It is very easy to get overwhelmed with all of the rapidly changing marketing strategies and online advertising schemes that seem to proliferate across the Internet. Your average online entrepreneur, such as a small business owner, author, artist, or website developer, often finds themselves struggling with implementing many of these seemingly foolproof techniques. I know, because I have been in that position myself after launching my website about my personal passion, open source website design. I was a computer engineer and a writer, not an Internet marketing expert, and I had to work out a way to get web traffic to my sites, one that I could actually do with my limited time and money. This article is a way to share the insights I have found that started boosting my web traffic and sales.

Let's start by looking at some of the reasons why the "systems" you read about in typical online marketing books do not work well for the average person:

1. Many of these guides or strategies are written by people who do not have REAL-WORLD online business experience. Things are different in the actual Internet trenches than in some academic marketing class, as you probably already have found out. I got really sick of reading books, written by so called experts (probably professors) because it wasted my time and money.
2. Most online marketing strategies are geared for the "big guys", websites and online businesses with the deep pockets and specialized personnel needed to implement effective, large scale marketing and sales campaigns. I didn't have a team or seed money, it was just me. No matter how well written a strategy is the only thing that counts online is (traffic & sales) per (cost & time of doing it).

Most of you reading this are starting online products and/or websites have real strengths and passions - that is what drives us forward. You may also be trying to bootstrap an operation on very limited funds, alone or with a small team, with a laser-like focus on getting your online product (website, e-book, etc) completed. If you are like me, you may have already found that your "finished" website is only getting a dribble of visitors, with almost no sales - very demoralizing. You need web traffic to generate more product sales or Google Adsense advertising revenue.

I knew that I needed a way to convert my sweat equity (writing about what I am passionate about) into a marketing strategy that reached real people interested in the lessons and materials I was providing on my website. I found that the best vehicle was Craigslist.org, which for years has been one of the fastest growing websites on the Internet, and which provides almost the ideal environment for viral marketing. I say "almost" because there are some limitations to Craigslist (these turn out to be critically important strengths) which have to be understood before you can capitalize on this amazing resource:

• Craigslist.org is not a single, unified national or international website.
• It is intrinsically a local resource only. It is designed to do one thing and that is to provide each craigslist market city or town or region with a local classified ad system.
• If you spend any time reading about Craigslist.org or about its creator Craig Newmark, you will see that it actually limits you to posting "local" ads only. You can't go to tampa.craigsist.org for instance and find a way to post your information to all 289+ cities across the US or world with one click.
• I found that it is best not to waste time and money on the automated posting software that is available out there. It blatantly violates the Craigslist.org terms-of-use, and will ultimately get your posts banned.
• People like you and I that use Craigslist.org sites to buy things or find out information are in general extremely savvy about ignoring anything that looks spam-like, and they will quickly flag spam-like postings for deletion, ultimately wasting your time and effort.
• Knowing the demographics of the areas covered by each of the 289 "local" Craigslist markets (where are they located, how many people use them, what are the race, sex, and ages?) will help you reach the most people with the demographic "profile" you want to reach out to, with the least effort.

As a Computer Engineer, I have over 15 years of experience using Geographic Information System (GIS) to analyze things like population changes, so I used that knowledge to help me put together maps and demographic reports for each Craigslist website. First I used the GIS to geolocate each website based on the city, town, or region in its website name. This was not trivial, but resulted in terrific map resource. See the resources at the end of this article for a link to a free map of the sites I put into a Google Map. Then I used Census and other available demographic data sources to mine for data I could link to each of them. It was a very time consuming process, but I ended up with a unique series of maps, reports, and data files profiling each of the 289 US craigslist.org market areas. I then began using these to focus my own posting efforts to reach the most potential customers for my open source website. I started seeing results, which I could track using Google Analytics. Slow but sure is how I would characterize my campaign, always being respectful of other craigslist users. I learned how to use the built-in craigslist.org account to manage my posts, and honed some simple techniques to make professional, but not over-the-top posts.

I started sharing my materials with my friends, and then decided to offer this all as its own e-book. Here are some other observations about how things have gone while doing this myself:

1. There is one important indirect benefit for using Craigslist.org as a primary marketing tool - increasing traffic from Google searches. Now a lot of material is out there on Search Engine Optimization or SEO, and you should follow every recommendation you reasonably can to make your product pages and websites look enticing to all the search engines; however, that in itself can be an overwhelming project for the average webmaster. I do not know if my craigslist.org posts, which are essentially links back to my website, directly boost my page rankings, but I do see those posts appear as first page search page results in many cases.
2. It is amazing how fast Google and the other engines pick up on new posts. I have experienced that using craigslist.org in this way has been more effective for me than paying for Google's Adwords system.
3. Using Google Analytics, I can see the traffic coming from my various posts. This gives you a method to track which Craigslist sites are producing the most visitors for you. Once again, it helps you redirect your efforts.