secret

I was scrolling through some articles online and came across an idea to streamline your Craigslist Postings that I don't think I ever shared before.

Its an email organization idea found here.

Basically it involves creating a master email account to which all of your other email accounts will be forwarded. (You use different email accounts to post similar ads to improve your chances of not being flagged as spam)

That way the only thing you need to do is log into one email account to confirm your new ad postings.

Its a quick idea but it saves a ton of time and eliminates the hassle of constantly trying to remember every password for every email account.

Craigslist Marketing Refinement

I'll admit that I use Craigslist sporadically to help increase my web traffic. It doesn't always bring in the tons of traffic I had expected when I first got started but it is a steady trickle and its easy to use. Sign up for an account and you can keep track of all of your listings and automatically relist them when they expire.

That being said I came up with an interesting idea today while playing with Google Trends. I put in several search terms for one of my websites to compare the amount of searches for each one. It returns a handy graph with Search Volumes for each of your keywords as well as pages of interest (good for comments if its a blog) and where the searches come from.

That last part is what got me thinking. They narrow it down to not just countries but states and cities in the United States.

What good is that?

Well now I know that two cities with the highest search volume by far are from an area easily covered by Craigslist. All I have to do is work my link into the appropriate category.

No more randomly targeting cities or competing against the flood of posts in NYC, LA and SF for a little extra traffic.

Mashup Websites

A quick way to easily compile an auto updating website is to use the developer API's from the leading websites online such as YouTube, AMazon, Ebay and others.

Thankfully there are people out there working on this and publishing their work with a creative commons liscence. People like Chris Sampson over at http://www.c-online.co.uk/

His latest version of the EbayYouTube Amazon Mashup works great. To see a sample test that I did this morning look at my Traditional Archery Equipment website. Of course you have to sign up as a developer at Ebay and Amazon but thats free.

The rest is mostly cutting and pasting your code into the stufftochange file and your product list into the products file.

Click Here to Download Chris's Version of the Mashup Script

Or if you want to know a little more about it try checking this out at 45n5.com

Let me know if you have any luck implementing this script. I would love to see the variations people come up with.

Development VS. Parking

Last year, or maybe a little more than that, I told everyone to buy into the 4 letter domain names as they would be a great investment opportunity.

And they still are if you can find them cheap.

However a recent post over at Jenny's Blog has me thinking about the difference between parking and development.

You see each of my 4 letter domain names are considered a long term investment. I'll maybe resell in a few years for a good ROI.

But they, for the most part, have been parked since purchase. They get a decent amount of traffic for a non promoted domain name. The problem is that they dont make any money from the pay per click ads that the parking companies provide.

So I have been thinking that over the last year and a half I would have been better off developing something, even if it was a simple couple of pages of content to get indexed, rather than parking and forgetting.

There was an ebook floating around about increasing the value of your domains but it was out dated and mostly contained black hat techniques.

So now I'm thinking that any parked domain that isn't at least paying for itself needs to be removed from parking and have a site built on top of it, wether advertising is included or not.

That way in a few years the domain will be indexed, have a few backlinks and maybe some decent traffic adding a little extra juice to the sales price.

How to REALLY Do Keyword Research

Here is a link to a free video discussing keyword searching.

It is an important subject that many people often over look. Personally I was targeting a narrow range of keywords and working my way to the top of the search engines for each site. Seeing how many sets of Long Tail Keywords they are going after in this video you can be assured that I will be looking for more.

How to REALLY Do Keyword Research:

"During that second Webinar, Jim Morris offered a KILLER resource. A free PDF that outlines a plan of action for your sites; based on how much time and effort you want to put in to your marketing. You can download that PDF here. You will absolutely want to implement what's inside, it's content, no BS (just like I like it).

Take a quick look at the single page PDF document offered with the video and you will see how much work is involved even with minimal web promotion.