SME Advertising on Craigslist
ClickZ has an interesting article on the practice of advertising on Craigslist. Essentially this entails small businesses advertising products or services in the form of a Craigslist posting. I wrote about this for Search Engine Watch a few weeks ago.
Though Craigslist expressly forbids commercial intent in postings on some sections of the site (ClickZ article has more detail), many businesses have used this as a backdoor approach to having a Web site. These postings can basically be a free way to get a landing page; however, the page is precariously placed where new posts can push it down chronologically ordered listings (although the permalink remains the same).
Other free landing page offerings found useful by some SMEs include vFlyer, and those offered by search giants including Yahoo!’s free local listings product and Google’s hosted business pages. One challenge in expanding this market and getting SMEs to self provision is getting them to have a Web presence in the first place, as we’ve said before.
In addition to Craigslist, some SMEs have utilized social networks such as MySpace as a place to get free advertising, landing page hosting and the benefits of viral marketing. This trend should continue, and online models will keep developing that meet the demand for free landing page hosting and optimization.
