How To Generate Tons Of Free Leads Advertising On Craig’s List Part 2

September 21, 2009

Time Your Ad Posts Carefully

The Real Estate For Sale sections on Craig’s List get a massive number of new postings every day for most major US and Canadian cities.  For instance, the New York City board currently gets over 4000 new postings each day!  So it’s very, very easy to get your ads lost in the shuffle.  It’s been proven with search engines that few people look at results beyond page 3 of search results (IE 30 results), so you need to make sure your ad has got high placement.  Yet unlike many other classifieds sites (including Kijiji) and search engines, there’s no way to buy premium placement on Craig’s List so that your ads appear at or near the top of search results.  When you post an ad on Craig’s List, it’s immediately put at the very top of the listings.  When someone posts an ad after you, their ad will get position #1 and yours will get bumped down to #2.  So timing your ad postings is very important.  

So you need to think about when your target audience’s day is like and when they might look at online ads.  Think about what time they wake up and what tasks they’re typically doing in the morning, afternoon or evening.  There can be wide variances in what different people are doing when on different days, so you really need to put some thought into thinking about what times of the day they aren’t usually busy and when they’ll be most likely to take some time and look at online ads.

Generally speaking, on weekdays the times when people are least busy and are most apt to look at your ads are lunch time (shortly before, during, and shortly after), late afternoon (between 4PM and 6PM) when their day is winding down, and after 8PM in the evenings after dinner.  Now this is for people who work 9-5.  Retired people can be completely different.  They are usually early risers (6AM-7AM), but with no job to go to, you may find searching ads in the morning is their preferred time.  Try different times on different days and track the response rate to each ad.

Perhaps the very worst time to post for most people is between midnight and 3AM, but for some people it might be the best time for them to browse classified ads.  There are lots of people working mundane graveyard shift jobs (eg. building security) who have lots of time on their hands to browse the web during very late hours.  If you have rental listings, those late hours might be the very best time to post.

Read Part 3

Filed under: Marketing Tips,Networking Tips,Realtor Websites - Best Practices,SEO For Realtor Websites,Technology and Marketing/Selling Lists - Best Practices

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