Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

by Bryan Clark – EJ News

I don’t know about you, but I nearly kicked myself when I found out how much Craig Newmark was making for setting up an ultra-simplistic classified service called Craigslist. It rakes in millions per year for listing FREE classified ads. How did that one skip past me?

It all started for Craigslist in 1994 when Craig Newmark, a java programmer by trade, moved to San Francisco. Feeling isolated from the rest of the world, Craig began fiddling with the primitive version of Craigslist in mid-1994 hoping to create a social community for locals that would divulge information about pending local events, and provide a social environment for networking and posting classified ads.

There wasn’t a whole lot of growth out of the gates for Newmark or Craigslist, which was directly attributed to bad software. Newmark made the switch to Majordomo in 1995 after several months where the site lay dormant. This is where the growth began. To kick-start the site he began collecting business cards from everyone he knew in order to create a massive email database. This database would prove to be the turning point for the Craigslist that we have become accustomed to.

By 1999 the site had grown so much that Craig Newmark had to volunteer his flat on Cole St. to his “hobby” and it’s nine employees. The same year the site was declared a non-profit and turned down many requests from ravenous venture capitalist firms. Rather than taking the venture capital money, Newmark embarked on his own mission to keep his creation free for everyone (mostly… more on this in a minute), and to provide a friendly, trusting, and social community that was available to the masses.

Even without the Venture Capital money, and with the site being labeled as a non-profit, conservative estimates put Craigslists earnings at about 18 million a year. How is this possible for a simplistic site that is run from the same home that it started in and has only 23 employees? Some cities (New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) have to pay to post job listings. That’s it. That’s the whole formula! 18 million a year for charging companies to list job openings… brilliant!

However brilliant, Craigslist isn’t without opposition. Today it is catching more heat than ever for it’s “downfalls”. Prostitution, sale of stolen goods, fraud, and more have some calling for radical changes to the way Craigslist does business. Craig Newmarks response?

We cannot and will not police Craigslist. It’s an open community made to be shared by everyone. We assist law enforcement in any way we can when these situations come to our attention. But it’s not our place to decide what people can and can’t do… we just provide the place for them to do it.

Although Craig Newmark is still the face of Craigslist, he now owns less than 50% of the company. In 2001 he sold a stake of the company to the current CEO Jim Buckmaster. Another big (and recent) investor in Craigslist is eBay; who bought a 25% stake in the company in 2004.

You may recall I signed up for ReviewMe and began with a review of ReviewMe, taking advantage of their opening promotion to pay bloggers to help spread the word about the new service. My review was more of a discussion of the viability of bloggers being paid for reviews, which you can read here – Should Bloggers Accept Money For Reviews?

Since that review I have been offered six more paid reviews between this blog and the Small Business Branding blog, which I am in charge of as well. For the Small Business Branding reviews I contacted a few of the writers who blog there and offered them the reviews, but they were declined because of lack of familiarity with the subject matter of the review. In my case for the reviews ordered on this blog, I have either felt the subjects were not relevant enough for my readers, were too difficult to write about in an interesting manner or I simply couldn’t slot the review into my hectic writing schedule. You only get 48 hours to accept a review so you have to act quickly.

It’s worth noting that I have collectively turned down $750 USD in review revenue in a month’s time, which for some may not be much, but for me is still significant enough cash that I care, as I’m sure many other bloggers would too. The effectively hourly pay rate would probably have been around $100 an hour – not so bad. It’s also a sign that this service has some attention from advertisers, but I am curious how many reviews are making on to blogs and how much impact the reviews are having for the advertisers who purchase them. I’m sure the staff at ReviewMe are watching the search engine and publicity data closely for each completed review.

MySpace Bulletin Postings

There were a couple of reviews requested via ReviewMe that spiked my interest, but I turned them down for the reasons mentioned above. Yesterday I received a review request for a service that grabbed my attention, so I decided to accept the review. As per the ReviewMe policies I would like to let you know that the following is a sponsored review, but I think this is a service you may be interested in – in fact I may even test it out myself!

Social Media Marketing

Read the rest of this entry >>

I just finished listening to my most recent audio CD from Perry Marshall as part of my membership to his Renaissance Club (Membership is $29.95 a month and you get a bunch of great stuff thrown in when you sign up plus a monthly hardcopy marketing newsletter and audio CDs in the mail – see here for details).

The audio featured an interview with Stephen Arnold, a “Technology Analyst”. This guy is like a treasure trove of news about Internet companies. I don’t know how he keeps up with it all but he sure sounded off some interesting and very current commentary about the big boys – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

He discussed internal situations at all three companies and looked at how Google has a competitive advantage because it’s technology infrastructure is so cheap to create. Yet its technology could potentially be an Achilles heel if something ever goes wrong with it and the Google engineers can’t figure out what’s causing the problem because of how distributed their network is (a clustered infrastructure).

Perry and Stephen covered click fraud, what Google is planning for the future, why Google replicating Microsoft Office is not really “that important” because there are much bigger things at stake based on where Google is heading. They looked at advertising models on the web, how Google’s structure is full of geeks while at the other big web firms the geeks are the minority and the suits are the majority, and a whole host of other technology topics. It was a pretty cool listen for an technology geek like myself.

Google Own Economy

What really grabbed my attention was Stephen’s discussion of the potential future situation where Google operates a successful payments system (Google Wallet – Google’s answer to Paypal), Google Base (an online global marketplace – Google’s answer to Craiglist) and Google AdWords, and how all these systems could integrate together.

He painted a fictional scenario where a seller has an item that has little value in the USA but can garner a $100 price tag from a person in Sweden through Google Base. Upon making the sale Google asks the seller what they want to do with the cash – deposit it into their bank account, transfer the funds to AdWords credit or divide it into multiple purposes.

Google essentially becomes the one stop shop of online commerce even more so than it is now. It controls the financial services (flow of funds) and the marketplace (buyers, sellers, advertisers, publishers). No company in history has ever had that much control. Stephen stated that Google isn’t there yet but if it does happen the situation means one company will be very powerful but, hopefully, everyone wins and the whole process becomes quite seamless. Does power corrupt – we will have to wait and see!

I’m a huge fan of pondering the future of technology so I thoroughly enjoyed this CD. Did any of you other Renaissance Members have a listen to it? (I know there are a few who have joined up via this blog – at least 20).

You probably do this already – complete regular searches in Google for your key phrases and see how high you rank. It’s well known that the first three results are far and away the sites that get the most clicks. If you can get one of the top three results in your key terms then you will have more targeted visitors coming to your site. If you can get the first result, well that is even better. Of course all your competitors want to do the same.

One of the great things about Google is that is updates quite frequently. That little GoogleBot is busy 24/7 indexing the web to make sure everyone gets the best answers to their search questions. I’ve recently been playing with a technique that I thought might be worth testing and because Google has updated so quickly I’ve been able to get a result within a few weeks, and I got the perfect result – a number one ranking for one of the key phrases I was after. In fact this technique worked so well that I got the number one result for a related search phrase too!

A Quick and Easy Google SEO Trick

The technique I used was to place an ad in a particularly highly ranked classified site. In this case it was the famous site Craigslist. This site is the original free classifieds trading community that has become a world wide phenomenon driven by word of mouth. But that’s not important. What is important is that Craigslist is very popular and has a high PageRank, and most importantly you can place a free ad on the site anytime you want to. There are restrictions and limitations but it is easy to do, there is no reason you shouldn’t make an ad or two. It’s free promotion for your business that may happen to also help with your placement in Google SERPs.

Key Term: SERP – Short for Search Engine Results Page, the Web page that a search engine returns with the results of its search. The major search engines typically display three kinds of listings on their SERPs. Listings that have been indexed by the search engine’s spider, listings that have been indexed into the search engine’s directory by a human, and listings that are paid to be listed by the search engine.

A Practical Test

For testing I was after the search phrase “Thesis Proofreader” for my business site’s thesis proofreading service. I entered the term into Google and noticed that a Craigslist entry was receiving a high result, but the subject and keywords were not highly targeted. However they were good enough to get a third page result in Google for that term. I went in and created a very simple ad in Craigslist that directly targeted my keywords and a week or two later I had the number one result for that term in the Google global SERP. Also because I had used the term “Essay” in the subject of the ad I managed to secure the first page result for “Essay Proofreader” as well. Not bad hey.

A Bit Hit and Miss

I was surprised that it worked as well as it did but I know better than to expect that good a result every time. One important consideration in my test is that there just isn’t much competition for my search phrase; hence it was easy to get the top result. If your market is more competitive your result likely won’t be as good. Craigslist deletes ads in 45 days so it’s not a permanent result either, you will need to keep going back to recreate your ad if you want to keep the result.

You should be sure to check the current results in Google to see if any free listing sites like Craigslist are pulling up high results for your terms. If you have some advertising cash to spend, see if any pay-for-entry directories or classifieds are pulling high results too. If there are then there is a good chance that if you create a well targeted ad you will have positive results.

It’s important to do search research first so you know which city listings in Craigslist are pulling the high results. Ideally for an online business that can service the world you would have a Craigslist listing for every city, but that just may not be feasible and may break the Craigslist rules anyway. With search research you determine which city is pulling the best results for your terms, which could be caused by a whole number of reasons – backlinks to that particular Craigslist city, key terms – the amount of variables to consider are beyond human comprehension, let Google handle that and just take the results on face value.

Take the time to locate the best city based on current search results and place your entry in that city at the very least. If your business is specifically targeted at a geographical area then it is a good idea to do a comprehensive ad in your Craigslist city (if available) as well, it certainly won’t hurt.

It’s also important to note that there is nothing stopping competitors doing the same thing as you. The SEO war may spread into Craigslist and muddy the site, which would no doubt prompt a clampdown on commercial listings in Craigslist. Perhaps this technique is best for those operating in small or unique industries since it is unlikely that competitive action will ruin it for everyone.

Also note that Google itself is a completely uncontrollable variable in this equation. Google may decide that it will no longer count Craigslist entries. Maybe it will decide to only index for certain terms. Just accept that you can’t control what Google decides to do, but you can test to see what results you can get. Not trying guarantees no results.

It’s Too Easy Not to Test

There is no good reason to not use this technique. Classified sites want listings, it’s what they do. You may or may not achieve better search engine results but at the least there is a chance that a browser may stumble across your ad and come shopping at your business. It takes very little time and usually is free so get out there and start creating those free ads. Just remember to use the right keywords and don’t go overboard, you don’t want all your incoming links to come from free directories because in the long run Google may penalise your results.

Yaro Starak
Google Hunter

Note: The links in the article to Google search results were current for the date that this article was published. There is a very good chance that the Google search links no longer validate the test completed for this article because Craigslist only allows ads to stay online for 45 days and Google constantly refreshes search results. Regardless it is still a very good practice to advertise your business in free online classified sites – it’s free advertising, so well, duh! – Just pick the reputable and popular authority sites and get busy creating ads.