Our first effort to help our brick and mortar friend generate more online sales was to post on Craigslist.  We weren’t too interested in the Craigslist traffic (although that is a nice bonus).  Our thought was to post his popular products fairly regularly so that they shoot to the top of the Google SERPs for searches for that product.

So, I created 24 ads and decided to post one ad in each of the “big locations” that is linked directly off the Craigslist home page.  I chose these markets because they should have the most link juice because they are the fewest clicks from the home page and thus should show up higher in the Google SERPs and also be picked up quicker.

My client sells many variations of the same product.  The variation is significant and makes it a distinctly different product.  So, I made 24 variations of the same ad that just changed some text to note this variation.  My first ad was posted fine.  However, every ad after that one is tagged as a duplicate.

When creating my ads, I wanted the variations so that the name of the actual variant of this product would show in the title.  This helps the Google results.  To overcome the duplicate error, I am going to post one ad for this product and list each duplicate in the body.  I don’t know if we will rank as highly in Google, but it’s worth a try.

So, I am going to create 24 ads for different products and post one in each market.  Spreading them out among different markets will hopefully keep us from getting flagged as spam like 24 posts in the same market would.

I’ll update you later on the results.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10:12 am and is filed under Porch Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.