I recently got in touch with a high school classmate of mine. Barb Girson is an International Direct Selling expert, trainer and coach who recently set sail with her own business called mysalestactics.com. We had a few emails back and forth and an interesting conversation about where we have been and what works in promoting out businesses.

I mentioned to her that Craigslist has been one of the best tools that I use to find new customers. Barb asked me about how I get it to work for me and also asked me an interesting question, “Would you consider this a networking strategy?”

My first thought that no it was not, but after pondering the question for a while I have decided that it is. I’ve met new people through the use of it and have used my networking rule of trying to offer something of value (free information) without expecting anything in return, so I guess it could be called networking.

Her next request was for me to describe the process that I used for this. I decided to write this post about it because I believe what Scott Ginsberg says “Writing is the key to all wealth“.

There are two methods that I use to promote my business on Craigslist:

First, I have written a series of advertisements that I rotate through several cities in my region in the “computer services” section. It is important to follow Craiglist’s rules by not posting too often and only posting these ads in the appropriate section.

I have seen many ads for different services posted in the “web design jobs” or “computer gigs” sections. Since these sections are for people looking to buy web services these ads usually get flagged and removed pretty quickly, but more importantly they are not read by the people who are actually in the market for their services. I know that personally I would never hire someone who didn’t understand or care that this was not the correct section to post their ads.

Second,  the “web design jobs” and “computer gigs” sections are the ones that I need to be reading to find people advertising jobs that I can do. To read those I use RSS. Every Craigslist page has it’s own RSS feed and I can subscribe to those just like any blog and get these ads almost as soon as they appear in my feedreader. For that I use Thunderbird another great free Open Source tool. Not only do I get my email, Thunderbird brings all of my RSS feeds into it as well and I can read them just like my regular email.

Even though there is quite a bit of Spam on Craigslist using Thunderbird I can still monitor many Craigslist cities, have all the post sent to one folder and go through 30 or 40 posts in a couple of minutes. I currently subscribe to two feeds in well over 30 Craigslist cities and still only spend about ten to fifteen minutes a day working on it. I probably actually answer five to six ads a day and I have a general outline that I use for this. I try to personalize each reply to the individual city and request, but here’s the basic outline:

Hello,
My name is Jim Lillicotch and I am replying to your Craigslist ad.
I live in Pittsburgh PA and have customers in (local city) and many other areas that are very satisfied.

For information about my business, I invite you to tour my blog:

• seo
• promotion
• email
• viral
• management
• security
• do it yourself

Feel free to comment on any posts that strike your interest and contact me with any questions

Thank you for your consideration.

Jim Lillicotch
Lillicotch.com

I have found that people posting these jobs on Craigslist tend to be bombarded with responses to their ads, but if I get a reply I try to find out exactly what their job entails and offer to be as helpful as I can. I have foud several customers this way and also a few good friends.

It’s finally going to happen. As I wrote in my post Pittsburgh Happenings – The ‘Burgh Sees All, Pittsburgh PA is going to install cameras everywhere.

The manufacturers claim that they help solve and prevent crimes. Well, of course they say they do, they’d be foolish to say anything else, they want to sell these systems, but prevent crimes? I’m not so sure. I am sure that as in the past whenever something good comes from this the cameras will get the credit even if it was just traditional investigation that got the job done.

“You can zoom three blocks away and read a business card or a license plate,” said Darrin Lipscomb, president of Avrio Group, a Maryland firm that won a competition to be the city’s surveillance camera vendor. “We’re going to have very sophisticated viewing stations that will allow any number of people to view these cameras in any number of ways.”

I want to know who is watching the watchers? and what is going to happen to the data? Even though the City assures me the data will go away I know that these days data never truly goes away. It’s much too easy and cheap to save, store and move around.

I keep reading that crime has gone down (but it’s too early to tell for sure). The studies that I have seen haven’t shown any real drop, the crime just moves to where the cameras aren’t. In the end I think that this money would be better spent on something that will really make me more secure everyday, like more detectives or fixing the potholes and making the roads that I drive every day safer.

City to go high-tech with security cameras soon

When I first started this business I had some business cards made.
I didn’t give it much thought and threw them together pretty quickly.

I’ve been talking about new cards for quite a while now and one of the members of Business Leads Exchange Networking Group that I attend is a graphic designer and illustrator named Dan Szwedko. I know Dan pretty well from the meetings and I like his work. What I thought I’d do is to get a fresh perspective on my card design.

One of Dan’s promotion ideas is that if you’re only printing on one side of your business card you’re also wasting valuable advertising space that you already own. He has a special on two sided business cards.

I gave Dan my logo, my company colors and the text that I wanted on my card. Those of you who read this blog know that I like black text on a white background. It’s always the easiest to read.

I let Dan know this as well and being an artist Dan wanted to add some color to my card. I told him to use my colors any way that he wanted.

He sent me this back…

I must admit that I think the color definitely gives it some style and looking at it I realized that if we flipped the gradient background and put the tan on the top, all of my contact info will still be black on white.
Same with the back.

I really like the ghosted logo Dan added on the back so I kept that and added a bit more text.
I am very happy with the final product.

If you would like to take advantage of my freind Dan’s special of 1000 two sided cards for $47.95, plus a flat fee of Only $25.00 for layout. Just visit his site dsgraphics.net. It’s quality work at a great price and he will even include Free Shipping!

When designing a new site I usually don’t write the content. My feeling is that no one knows your business like you do, but I will offer some help if needed.

One of my new customers had this question, “When I re-write my first page, would it help to include any information so the search engines will find it?” I replied with some basic information that, I hope, was to their point.

Absolutely! You want to place your the keywords or search terms that you want to be found for on your page. Every page should be writen with this in mind, although your human visitor should be your first priority.

Keywords can and should be groups of words. Action words, not just “widgets”, but “buy widgets” or “buy widgets in Pittsburgh PA”. Without the quotes, of course. Using multiple words like this will get you better rankings for those terms than just using single, more generic terms that are much harder to rank well for. It will also get you more qualified visitors that are more likely to want to buy what you have to sell.

You also want the most important keywords in the headlines. You want a main headline for the page and a smaller headline for each paragraph or section that you write. Have your keyword once in the headline and once or twice (no more) in the body text.

Use these keyword suggestion tools to search for popular search terms. No sense optimizing your pages for something no one is searching for. You also want to pick terms that are relevant to your business. Why have visitors come to your site that are not interested in what you have to offer?

There is much more to know about this, but I think it’s a pretty good start.

I live in Pittsburgh PA and have all of my life.

This morning I heard news that The ‘Burgh wants to install cameras everywhere.

Then this afternoon I check the blogs that I like and see Bruce Schneier has posted London’s Security Cameras Don’t Help. There is always lively discussion on his blog.

I hate to see this camera thing coming to be, but they are already on the highways, at traffic lights and I suppose it’s inevitable in this age.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic.

In the end it’s probably going to be Google that does a better job with the technology. They already have Street View.

I believe that there are more proven methods of crime prevention which would make better use of the money.
Although it may be one of those deals where you have to spend the money on this project or lose it, I’m not sure.

I wonder about things like…
What would happen if the system was hacked without detection, from outside or inside and used to commit crimes?
Good movie plot, no?

So you are designing your site and you want to be found on the search engines for certain keywords. You are not going to be found for these words if they are not in your headlines and main content. So what keywords do you choose? You want them to be relevant to your site, but you also want words that will bring some kind of action from your visitors. That could be to make a purchase, click on an ad, sign up for a newsletter, or maybe request more information. Why would you pick keywords that don’t do anything for you?

The time to pick keywords it before you start to write your content. Nothing sounds more artificial that when an author tries to stuff keywords into some text that’s already written. So you want to pick keywords and then write content around them, but what keywords should you pick? That is a million dollar question and it’s been my experience that single keywords are generally less effective than a multi word keyword that more closely relates to what you have to offer. Finding visitors for “pants” probably won’t work nearly as well for you as “men’s dress pants” or even “men’s dress pants Pittsburgh PA”. Longer strings of keywords in addition to possibly being more effective towards your end goal tend to be much less competitive on the search engines so it’s much easier to get to the top. Common misspellings can be good, too (mens dress pants) as many people will type these in. This can be true if you are looking to optimize your site for the search engines to find you or if you are want to buy keywords for a marketing campaign.

Here’s a good post by Jake Matthews called “The Most Overlooked & Affordable Keyword Research Method” that may help you get started.

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