Blog Dub

Affiliate Sales With Craigslist

This is a method involving Craigslist which makes it very easy to get a sale on virtually any affiliate network selling physical products.  Not a whole lot of affiliates like to see your traffic coming from Craigslist, which isn’t a problem… just make a blogspot blog as a gateway to your products page.  This method is simple, so I’m going to keep this pretty short.

1. Find a product on Craigslist that is being bought/sold/traded frequently.  The more popular a product is, the more responses/sales you’ll get from posting an ad.
2. Now go to your favorite affiliate website (Linkshare, Pepperjam, Shopzilla, Chitika, CJ, Ebay… The list goes on and on) and find the product you’ve decided to sell.  Save the link to the product, and note what the price is.
3. Create an advertisement saying you want to get rid of your ‘product’.   Price your product slightly more than you see it selling for on your affiliate’s website.  Not too much of a price increase, as you don’t want people to think your price is too ridiculous and be immediately turned away from your advertisement.  Also, don’t increase the price by too small of an increment, because the overprice is the buyers incentive to purchase from your affiliate rather than you.
4. Somewhere in your advertisement, probably the bottom, place a link to the product on your affiliate’s website.  Or, if your afraid your affiliate network won’t like the traffic coming from Craigslist then you have another option.  Create a blogspot blog, slap a few links up for your product, and write a quick review or two.  Then instead of linking directly to your affiliate, you can link to your blog.

If all goes according to plan, a few buyers will compare your expensive price with the cheaper price on your affiliate’s website and purchase from your affiliate’s website.

Method Variation:

Another option, would be to setup an auto-responder instead of including a link to amazon in your original post (You could leave it there, but I see no point to it).  I would also suggest removing the price from the original post as well.

When someone sends you an email asking the price of the product, you setup an auto responder to say something like,

“Sorry I already sold it for {overpriced amount}, funny thing is you can find them cheaper on {youraffiliatelink.com}”

Of course that’s probably not a very well written message, but you get the point!  I actually think you might make more money with the autoresponder than the first method since sometimes people would question your stupidity for putting a link to a cheaper product in your ad, and could also simply overlook the link altogether.