How To Generate Tons Of Free Leads Advertising On Craig’s List Part 4

September 23, 2009

Your Back Linking Strategy & Craig’s List

For your back link strategy on Craig’s List, you ought to post ads in other areas of Craig’s List, but these ads shouldn’t be your listings.  For instance, you should regularly post ads to the Real Estate Services section.  Be creative with the content you post here.  For instance, if you have a blog, you could include an excerpt of an article here with a link to the whole article on your blog.  You could try doing a cross-post wherein you describe your services and at the end mention you have a new listing and provide the link to your ad in the Real Estate For Sale section.  If you have webinars or in-person seminars, be sure to advertise them here.  Be sure to put up ads in the Real Estate Jobs section for various jobs, even if you have no intention of hiring such people at the moment.  If and when you do need someone for any of those jobs, you’ll have loads of resumes on hand, so you’re hiring process will be much quicker.

Note if you try posting anything but a listing in the Real Estate Section For Sale area, it will get removed very quickly.  Another democratic aspect of Craig’s List is allowing users to flag posts that break the rules, and multiple flags will get your ad deleted.

Squeeze Pages

Always be looking for ways of building your prospect email database.  One way is by having a page on your website where you offer someone something specific and of substantial value, but the visitor must give you an email address to get it.  These are known as squeeze pages.  The idea with a squeeze page is making a proposition requiring an immediate yes or no answer from your prospect.  Making a specific value proposition with a call to action (IE give me your email address!) to get it (or not) is a more effective way of getting a person’s email address than just having them roam around your website.  So integrating your ad posting strategy with your squeeze pages can get you a steady stream of signups for your mailing list.

So the obvious question is: what can you offer them on the squeeze page?  Again, get creative and try different offerings.  You must offer them something they can’t readily find anywhere else.  Does your brokerage or company have any proprietary market research they’ll allow you to share with prospects?  Try enticing prospects with some of the juicier parts of this research, especially info on where the local real estate market is going.  So many real estate professionals offer a ‘free market appraisal’, so definitely don’t offer this since they can get this anywhere.  You have to prove your expertise on the local market first before anyone will ever care about any appraisal you could give them.

Read Part 5

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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