Sites I Love: Craigslist

This is the next post in my ongoing Sites I Love series (previous ones were Rotten Tomatoes, Kayak, and Menupages / OpenTable).

Craigslist o Craigslist, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

I've been using Craigslist since 1999.  Since then, I've found 4 apartments, 3 roommates, 2 cars, 2 vacation rentals and bought/sold a number of items (furniture, concert tickets, cell phones, electronics).  I even found someone to drive my car across country.  The combination of easy to use navigation and scale results in a great deal of utility.  An added bonus is the ad-free experiences (even though I wouldn't mind some ads).

How It Can Be Improved: Better metadata and search.  For instance, if I'm looking for real estate, I should be able to filter results by things like # of bedrooms or type of unit.  Being able to bookmark posts would also be good - I sometimes find myself in a futile attempt to find a post that I'd stumbled upon.  Also, it could be interesting to have user handles and introduce some sort of reputation system (one knock against the community is that there can be sketchy/random folks that frequent it).  User handles would not prevent this but would help.

Comments

[zhafran]

Advertising on Craigslist vs. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another type of marketing which many business owners find to be both worthwhile and affordable. For many the appeal of affiliate marketing is the affiliates are not compensated for their efforts unless the business owner sees some type of gain from the advertising. This gain may be in the form of website traffic in the case of pay per click marketing, in the form of sales in pay per sale marketing or in the form of potential leads when a website visitor performs a specific action such as registering with a website or signing up for an offer.

While affiliate marketing is very appealing there are others who prefer advertising on Craigslist. The advantages Craigslist offers to advertisers is, of course, that the advertisers never pay for their business advertisements and the community receives a great deal of website traffic already so driving traffic to the website is not a concern.

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