Skip to main content

Affiliate Marketing through Craigslist

Craigslist is an extensive online community which has a great deal to offer to users of this community. With approximately four billion page views per month it should come as no surprise that Craigslist can offer a wealth of financial opportunities to savvy Internet marketers who know how to capitalize on the popularity of this website. Affiliate marketing is one of the ways knowledgeable Internet marketers can expand on the profitability of their websites. Craigslist provides wonderful opportunities for both e-commerce website owners seeking affiliates to market for them as well as those who are in the business of affiliate marketing who are looking for new opportunities to market for another business. This article will provide an explanation of affiliate marketing and will also provide information on how Craigslist can be used to either find affiliates or affiliate opportunities. 

Conversion Optimization
What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially a marketing campaign in which the business owner only pays the affiliate based on performance. Unlike conventional marketing campaigns where the business owner pays for the advertising regardless of the results produced by the advertisements, in affiliate marketing the business owner only pays when a specific result is achieved. Affiliate marketing usually takes place in the following three forms:

* Pay Per Click
* Pay Per Sale
* Pay Per Lead

In a pay per click affiliate marketing campaign the affiliate places a coded link on their website and each time a visitor to their website clicks through the link to the sponsor’s website, the affiliate receives a sum of money. The amount of money they receive is based on an agreement between the sponsor and the affiliate. This amount can be cents, dollars or even a fraction of a cent. In a pay per sale campaign the affiliate is not compensated when the visitor clicks through to the sponsor’s website unless they also make a purchase when they click through this link. Again the amount of money the affiliate receives will depend on a pre-determined agreement and may be a specific amount or a percentage of the sale. In a pay per lead program the affiliate receives monetary compensation when a visitor clicks through the affiliate link and performs a specific action such as registering at the sponsor’s website or requesting additional information. 

Using Craigslist to Find Potential Affiliates

Business owners who are interested in finding affiliates to promote their website may use Craigslist for the purpose of finding these affiliates. It may seem logical to post affiliate opportunities in the jobs section of Craigslist but it is important to note this is against Craigslist’s job posting policies. Review of the policy for posting jobs on Craigslist will verify these requirements. Therefore those who are interested in finding affiliates will have to take advantage of other areas of Craigslist to find affiliates.

Visiting discussion forums related to your business may be one way to find potential affiliates. However, when using the discussion forums, care should be taken to avoiding spamming the discussion forums with links to sign up for your affiliate program. Such spamming techniques are likely to not be taken seriously by potential affiliates and may incur more severe penalties by Craigslist moderators. The best way to find potential affiliates is to make logical contributions to discussions and get to know other participants offline or to include a link to more information on your affiliate marketing program whenever you post.

Using Craigslist to Find Opportunities for Affiliates

Those who generate a profit from acting as an affiliate for others can find new affiliate opportunities through Craigslist. Although posting these opportunities on the job boards are prohibited it is possible for advertisements of this nature to appear either because the original poster was not aware of the restrictions or because they deliberately ignored the restrictions. These types of advertisements are likely to be removed when discovered but they may exist for a short time without being noticed.

Those who act as affiliates can also find potential leads by placing advertisements in the services section or the resumes section. They may also find potential leads by networking with those in the discussion forums.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Trending Posts on Digital Marketing Sparks

5 Free And Essential Marketing Tools To Ensure Success

Time and time again, it has been said that affiliate marketing is, without a doubt, the quickest and most efficient way of earning a living online.  There are a variety of reasons for this.  For starters, most affiliate programs do not require any enrollment fees.  There is no financial investment on the part of the affiliate.  Secondly, the affiliate is only tasked with pre-selling the affiliate merchant’s products.  The sales page, the payment processing, the digital delivery, and the post sales services shall be borne by the affiliate merchant. These shouldn’t mean that the affiliate should want in commitment, however.  As a matter of fact, an affiliate’s success wholly depends on how much commitment he could give the program, and how much effort he could invest to pursue such commitment.   Sometimes, this requires some monetary expenses.  Getting a web host, for example, as well as a domain name, would necessitate some cash to ...
Post a Comment
Read More »

What to Consider Before Posting a Video on YouTube

Are you interested in making a video to have displayed on YouTube?   With a large fan following, YouTube is a great place to make your own videos and get them seen.  With YouTube, it is not uncommon for one video to get as many as a few thousand hits, sometimes even more.  That is one of the main reasons why internet users, just like you, enjoy sharing their videos on YouTube; the exposure is nice.  Of course, the decision to upload your videos to YouTube is yours to make, but there are some important factors that you may first want to take into consideration. As it was previously mentioned, many YouTube videos end up getting thousands of hits.  While having a large number of viewers is nice, you never exactly know who is viewing your videos, as well as what their intentions are.  In today’s society, you need to be extremely careful; different people interpret things different ways.  While you may believe that you are just posting a si...
Post a Comment
Read More »

3 Reasons Why Adsense Is Essential For Content Sites

To know why Adsense is essential for your content sites is to know first how this works.  The concept is really simple, if you think about it. The publisher or the webmaster inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click. The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the...
Post a Comment
Read More »