We’ve previously seen some of the changes that could happen in the world of online marketing in the year 2012. While it’s good to know about what will be new in online marketing, it’s even better to know how you can apply this in a more practical context, as in your own online marketing efforts. If you want to establish some better online marketing habits for this year, there are certain things that you should do. Of course, not all of these tips will apply to you as some might be specific to local businesses, e-commerce websites or affiliate websites. What you should do is to think about what will make sense in your own situation and how you can integrate it within your business. Of course, you should also develop your own methods, strategies and ideas if you’ve resolved to have better success with internet marketing during 2012.

• Establish a Plan

This is how you should start, no matter how simple your goals are. There’s no need to buy $1000 software that creates fancy graphs and flowcharts either. A simple plan drawn up with a pen and paper is sufficient. List your goals, as well as the methods that you intend to use in order to achieve them. Also, list some backup options or side goals that you would want to use if your main objectives don’t work out for whatever reason, or have already been achieved and you would like to do something more.

• Keep Track of Changes in the Online World

Anyone that does online marketing, whether as a primary occupation, a side job, a hobby or as an alternate to other means of marketing (print, radio ads, etc) should stay on top of the new things in the online world. This is because you could find some opportunities to take advantage of that you otherwise wouldn’t have even known existed! By reading online marketing related blogs, forums and news sites you can see if there’s something that could be useful for you, such as a new advertising network which has a unique business concept, an up and coming social networking site that is starting to grow, etc.

• Cut Costs Whenever You Can

Now this doesn’t mean that you should go for whatever is cheapest without regard to quality, but there are many ways that you can cut your business expenses online. For example, if you’re using a web host that charges you $25 a month for just 1 website and domain, you could find other hosting companies that can provide you with unlimited website hosting for just $5 a month and still be of high quality. The bottom line is that you need to look at the services that you’re using or are planning to use. Think about whether it would be possible to get the same functionality and quality for a less expensive price. This can be done by contacting your existing partners and providers to negotiate better rates, or comparing other companies online to see if they have something that would be right for your business.

Now that you know about the importance of good SEO, as well as inclusion in your email marketing, plus linking from your main site is important, you may be wondering if there are any other tips that you can apply to promote the blog you’ve just build and get a steady stream of interested visitors. There are a few final tips that I’m going to share with you regarding how to accomplish this easily. The key here would be integration with other marketing efforts, which will result in plenty of good traffic if you’re diligent and patient in your traffic building efforts.

Be Social

Social media is a topic that comes numerous times when discussing traffic generation techniques as well as internet marketing in general. This is not without good reason: the majority of people visit social networking sites, so the traffic on these sites is already there. You just need to direct it to your blog. The two best examples in this case would be using Facebook. When you post a new article in your blog, share it on Facebook. Readers will see the title of the post and a summary, where they can click through to your blog to read more if interested. For Twitter, just send out a Tweet about the update and include a link.

Also, don’t forget to include buttons so that users can like and share your posts on their social networking profiles, thus giving you exposure to their friends and followers, generating a potential for more traffic in the process.

Use RSS

RSS feeds are a good way to get people to follow your blog in a way similar to following someone on Twitter or Facebook. When they subscribe to your RSS feeds, people will be able to see in their browser if you’ve made a new blog post. If it’s something that interests them, they will then click through to your blog and read the article you just posted.

Be Patient

Building a steady amount of traffic to a blog is something that takes time and patience. It’s quite unlikely that you will receive thousands of daily visitors after just taking one of the actions presented here. But keep posting good content and keep using the techniques shown here and you will soon start seeing a few visitors on your blog. This can grow in time, you will just need to be patient and continue blogging and actively taking efforts to generate more interest and thus more traffic on the blog you’ve built.

Be Creative

You’re not limited to what was presented here when it comes to getting traffic. Think up of your own strategies to bring in high quality visitors and read up more about things such as social media, SEO and traffic generation to blogs. You may discover some new methods and techniques that you will want to try, which may very well be the solution that you were looking for to finally get the amount of visitors you wanted.

Now that you’ve created your blog and added some useful and informative content to it that is sure to keep your visitors interested in it, you may still have one issue: how to get more visitors to see your blog. We all know that in the online world, quality traffic to any website equals more money for the webmaster. But unless you send your blog to one friend and it suddenly goes viral (which can happen, though is very rare), you will need to take some action yourself in order to promote your blog to your targeted audience. This isn’t complicated and it simply requires that you follow a few tried and tested internet marketing tips. Here are some of them:

Establish Good SEO Practices

If you have a blog, then you’re already at a slight advantage over other sites, since search engines such as Google tend to love blogs. But you would still need to take some actions to give your blog “better SEO”. The first thing would be to think about the inclusion of targeted keywords in your blog posts. Optimize your posts for your targeted keywords by maintaining a density of around 1% to 2%. Try not to over do it, as it would look like you’re just keyword stuffing. Also, don’t force keywords in phrases where they would make no sense. Search engine algorithms have been updated recently to detect such things and you will end up being penalized for having nonsensical phrases in your posts that are obviously designed to boost your rankings rather than give your readers some useful content. There are a few plugins that will help you analyze the SEO qualities of your blog posts, for example SEO Pressor for WordPress. Use them to your advantage.

Link to it From Your Main Site

If you already have some steady traffic flowing to your main website, then including a link to your blog can be a logical thing to do. If you’ve just launched your blog, then including a mid size square button on your site or making an announcement on it can build some interest in your blog rather quickly and bring your some much needed traffic to it. After all, if your site visitors don’t know that your blog exists, they won’t visit it and will just stay on your website.

Announce it in your Email Campaigns or Link to it in your Email Signature

If your blog is new, having an entry about it in one of your email messages that you send to your mailing list is recommended. You already know the importance of linking to your main website in your messages by including a link to it in your signature at the bottom of the email. You can do the same thing with your blog in your subsequent communications to your customers. Of course, if you’ve made a new and interesting blog post, you can also make this the topic of one of your email newsletters. Rather than copying your blog post in your message, link to the relevant post on your blog.

One complaint that many online marketers have is that they don’t have the time to do all the things that they would want to in a day. We all know that being an internet marketer is sometimes not easy. Certain tasks, such as creating landing pages, writing articles, creating graphics and logos, etc. could be quite time consuming. However, there are ways around this which would allow you to save a lot of time and focus on your marketing efforts, rather than to get bogged down in the technicalities of doing the job.

The great thing about internet marketing is that there are many tasks which can be outsourced to others for a relatively low amount. You also don’t have to maintain a permanent staff on hand like in many other businesses (unless you actually want to). Most of the tasks related to running an online business can be outsourced to freelancers that you can find in online forums or on freelancing sites such as Fiverr or Odesk. Here are certain things that are easy to outsource:

* Content creation

If you do article marketing, or have a blog that you need updated regularly, you can have this part outsourced to a content writer that can deliver the content that you need based on your specifications.

* Landing page and website design

If you are an affiliate marketer, you probably run a few different campaigns at the same time. It can be quite hard to find time to design all the landing pages for your advertising campaigns. You can outsource this task as well. It is possible to have a freelancer with experience in online marketing and web design create landing pages for your offers based on your specifications, including lead capture boxes or affiliate links, etc.

* Graphic design

If you need graphics, logos, etc. designed, outsourcing the process can be an excellent idea. Sure, there are many programs out there such as Photoshop and GIMP that allow you to create your own graphics for your marketing materials, however learning how to use them to get professional looking results can be quite difficult if you don’t have much experienced and aren’t very skilled in the graphic arts. You can find people who can, for example, design a logo for your site, or edit a picture in Photoshop for just $5 on many freelancing websites.

* General administrative tasks

You can get a “virtual assistant” to help you with many of the aspects of running an online business. This can include things such as responding to customer inquiries, uploading new pages and videos to your web server or to various sharing sites, updating your social media pages with your recent promotions, etc. Having a virtual assistant usually doesn’t cost that much, depending on how many hours of work you would need done by them every week. On various freelancing sites, it is possible to hire someone for less than $10 an hour.

Using article marketing is a good way to drive some traffic to your sites, as it works in two different ways. First, you can receive traffic from people who are viewing your article and then decide to click through to continue on to your site. You also have some SEO benefits from it, as every time you include a link to your site, it counts as a one way backlink which can be very useful in boosting your search engine ranking. But are there some things you should do to increase the efficiency of your article marketing efforts? Definitely. Here are some of them:

• Use Only Unique Content

In most cases, article directories only accept content that is unique and has never been posted anywhere before. It doesn’t matter if you wrote it, or if it has been posted on a site that you own. Your content needs to be unique. Search engines frown on duplicate content and so do visitors. If someone starts reading the article and notices that they have already seen the exact same information some where else, they will probably just move on to something else and not bother continuing.

• Avoid Making too Many “Salesy” Articles

There are way too many fake “reviews” of online products being posted all over the place and this is something that seems to be especially popular when promoting internet marketing related stuff such as e-books, membership sites and courses. The articles usually go like this: “Product X is a SCAM!! Arrghh!!! Oops… Actually, It’s Not, Buy It!!!!!” See, the thing is these might have been effective 6 years ago or so… but not anymore. The problem is that there are simply too many of them and the reader will automatically see that your “review” is completely bogus and you are just trying to make money by selling your own, or an affiliate product.

Articles that you post should always include useful information about your niche. For example, if you are promoting an “alternative energy” guide, you could post something about the different kinds of ways you can generate alternative energy and their pros and cons. Or, you could go into detail about how a certain method works and then explain why you think that it would be suitable as a solution for someone looking for an alternative energy generator for their home. Believe me, this is much, much more likely to result in someone visiting your site and buying the product you are promoting, as opposed to simply going on and on about how great the ‘ACME Green Energy Super Guide’ is and why everyone on the planet should drop everything that they’re doing and rush to buy it. Keep the sales pitch for your website. If a user has clicked through to it, then it means they are seeking more information about what you just told them in the article and now would be a good time to propose some products to buy.

Previously, we have seen some tips on how you can test the dropshipper that you intend to use and the fact that it is much better to have more than one dropshipper to do business with. But how do you find a good dropshipper? There are a few ways to do this. Here are some of them:

• Look through dropshipping websites

There are some website out there such as DH Gate, TradeTang and Alibaba that are a real treasure trove for all kinds of merchandise. Anything like clothing, electronics and jewelry can be found there. The good thing about these sites is that they are mostly aimed at business owners who are looking to acquire merchandise rather than at individual consumers. This means that you can easily find dropshippers or buy merchandise in bulk. This is the good thing. But the bad thing about these sites is that they also contain many scammers who will either rip you off and not send anything, or ship something different than what they advertise.

But there are ways to protect yourself from that. Obviously, you can apply what we covered in the previous article which would be to make a test order first to see if they deliver. But you should also check the seller’s feedback on the site. See how long they have been active and how many positive comments they have from others who have done business with them. Also, look to see whether they have a website and phone number. While this is not a guarantee of safety, it does make it more likely that you will be dealing with a legitimate supplier rather than a scammer. If possible pay with PayPal or a credit card and avoid sending money through Western Union or Money Gram, as these services are preferred by scammers due to the fact that the transaction cannot be reversed.

• Look at internet marketing forums

Most “make money online” forums will have a section that is dedicated to eBay selling or dropshipping. Check it out to see what others are saying. You may find the contact information for some good suppliers, complete with comments from forum members who have used them and were happy with their transaction. You might even find some members of the forum who are suppliers for a wide variety of merchandise and who can drop ship to your eBay buyers.

Dealing with someone from a forum can be safer than dealing with a seller on Alibaba, as the supplier will often be well known in the forum and have members who can vouch for him. But this is not a guarantee that everything will go well. Don’t forget to use common sense when you are looking for a dropshipper, no matter where you find him. Always try to check their reputation out before you decide to use them as a supplier for your eBay online business. If you are careful, then you will reduce the chances of getting scammed when doing business with one.

A recent survey taken in the United States by a technology consulting firm gives some very interesting figures about the use of internet marketing among small business owners. Based on the results, the majority (close to 80%) of small business owners had a website for their business. Of those that didn’t the majority were planning to create one in the coming year. This result is really not something that is surprising. It has been said time and time again that creating a website is beneficial for any business owner, even those that run a very small local enterprise. It makes them easier to find by their prospective clients, many of who exclusively use the internet in order to locate a business that they want to use.

While this first statistic was not especially surprising to anyone, what followed next may raise a few eyebrows. Of all business owners that had an online presence, nearly 40% were not entirely satisfied with the results that it was bringing them. Some were not happy with the way their website looked and wanted one that was more professional and more attractive to customers. Some others had a website and were quite happy with the way it looked and worked, but they were not convinced that it was doing them any good, as they did not see their website bringing them the amount of customers that they needed. It has also been said that small business owners (outside of the technology or marketing sectors) did not have much knowledge of how internet marketing worked and only a minority of them (14%) wanted to spend some time studying techniques to make their site better and to figure out how to deploy betting marketing efforts such as SEO and other internet advertising, in order to get more visitors to their website.

Ok, this maybe news and it is always nice to know some stats… but what does this mean to internet marketers? The bottom line is that there is a wide open market of local business owners who would want to use your services. Some of them want better websites. Some want to do some SEO on their site to get a better ranking on search engines. Others would want to use internet advertising in order to bring in more customers but are not sure which kind to use and are hesitant to buy ads on their own.

For those of you who are just learning internet marketing, or who are doing something else (CPA, Clickbank, eBay sales, affiliate stuff, etc.) and don’t get the results you want, this is a great opportunity. What you need to do is simple: learn how to create simple, yet functional websites. Learn how to optimize pages for SEO and build backlinks. Learn about the different kinds of online ads (business directories, classified ads sites, PPC, etc) and how they work. Compile a list of tutorials and learning materials (there are hundreds of videos, articles and blog posts on these topics, all free) and study them for about 2 weeks. Then you can start targeting local business owners and providing them your services as an internet marketer.

Of course, having your members do your promotion for you is a very good strategy when you run a membership site, due to the fact that it is free and would actually not require any marketing efforts on your part. All you would need to do is to create a decent membership site and give your members a few incentives to promote it for you. But there are a few more free methods for promoting your membership site. Let us examine them here:

• Social Media

Again, social media. This is something that is talked about a whole lot in internet marketing circles. Of course, there is one big reason for that: it works. Think of it, if it was ineffective, there wouldn’t be thousands of guides, forum posts, etc. about it. There are two things that you would need to do if you are promoting your site on social networking websites:

• Create a page for it

Facebook lets you create a fan page for a business. You should do so for your membership site. Give a bit of information about it and make a nice looking, but not too pushy, sales page as well. People can also “like” your page. The more people like it, the more popular it becomes.

• Make a post about it

With Facebook, you can post on your wall that you’ve created a new site and invite your Facebook friends to check it out. On Twitter, you can send out a Tweet with the link to your website included in it.

But to make your social media use even more effective, consider creating a promotion for those who access your site through social media. A discount on the membership price works very well, but there are also other things you can do to add value such as adding an additional product, or giving a free personal consultation with you, etc.

• Email marketing

If you already have a mailing list, email marketing could be an excellent way to market your new site. This would work even better if you have released products before that were liked by your subscribers. All you would need to do to make use of email marketing would be to send out an email to your subscribers and let them know about your membership site. If your list is made up of people who have already purchased products from you, then they will be more likely to join your site.

Another way to build a list would be to release a free product and give it to people in exchange for opting in to receive emails for you. That would allow you to build a list of subscribers who are interested in internet marketing course products and might want to join your new membership site. While building a list from zero would take a bit of time, it is nonetheless a very good marketing method and something that you can consider doing alongside other promotion methods such as forum posting or social media promotion.

When you create a membership site, you need to promote it in order to get people to subscribe to it and thus make some money from it. We have already seen how using internet marketing forums could get you the members that you need to your site. But what about using your existing members to promote the site for you? This is indeed quite possible.

If you run a quality site that is very helpful and informational, many people will tell their friends about it and encourage them to join if they want to learn a few things about online marketing. Indeed, word of mouth marketing can be quite a powerful tool. But if you want to be even more successful with it, then you will need to give incentives to your members so that they recruit others to join. This can be done by various means such as:

• Giving a discount to the member being referred. If someone has been referred by an existing member of the site, they would get a discount on their first month’s membership.
• Creating a contest. By doing so, you can offer a prize to the top 3 people who refer others to your site. This will encourage members to get their friends to sign up for it.
• Giving a special bonus once someone has referred a certain amount of people to the site. This could be a product that you own, or maybe a one on one coaching session with you.

By doing these things, you will encourage members of your site to refer others to your site in greater number than what you would have ever though possible before. But if you want members to tell others about your site, there are also a few other things you need to remember:

• Run a good quality site. This means having useful and informative content on it. It also means that your site must be easy to navigate and function well. Nobody will like a membership site that goes down every few minutes and will definitely not want to recommend this kind of website to their friends.
• Update your site on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean that you will need to add new content every single day, however you should give your members the impression that your site is updated regularly. If members see that your site looks “dead” with no new information added to it in quite a while, then they are less likely to stay members and even less likely to encourage others to join.

Remember, that one of the best advertising tools would be word of mouth referrals. This works well in almost any business and it will definitely work well if you run a membership site. All that you need to do is to give your members the necessary incentives to promote your website to others and chances are, they will actually go ahead and do it.

Besides quality web hosting, there are certain other things that you would need in order to run your membership site. These are: a content management system and a payment gateway. Once again, you need to make the right choice when selecting these two, as they will be very important to running your site. Here is a closer examination on how to choose them:

• Content management system

Basically, it will be the software that resides on your server and will be powering your entire membership site. This will allow you to add content and manage your site. There are hundreds of different membership site systems out there. Some are commercial, while others are open source systems. The best way to select a good content management system would be to first read some information about this. You can find this in many webmaster and internet marketing forums such as Digital Point and the Warrior Forum.

Basically, some points that you should compare the various systems on are:

• Security – Is this system vulnerable to any kinds of malicious attacks and are there any known security vulnerabilities affecting it?
• Functionality – Does the system give you all the features that you would need to manage your site well. Is it able to be fully integrated with payment systems? This will allow members to be given access right away after they join.
• Flexibility – Are there any limitations on how much content and what kind of content you can add to your site? Is there a maximum number of users you can add?

• A Payment System

This will allow your membership site to take payment from members and can be fully integrated with your content management system in order to activate accounts as well as deactivate those that did not renew their membership.

The payment system that you use will process credit card payments and allow you to receive the proceeds of your membership site subscriptions. The most common payment processing system available right now is of course PayPal. Many membership site owners use it because of its popularity and the fact that it offers many API features that can integrate very well with the majority of content management systems out there. PayPal also supports recurring payments, meaning that your subscribers will not have to pay manually every month. Rather, they will be charged automatically unless they themselves cancel their subscription to your site.

Although PayPal is the most popular system right now, there are other payment processors available too. Some examples are MoneyBookers and Plimus. It is also recommended that you use more than one payment processor, in case someone has problems using one. Creating a business account is free and integrating multiple payment processors is not that difficult, all you would need to do is to add the right code to your membership site. This could also be convenient for users, as for example someone might not have money in their PayPal account but might have some in their MoneyBookers account and would want to use that to join your site rather than paying with a credit card.

When it comes to creating their own products, you can see a lot of online entrepreneurs creating an ebook or a more complete course that comes with videos and several bonuses. Of course, these are all good ideas and can be very profitable. The issue, however, is that if you use this business model, you would only make one sale from each customer and will have no residual income from them. Sure, you can get them on your mailing list and try to sell them some of your other products or promote a new product that you have created to them, but this will require additional marketing efforts on your part. Creating a membership site will eliminate these issues. There are several advantages that creating a membership site has:

• Recurring income

Instead of just making a sale once, you will be able to get a monthly fee from your buyers. As long as you update your site on a regular basis and thus provide them with interesting and new content every month, they will stay. In fact, some of them could stay for many years as long as they find your site to be useful for them. This is much better than simply making a “one off” sale.

• Better perceived value from your buyers

Many people have seen a lot of ebooks, especially in the internet marketing niche. Plenty of them have bought these ebooks before and have been disappointed with their content. However, there are a lot of buyers out there who see membership sites as more valuable and useful to them than just a course or a guide. This is because the sites often have a collection of tools, several sections of learning material, a discussion forum, etc.

• Increased marketing and money making opportunities

With a membership site, as opposed to a stand alone product, you have more opportunities to sell to people, especially once they become members. Sure, having a mailing list can be very good and can make you successful. But the issue here is that plenty of ebook buyers are already on the mailing list of every guru (real or wannabe) in town. They get so many of these emails each day that they might read one or two and ignore the rest. But if they become a member, they will pay a lot more attention to what you have to say.

So if you are promoting another product, whether it is an affiliate offer or one that you created, they are a lot more likely to take interest in it. Also, if your methods involve the use of services, like web hosting or online phone services, you can become an affiliate of these and include your affiliate link in the relevant section of your membership site content. This gives you an even greater opportunity to make some money from your buyers.

Of course, setting up and managing a membership site will require a bit more work than just selling an ebook. But it is not impossible to do and remember that in terms of profits, it can be a very beneficial activity for you.

In the internet marketing world, creating your own digital product and selling it is seen as a profitable venture to take part in. In fact, there are millions of ebooks and guides on different topics that are being sold each year. Many online entrepreneurs have seen this and want a share of the action. Many of them simply create an ebook which explains either various methods of making money on the internet or focuses on a specific topic, such as Adsense, CPA, site flipping, etc. While this is a good way to start, there are some additional things that you can do to give more value to your products in the eyes of your buyers and thus make them more likely to be interested in buying them. Remember, the buyers can’t really see what’s inside your product when they are on the sales page, so they will base their buying decision mainly on the perceived value that they see in your product overall.

Now how do you increase the value of a product? Here are some good ideas:

• Add bonuses

This can be an additional, smaller ebook on a related topic that will be useful to the buyer.

If the method that your guide is teaching involves building a website, you can include things such as PLR website templates or graphics as part of the whole package. You can also include various other web building tools too.

The bonus doesn’t have to be in the form of a “product” either. Another thing that you can include is a service. It could be in the form of a free one on one coaching session with you. Or it could be something like a few months of free hosting or a free domain name. Basically, anything that will make the buyer see added value in your item.

• Separate your ebook into several parts

This will give the impression that your guide is bigger and contains more content, while previously these were all chapters in one big ebook. You can present these as separate, smaller guides that inform the reader about something specific. The buyer will feel as if they are getting many ebooks for the price of one and might see your offer as more valuable to them.

• Create a video course

You can convert your ebook completely into a video or add a few videos that explain something specific that is taught in your guide. There are some buyers who prefer watching a video over reading an ebook. Others will see the inclusion of a video part in your product as an assurance that it is more detailed and gives easy to follow, step by step instructions. While creating a video takes more time and requires more effort than simply writing, it can be very well worth it in the end, as it can have a very positive impact on the amount of sales that you make from the product you are selling.

There is a lot of talk in internet marketing communities about using traffic from Craigslist to publish affiliate or CPA offers. While it is possible to do so, there are certain practices to avoid. Here are some things not to do when using Craigslist.

• Don’t use it for offers where it is not allowed

CPA networks are aware of the fact that some marketers use Craigslist. Some networks ban this type of promotion outright, some forbid it for certain offers, while certain allow it as long as you follow some rules set forth by them. If you do not want to get banned from the network and possible lose the earnings that you have made, you should comply with any rules that they have. When in doubt, contact your affiliate manager just to be sure.

• Don’t simply put in your affiliate links and banners all over the place

Craigslist is mainly designed for local businesses and individuals to post ads and not a place to spam affiliate offers. Any blatant affiliate links and offers will be flagged down rather quickly by users of the site. Simply put, do not direct link from a Craigslist post to an affiliate offer. Your post will probably be gone within minutes anyways.

• Don’t post in the wrong category just to get traffic

If you post an ad in a category that is irrelevant, it will get flagged down almost instantly. The bottom line is, keep your postings to categories where they are relevant if you want them to have any chance of staying up.

• Don’t attempt to trick or mislead people

This is one of the biggest things not to do when using Craiglist. While it was quite popular with black hat marketers about 2 years ago, Craigslist, affiliate networks and merchants have all come down on this and took action to prevent it from happening.

Now, what exactly is “misleading” people? Some examples would be: posting a fake job offer, telling people that they got the job, but that they simply need to complete a biz opp offer to “verify their info”. Or putting up an ad for an apartment and then telling people that they need to pass a credit check, then sending them over to a credit report affiliate offer. One other trick that was popular consisted of offering people a job and then telling them to buy a video conferencing software from an affiliate offer as the “training” for the job would be done remotely. In all cases, this is misleading people, as the apartment or job that was promised to them simply does not exist.

If you do this, soon enough, somebody will complain to the merchant and say “Hey! You promised me a job if I signed up on your site! How come nothing happened?” and you will simply end up banned.

Craigslist is a popular and free online classified ads site. While it certainly isn’t as popular as say Google or Facebook, it is still one of the most popular sites on the internet, with millions of users from all around the world visiting it. This has given online marketers a lot of ideas on how to monetize all of this traffic. Unfortunately, Craigslist is not what it used to be when it comes to internet marketing and you have black hat marketers to thank for that. What some people did went far beyond just spamming CPA offers to downright lying to people such as promising them jobs or mortgages if they complete a CPA offer for a credit report or a biz opp. As a response to that, Craigslist has upped its security mechanism and has even posted warning in many of its sections that specifically mention affiliate marketing.

But this doesn’t mean that is is completely useless to online entrepreneurs. There are a few ways to use it for your online marketing efforts. Here are some of them:

• Promoting your e-commerce site

If you have a website that sells merchandise, then you can still use Craigslist to promote it. For example, if you sell clothes or electronics in your online shop, then you can post an ad in the proper section of Craigslist and get some traffic to it that way. Make sure to post in the right section, or your ad will be flagged down rather quickly. Also, don’t post the same ad in different cities at the same time. While there is nothing wrong with a global e-commerce site posting ads in multiple cities, remember that Craigslist is not mainly aimed at internet marketers, but rather for small, local businesses to post ads in the city where they operate.

• Providing services

If you offer some services that can be done over the internet, then you can use Craigslist to get some business too. For example, if you create websites for businesses and individuals, then you can put an ad in the right section to promote that. There are plenty of services that you can do over the internet and have your clients pay your by Paypal or another payment system. Some examples include: translation, writing, graphic design, flier/advertising design, promotional video creations and a whole lot more. If you want to appear more professional and therefore more trustworthy when providing these services, you can always create a simple “business” style website that gives details of what you do and your prices, as well as get a toll free phone number to get your clients to reach you. You can get one for a few dollars a month and then forward it to your cell phone, or just leave it to always go to voicemail. Here’s a tip to get more sales: put a special discount or coupon code in your ad and tell readers to mention it when they order.