craigslist

A few days ago, I wrote about a few tools that can help your Craigslist marketing, but I realized that I never really explained how you can make money for free on Craigslist. There are actually 2 ways to make money on Craigslist. The first one doesn’t require any investment at all from you (except time and Internet connection!). The second one may require a little investment but can be done for free if you master the thing.

Marketing affiliate programs on Craigslist

My previous post was about how to make money online for free with affiliate programs. In this post, I described how I use affiliate programs and Google Adwords to generate revenues without spending much. Well, good news, you can generate revenues without spending at all, using Craigslist.

You see, Craigslist is a gigantic market place with millions of visits every day. All the people are looking for jobs, furniture, pet stuff, etc… If you can find an affiliate program that caters to any of the ad sections on Craigslist, then post about it. You’re guaranteed to generate massive amount of traffic for free.

Ok, it sounds simple but… it isn’t. Craigslist has amazing spam filters in place that won’t let you post as much as you want. While you can do your Craigslist posting manually, I highly recommend using tools. These tools will save you time and even though you have to pay for them, I can guarantee you they will pay for themselves in one round of posting on Craigslist.

Another problem you may encounter on Craigslist is that it doesn’t allow you to post affiliate links. There are some tricks to this like putting a link to a Blogger account that automatically redirects to your affiliate link. Another trick is to buy cheap domain names and use them to redirect to your affiliate links. Once the domain has been flagged and banned by Craigslist, just get rid of it. I know, a domain name is another $10 investment but it’s well worth it.

Buying and selling on Craigslist for a profit

The other way to make money on Craigslist is to buy cheap stuff and resell them for a profit. You can either resell them on Craigslist or, even better, you can resell them on eBay.

I’m going to take a real example: mine. A few months ago, right before Apple came out with the iPhone 3G, I noticed that iPhone prices on Craigslist and eBay were skyrocketing. I also noticed that the Euro was very strong compared to the dollar. Lastly, I noticed that a $400 iPhone in the US, easily sells for 450-500 Euros in Europe.

What did I do? I bought as many iPhones that I could get my hands on in my area and I started putting them online on eBay, targeting the European market. I bought most of the iPhones for $300 and I sold all of them at least at 450 Euros. My profit was around $200 per iPhone sold. I had made a business out of it and sold 93 of them in a 2-month period. Total estmated profit: $19,600. To this, you have to deduct the time I spent in my car driving around town to meet the people selling their iPhones. That would be about $300 in gas, tops. All the shipping charges were on top of the sales price so shipping didn’t cost me anything and I actually made a very very small profit on every iPhone I was shipping to Europe.

This is a perfect example of how you can make money on Craigslist. I did spend a little money but the return on investment was gigantic!

The last way to make money on Craigslist without even spending a dime is to find good drop-shippers. I guess this could be explained in another post but basically dropshipping allows you to sell products you don’t own. But how does that work?

First, you need to find good drop-shipping programs. I highly recommend you look at this site, this site, and this site for huge lists of the best dropshipping comapanies. Once you found a few dropshipping companies that you think can work well for you, start posting the products on Craigslist.

I did that for a while but really hate having to deal with actual products so I kinda gave up on it but you can make serious money just selling stuff you don’t even own.

This business works even better on eBay. List products you don’t own but you can get through dropshippers. When someone buys your product on Ebay, order it from the drop shipper as soon as you receive the payment from the item’s buyer. This way, you don’t even have to use your own money. You’re selling a product that you don’t have but can get in a few days delivered to the door of the buyer.

As a conclusion, you can see that there is a lot of money to be made on Craigslist. Whether you own the product or not, you will be able to make a decent amount of cash but don’t forget that nothing’s easy. This will take a lot of your time, but again, rewards are way worth it!