Free Classifieds on the Internet - Whoa!
I used to have an office one upon a time (I work from a home office nowadays) and the running joke in my office as that if you ask Mark how to cure world’s hunger or find peace in the Middle East – his answer would be, “ Lets run a classified ad and see who calls”.
I was simply, in a good way, obsessed with running classified ads and testing different things that popped in my mind. Instead of sitting and wondering whether somebody was looking – I would run a classified ad in Detroit News and see if somebody was interested
So you can safely say that I like newspapers and I like running classified ads in the local newspapers – Detroit News, Birmingham Eagle, Oakland Press – why bother with one? Lets run an ad in all of them.
But lately I feel like I am cheating on my first love of newspaper advertising; because with every passing week I am finding it harder and harder to justify the cost of running local area newspapers when I can go online and run classified ads for free and this is a very BIG factor – I can actually see what ads are working and which one are not.
I am talking about dozens of free online classified websites whose number is only going to increase as times go by. Sites like Craig’s List for Michigan, Edgeio, DormItem, Google Base allow sellers to list anything they want to sell – real estate, housing items, cars, job postings, and personal ads – for free. They let you search by keywords, by area – in Michigan for example you have Craig’s List for all the major metro areas: (Screen Shot down below)
I have been fooling around with them for all kinds of things – and the results are so good that I cannot believe that I ignored these sites for so long. It is getting harder and harder for me to pull up my credit card and let Detroit News whack my card for $100 every Friday for running a lousy 4 line ad where I can go to any of these sites and write a good ad to sell whatever for free.
The thing that makes these websites so interesting is that unlike running an ad in Detroit News or Oakland Press where somebody actually looks at your ad and makes sure that everything look all right before they ran it – here other users decide if your ad is right or SPAM.
You have be careful in what you post for example on Craig’s List – because if other Craig’s List users flag your post / advertisement as SPAM then it will get deleted automatically.
My suggestion – don’t post any ad on these sites yet; read them, browse through the ads, see what catches your eyes and ask yourself why this post is catching your eye.
The is an extremely important change happening in front of our eyes – real estate has traditionally been sold for decades via local classified ads. Wholesalers have built list of local investors to flip houses via local classified ads. I know I did both of the above with running ads in local newspapers in Michigan but this is so good – price is free, you don’t have to wait for response if you do it “RIGHT” – I ran an ad on Friday night, very late around midnight, by Sunday night I had over 14 responses. 3 of them extremely good.
The only bad thing I can tell you about them if you live in a very small Michigan City then you are not going to see too much action but I guarantee you that will change. The next wave of these websites will be local centered – a site for Michigan online classifieds, Oakland County classifieds etc. So even if you cannot find your Michigan City in these sites – bookmark these sites or keep an eye out for you local online classified site.
Something worth looking at next week if you are chilling at home. You may not use it right away if you are totally new to the game but these sites and there are a bunch of them out there are changing the way Michigan real estate has been traditionally bought and sold.
Expect 2007 a banner year for free online classified ads. Put some time on the side to learn how to use them properly.