Are You Marketing Your Virtual Assistance Services On Craigslist?

I get a LOT of questions from new virtual assistants on how to market their services. Many people entering this industry simply do not have an advertising budget, nor do they know where to go to find clients. One place you can begin is on Craigslist.

Why? One excellent reason is that Craigslist is currently the 7th most visited website in the world. At this time, Yahoo is in the number one slot. Craigslist receives close to ten billion (BILLION!) views per months and far outstrips the reach of local newspapers. Since its launch in 1995 Craigslist has become the major online classified site for people who are looking for just about anything. Need a housekeeper? Place a free ad. Wanting to clean out the garage? Place a free ad.

One of the very important things that Craigslist offers is direct communication between buyer and seller. However, I do it feel it is best that you use a “junk” email rather than your business email for this type of communication. If you don’t already have a junk email that you use for subscriptions, online purchases, etc., I suggest that you get one from Yahoo or Hotmail and use it to keep spam out of your business email box.

When writing your ad, give some consideration to adding an image that let’s people know what you are offering. Do you have a great logo? Upload it. Images are free to post and easy to do. Images will also make your post stand out and people are far more likely to look at an ad that has a picture of some description.

One last tip on using Craigslist for marketing. If you have a website and are posting the link in your ad be sure to spell out your entire URL (Uniform Resource Locator).  In order for Craigslist to read your URL it must include this syntax: http://. If you leave this out, your link will not be clickable and you have just wasted a perfectly good opportunity to send traffic to your website or blog.

If you are currently using Craigslist as part of your marketing campaign I would love to hear some tips and tricks.